Nigel Farage says the British government blocked any contact between him and Donald Trump during the president’s visit. But a face-to-face meeting wasn’t necessary. Mark Hallam says they did their damage via the press.
Thursday nights are a big deal for British politics buffs and television addicts. After the evening news, the late prime-time TV hours on BBC1 are dedicated to a major political panel show, Question Time, followed by a weekly politics feature roundup, This Week. If you’re a British news junkie, and especially if it’s an off night at the World Cup, the chances are you’ll be tuning in. No other evening’s programming has such a heavy political bent.
For my sins, figuring that it was a more momentous week than most, I made the mistake of watching in real time from Germany on Thursday night. What I witnessed was some of Donald Trump’s closest British allies taking the fight to the BBC’s core audience, at the exact moment that the country’s top-selling tabloid, The Sun, published a feature interview savagely undermining Theresa May’s Brexit plans. And to say that these plans were hardly strong and stable (remember that now-comical election campaign slogan?) would be an understatement — before Trump doused them in gasoline and lobbed a match.
No need to actually meet Farage, or Boris Johnson
The real man behind Brexit — forget Conservatives like Boris Johnson and David Davis — is still the former, and perhaps future, UKIP leader Nigel Farage. That’s the man who campaigned with Trump in the US at a time when politicians like Boris Johnson were still describing The Donald as “clearly out of his mind.” (Johnson would later change his tune, calling the negative British coverage of president-elect Trump a “whinge-arama” just hours after his confident US election predictions flew out of the window.)
Prior to Trump’s arrival, Farage had told anyone who would listen that the Conservative Party had issued a clear red line to Trump when negotiating the visit: Under no account was he to meet with Farage. The government has not disputed this claim, and no meeting is scheduled.
But Farage and Trump didn’t need a face-to-face meeting; a coordinated media offensive would serve their purposes far better.
For more read the full of article at The Dw
