Nigel Farage wants the world to believe that Donald Trump’s rejection of Theresa May’s Brexit strategy was his idea. Just as the US president’s remarks that her plan would “kill” any trade deal with the US began to reverberate around social media on Thursday evening, the former Ukip leader used an appearance on Andrew Neil’s This Week to claim he had fed the idea to Trump.

Neil asked Farage if he had been “winding up” Trump over Brexit. “We’ve had the odd chat about it,” Farage replied, barely able to suppress a smile. “Your hand was all over that article in tomorrow’s Sun,” the BBC interviewer said. It was a suggestion Farage was happy to let run, replying: “On balance they [Trump’s team] are probably more Eurosceptic than I am … they believe in nation states running themselves and co-operating with each other and so do I.”

Whatever the precise truth of Farage’s involvement in feeding lines to Trump, the latter’s arrival during a period of British political crisis is a moment that the former has been rehearsing for several days. After Boris Johnson’s resignation at the beginning of the week, Farage was interviewed by Martha MacCallum on Fox News in the US, where he wasted little opportunity in criticising Theresa May and her Chequers plan.

On Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, Farage is more than just an ex-politician. He is a paid pundit, having joined in January 2017 to provide “political analysis” during both daytime and prime-time viewing. As for the Chequers plan, it basically said, according to Farage, “we should still stay part of many bits of the European Union, including the customs union,” before telling MacCallum “it would prevent us probably from having a trade deal with America and other countries”.

Appearing in front of a backdrop that appeared more Caribbean than British, Farage concluded the Chequers plan amounted to “nothing less than a total betrayal of what people voted for in that referendum,” before praising Johnson’s decision to quit as foreign secretary.



Meanwhile, in a separate interview on sister channel Fox Business, Farage called for Tory MPs to demand a no-confidence vote in May, then shared both clips on Twitter so his British followers could get the message too.

Working at making trouble is necessary for Farage. He no longer leads Ukip, which, under a string of leaders, has become discredited and drifted towards the far right; he will no longer be a member of the European parliament from next year, having successfully campaigned for the abolition of the job in the 2016 referendum; and has no real prospect of getting into the House of Commons. To stay relevant, and justify his media career on Fox and LBC in the UK, he needs to appear connected to Trump – with opinions to match.

Trump, meanwhile, has no such problem; the only question on his UK trip was how the world’s most powerful politician could best cause trouble and make himself the centre of attention at a time when May and her government were doing their best to keep him confined to carefully choreographed environments outside London. The answer, for Trump, was to conduct an interview before he arrived, in this case on the sidelines of the Nato summit, at the US embassy in Brussels, with Murdoch’s Sun tabloid.

The interview was secured with the support of Murdoch; the pair have known each since the 1970s, with Murdoch’s New York Post cheerfully covering Trump’s sex life at the time of his divorce from Ivana Trump. Since Trump’s election the men have been particularly close, speaking weekly, or even daily about policy and business. And Trump regularly phones into Fox and Friends, talking for so long on one occasion in April that a 30-minute chat was shut down by his increasingly uncomfortable-looking television hosts when he began on the subject of “corruption at the top of the FBI”.

For Murdoch, such troublemaking in the face of elected politicians is meat and drink. A weak prime minister (who is far closer to the Daily Mail) and Brexit in jeopardy, present the perfect opportunity to display power and buy up or unearth more news stories.



Rumours are now swirling that Murdoch would like to sign up Johnson, who is close to the Sun editor, Tony Gallagher, as a columnist. An editorial in the paper on Friday morning concludes that something has to give: “Our future is in the balance here … only one thing is making progress … Tory poll numbers slowly heading south.”