It is easy and often satisfying to laugh at the antics of Nigel Farage, the latest being launching the Brexit Party.
There is something of the sit-com character about our Nigel, he presents as a ‘little man’ who wants so desperately to be all the things he isn’t.
In this case that is a serious politician, rather than a noisy chancer mugging madly for the cameras.
And yet if you look at what he represents then a more alarming picture emerges.
Farage and the Brexit party represent the entry in earnest into the British political scene of the populism found in other European countries.
His is a party free from the baggage of having an ideology, instead he picks the targets that applause from whatever audience he is facing.
The bankers, out of touch metropolitan liberals, that vague but rhetorically useful mass known as the ‘political establishment’ all get a biff on the nose.
He also promises a ‘revolution’, though not the sort involving mobs and riots, because that might scare the media for whom he works as a commentator.
This is all a bit silly and probably harmless, like Robert Kilroy-Silk’s Veritas party Nigel Farage’s project could sink without trace.
Yet there is, for me anyway, a nagging worry about populism, movements that stand for nothing, tend to accept pretty much anything or anyone.
That could mean giving the far right a free pass into the political mainstream so long as they can play the anti-establishment card convincingly.
There is no doubt that the referendum and the three years of squabbling that have followed have split, baffled and befuddled the body politic. Our sense of who we are as a country has taken a big hit.
In the past countries that have had their confidence knocked by events have turned to populist politics before. The consequences have almost always been dire.
Nigel Farage may be a comic grotesque fit to stand alongside Basil Fawlty and Alf Garnett. The populism he represents though is far from being an amusing distraction; it is downright dangerous.
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