The Reform leader bit back over allegations of racial abuse and revealed his strategy: the best form of defence is dragging everyone else into the mire

As the allegations of Nigel Farage’s racist and antisemitic school bullying multiplied, it was hard to keep up with his shifting array of responses. At times, in his evasiveness and discomfort, he has looked like that most un-Farage of things: a nervous politician, anxious not to say the wrong word.

Last week, however, he angrily returned to his preferred posture: brimming with indignation at the moral hypocrisy of elites. He lashed out at the BBC’s “double standards” for indulging the allegations, when the broadcaster itself showed racist jokes and skits back in those days. Farage announced it was not he who should apologise, but apparently the BBC that should say sorry “for virtually everything you did throughout the 1970s and 1980s”.