Nigel told me he’s the new Boris

Last week I arrived in London from the Cotswolds just in time to witness the collective meltdown from everyone around me as it was announced that Donald Trump was the President-elect. I was delighted. Who are we to complain? The American people knew exactly what they were doing. I had been booked on to ITV’s This Morning where we were to discuss Kamala Harris’s resignation speech, a story so feeble it wouldn’t last until the 6 p.m. news. The tone in the studio was ‘poor Kamala’. I was having none of it. She fully deserved to lose. She had no coherent policies on immigration or the economy and banged on endlessly about women’s reproductive rights as though that were all women cared about. At the same time the Democrats patronised women, telling them to vote for Kamala but not to tell their husbands. I’m amazed anyone thought she would actually win.

I wonder if the perma-tanned Emily Maitlis – who had to be told off for swearing during the C4 election coverage as it became clear Trump was the victor – has recovered from her own obvious state of distress. Maybe when Trump visits the UK she will have a chance to interview him and ask some deeply probing questions. St Tropez or Garnier?

Nigel Farage wrote a comment piece in the Telegraph in which he said that if a bridge is required between the Labour government and the US, given the many insulting comments made by various members of the cabinet about Trump, then he’s the man for the job. Although the piece was well argued, I’m not convinced that the leader of a fringe party who has committed himself to Clacton-on-Sea for the next five years is really the right man. As it happens, I met Farage that very evening at Georgia Toffolo’s birthday party. As we stood on the balcony, with drinks in one hand, him with a fag in the other, we looked down on the Thames and out at the London skyline. ‘I’m Boris now,’ he pronounced. I may have looked startled. He went on to explain: ‘The Red Wall voters will never trust the Conservatives again.’ He could have a point, except most of them voted for Boris, not the Tory party – a detail many former Conservative MPs now hanging around the job centre failed to realise when they were calling for Boris to go. ‘They will vote for me, though. I’m going to destroy the Conservative party,’ Farage said with feeling.‘You or Reform?’ I asked, but he wasn’t listening. He’s a man on a mission and given that political parties do die, there is every chance he will succeed. He is bitter about standing down some candidates in the 2019 election – possibly with good reason – but he forgets his party was hardly riding high back then and he wouldn’t have won a single MP anyway. It’s a different story now. I wonder if it has ever crossed his mind that the only reason he is filling the political stage is because Boris has left it.

Now that Trump has said that wars will end when he becomes president, he has a difficult path ahead. The Ukrainians, who have proved themselves to be the bravest of all warriors, will not relinquish their freedom and Vladimir Putin will not retreat. Trump doesn’t want to isolate himself from Europe, an important ally, any more than he will isolate himself from Nato. If I were Trump, I’d be straight on the phone to Boris, who has remained the closest friend to Volodymyr Zelensky and has visited Ukraine many times since he left Westminster. Boris was born in New York, had dual citizenship with the US for years and even his foes admit you would look hard to find a better communicator.

Tea with my dear friend Nicky Haslam, whose living room I often end up in at some point over the weekend. The most invited man in Britain, he likes to say that he’s ‘met everyone, except Churchill’. We sit before the open fire in the divinely lit room, as one would expect from the queen of interior design, and we listen to an album he is about to release called One Night. He sings along to his own recorded voice, a Cole Porter number, and rests his head back against the Nicky Haslam upholstered chintz sofa as I commit the moment to memory. At times like this I am acutely aware that there is far more to life than politics.