The greatest challenge Farage has ever faced – convincing the world he was never besties with Donald Trump | Marina Hyde

. UK edition

Nigel Farage and Donald Trump in the Oval office in 2025.
Nigel Farage and Donald Trump in the Oval Office in 2025. Photograph: X

The Reform UK leader has belatedly clocked that most British people really don’t like the US president on whose coat-tails he has spent the past decade riding, says Guardian columnist Marina Hyde

At last, the culture has thrown up a split more nauseatingly up itself than Gwyneth Paltrow’s from Chris Martin. It is Nigel Farage’s attempt to consciously uncouple from Donald Trump, a man up whose backside he’s spent the past decade most firmly lodged. Nigel’s made such a massive, self-satisfied show of his real estate in the presidential large intestine for 10 years now that I actually don’t think non-surgical extraction is possible at this stage. He doesn’t just get to walk away whistling. The only way out is a full Faragectomy. I’ll give the president a piece of drone fuselage to bite down on.

Anyway: conscious uncoupling. Back in the day, you’ll remember, Gwyneth and the Coldplay singer deployed this particular phrase when announcing their marital split. Did the public love it? They did not. The general vibe – as with so much of Her Vajesty’s output – was that she would do even marriage failure more smugly and unachievably than mere plebs could ever. The pivot from gushing about her perfect marriage to gushing about her perfect divorce felt like mere days.

There’s a lot of this preposterously compressed timeline to Farage’s attempt to distance himself from Trump, as Operation Epic Facepalm rapidly unspools. He’s not alone out there, of course. As discussed here at the time, a whole posse of Britain’s political and pundit class greeted Keir Starmer’s failure to jump two-footed into Israel and the US’s Iran operation as a truly calamitous error. Yet these days, you can’t move for the spectacle of the initial cheerleaders reverse-ferreting. “I don’t like to see our prime minister be berated by foreign leaders,” was Wednesday’s emanation from Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick, who, little more than two weeks ago, absolutely loved to see it. Starmer, Jenrick explained back in the first week of March 2026, was handling the Iran crisis “just about as badly as you could possibly go about it”.

Most of these turncoats now seem to be deploying the Josey Wales thousand-yard stare and hoping everyone forgets how any of us lived before this damn war, let alone what any of us said. The trouble is that was ONLY THREE WEEKS AGO. I’ve had health kicks that have lasted longer than their foreign policy positions. In a month or so, when we’re reduced to bartering screenshots for fuel, I’ll have enough social media receipts to open a petrol station.

But let’s focus on Farage, both on the basis that he is constantly treated as Britain’s prime minister-in-waiting, and because no one in British politics has sucked up as long or as hard to Donald Trump as Nigel has. He was still at it two weeks ago. At the end of the first week of the war, Farage announced he was flying out to dinner at Mar-a-Lago and would be making various foreign policy points to Trump, who we were led to believe would be available to Nigel in the communal areas of his Palm Beach home. (I will genuinely never get over the fact that the US president willingly lives in a golf club.) Hilariously, though, Trump decided against going to Mar-a-Lago that night, preferring to hole up in one of his alternative Florida resorts.

So how did Farage play the embarrassment? Fascinatingly, if ludicrously, he seems to have decided to use the moment as a pivot point. The Reform leader’s close aides immediately let it be known to the Financial Times that “the relationship between the two populist politicians has cooled since 2024”. And look, I always fly to Florida on the off-chance of having dinner with someone with whom my relationship has cooled. In fact, transatlantic-visit-wise, Farage’s Mar-a-Lago dash came with the most bogus excuse since Mister Andrew flew to New York to “break off” his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Now Farage does, very, very belatedly, appear to have grasped what the polls have long indicated – that most British people really don’t like Donald Trump. And that was before he screwed their energy, food and mortgage bills and threatened to start the third world war. Yet we are now being asked to forget that Farage really, really did like Donald Trump. Hero-worshipped him, in fact. What a hostage he made himself to a very predictable fortune.

But then, Farage is, and always will be, absolutely clueless on all this stuff. It was only one month ago that he was making a huge play of appointing his “shadow cabinet”. Incredibly, this shadow cabinet didn’t even bother having anyone in the defence or foreign affairs briefs. I guess that stuff never comes up, or something. Even more incredibly, now it very much has come up, Farage still hasn’t bothered announcing “shadow” defence or foreign secretaries. Come on dude – Lee Anderson’s right there. Actually, hang on, Lee’s only partly there, what with spending some of his parliamentary office time filming Cameo videos.

The reality is this lot are total and utter chancers and you can smell it off them unless you’re unwisely holding your nose and toying with giving them a go. In fact, Nigel would make a perfect Strait-of-Hormuz Guy, my breakout social type of 2026. Who is Strait-of-Hormuz Guy? Be honest, we all know one. He’s the guy who couldn’t find it on a map a month ago, has since mainlined 12 hours of political podcasts and now can be found honking: “I don’t think anyone understands what’s going to happen if oil hits one-ninety a barrel!” Be sure not to get stuck with him at a party this weekend.

But also, and arguably more importantly, be sure not to get stuck with him as prime minister in three years’ time.