On the top floor of a very grand hotel overlooking the White House, the Mississippi governor, Phil Bryant, is introducing the guest of honour to an enraptured throng of party guests. He has fondest memories of August, when Nigel Farage told a crowd of 10,000 Mississippians all about Brexit. “They were fired up,” Phil explained. “They were drinking the Kool-Aid, and they were licking the jar.”

Not sure Phil fully gets the Kool-Aid thing. Still, please welcome Nigel Farage and his entourage (hereafter the enfarage). “We got the bad boys of Brexit here!” hollers Phil.

The aforementioned bad boys comprise Farage, Arron Banks, the insurance millionaire who funded Leave.EU’s campaign, and Arron’s communications chief, Andy Wigmore (though they seem to have let a grateful-looking Lord Ashcroft be one for the night). During the EU referendum period, your correspondent once referred to them in passing as “the provisional wing of the leave campaign”, a designation they liked so much they began including it on press releases. Good to see a Washington party in aid of a provisional wing again. You don’t get as many of those to the pound as you used to.

At this one, everybody’s drinking liberal tears daiquiris and explaining how the right “haven’t caught a break in America since Reagan”, except for the man giving me an unsolicited history lesson. “Abraham Lincoln,” he is saying, “who was a guy who was our president a long long time ago” – “Hang on. Let me just write his name down so I don’t forget it. How are you spelling Lincoln?” Later, a woman looks darkly over at the White House. “The one thing I am so happy about,” she hisses, “is that this is THEIR last night in there.”

In Washington D.C. for the Trump inauguration. Great to be with @PhilBryantMS, @LordAshcroft and the Brexit Bad Boys! pic.twitter.com/YirdlT2aNJ — Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) January 19, 2017

Overall party vibe? The West Wing for people who think you could have got an episode over a lot quicker if you just stopped the endless yakking and bombed Haiti / called the Danish president a fat bitch / started a land war in Asia. But we already knew that smirking in front of a gold door is the new talking while walking in corridors. I wouldn’t like to hazard precisely what percentage of the guests the hosts had ever clapped eyes on before tonight. But the event may well be the equivalent of the guy who shows up to his school reunion in a chauffeur-driven Bentley (hired) with two girlfriends (also hired).

“Have you ever seen so many people gathered in one place in order to be rich, powerful and disgusting together?” wondered Don DeLillo in the fictionalised account of Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball that appeared in his novel Underworld. The week before this Washington gathering, I sent Banks a long account of the Black and White Ball. Having read it, he pronounced: “That is exactly what our party’s going to be like.”



That’s not all he said. In fact, the last time I heard this much about the minutiae of a coming soiree I was reading Mrs Dalloway. Of course, there is the odd departure from the novel. Unlike Clarissa Dalloway, whose to-do list doesn’t involve a whole lot more than buying flowers, the enfarage prepared for the evening with a round of media appearances. They’re so keen to complete the Washington platform game that they even fitted in a trip to lay a wreath at the national war cemetery in Arlington, having discovered that a single Briton was helpful enough to have been buried there. There were also conversations with movie people to discuss optioning Banks’s book – The Bad Boys of Brexit – for development as a motion picture. The enfarage tell me they’re in negotiations to get the House of Cards writer Michael Dobbs to do the script. “He should be here somewhere,” says Andy. Maybe he’s in the loo with the incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn – also said to be “around somewhere”.



Guest list-wise, then, I’d say Capote just about had the edge, even if he did break off from conversation with Greta Garbo to beg Sinatra not to leave in the small hours. The enfarage wanted the Trump strategist Steve Bannon; they got the Cameron strategist Steve Hilton. When you’ve decided the way to matter is to be near to people who matter … well, I guess it matters if you can only muster the rank-and-file of the DC arseoisie. This week in Washington, the success of a party is measured in how much power is concentrated in its attendees. Naturally, everyone wants the big one. Every host is essentially throwing an extravagant party for dreadful people in the desperate hope that a certain someone will come. Think of it all as The Great Twatsby.



“Is Donald coming?” asks a miniskirted judge who has a show on Fox News. “Don’t know,” says Andy, though I think we do. At different points during the evening, various men are presumed to be secret service operatives covertly sweeping the room, but Trump’s failure to materialise – either via the door or through a haunted mirror – suggests they were actually just guests with shifty eyes and really thick necks.

Thus it was up to Nigel – who can only be days off a mid-Atlantic accent – to provide the box office. “Donald Trump,” he told the room, “is the only person I have ever met in my life who makes me feel like an introvert.” What about Russell Brand on Question Time, when he called you a pound shop Enoch Powell? But of course, no one here saw that show. And in case the party guests had heard any other fake news folklore about the teetotal president-elect’s best lapdog, Nigel would like to set them straight. In the years before Brexit, he didn’t “spend several hours a day drowning my sorrows with English beer – though if you read the British press that’s what you think I did”.

Of course, there is a rich tradition of Brits relishing the chance to lose their baggage on an Atlantic crossing. Not their luggage, you understand, but of all the bits of their backstory that they’d like to consign to oblivion. When David Beckham went to play for LA Galaxy, his wife, Victoria, basically got on the plane with Wag hair extensions, and got off it a sophisticated fashion designer. And so with Farage, who is no longer the man who failed to get elected to parliament seven times – and certainly not the wobbler who conceded no less than twice on referendum night itself. He isn’t the guy who the official leave campaign believe not only failed to persuade anyone who wasn’t already going to vote for them, but actively put off those who might otherwise have done so. We lost contact with that guy somewhere over the Bermuda Triangle. Nigel is now Mr Brexit. He is all dressed up and doing Washington.

Indeed, there was much to enjoy in guest explanations for why Farage had just mingled off out of their conversational orbit. “I think what it is,” declares one man, “is that he gets so much love – so much love – that sometimes he just needs to take a moment.” Mm. He took a moment fairly swiftly after one couple presented him with a highly covetable piece of man jewellery: a chunky Donald Trump ring.

In the end, the point of the party seemed to be to remind everyone that this is a love story. “Y’all have something called a blind date in the UK?” Governor Bryant asked me. “You know a blind date, where you set up two beautiful people? Well I had these two guys – the two guys in the western world who most needed to meet each other. I had Nigel, who was Mr Brexit. And I had this tremendous hero, who was going to be the president of the United States. And I had to get them together. It was the start of a beautiful friendship.”



A friendship, anyway. What feels a little poignant is Nigel’s willingness these days to make Brexit a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump. “I agree with Trump,” he said in one of several variations on a theme. “Brexit is great, but Trump is Brexit plus plus plus.” Where Nigel goes, others follow. Bryant says he turned to his wife as the Brexit result came through, and said: “That was Trump’s first victory.”

Well done, Donald. No doubt he’d have liked to be here tonight. Certainly, he’d have recognised the self-dramatisation that underpins all these sort of parties. Made it ma! Top o’ the world! Or at least, top of a hotel really very near the White House. I don’t want to get all Seven Ages of Parties here, but there seems to be a point where you graduate from wanting the hot girls or boys to come to your parties and start wanting the funny girls and boys to come. Then eventually, some people start wanting a four-star general they’ve never met to show up. I wonder if the regular attendees of these things truly love them, or if the memory of genuine fun occasionally twitches like a phantom limb?

