I got an unexpected message last week from a former colleague whom I haven’t heard from in 20 years. I was all over her TikTok, she said, so she reached out to say hi. Such was the furore caused by Nigel Farage bizarrely raising an incident that took place in the House of Commons nearly six months ago that I suddenly found myself trending on social media.
That had not been on my bingo card for budget week. I was at home, having just got back from London, when I received a message telling me that Farage had referenced “the incident”. I looked at the footage of his press conference and was completely dumbfounded.
Because this “physical altercation”, as he described it, was something I’d chosen not to discuss in public at the time, and something that, if I were him, I’d have kept quiet about. Here he was, scrabbling around for excuses to explain why he wasn’t in the chamber for the budget, and this had to be the strangest one he could possibly have used. And it made absolutely no sense.
For clarity’s sake, this is what happened. On the day of the king’s speech, MPs process through to the House of Lords to listen to it. Leaders of all parties, including smaller ones, lead the procession, but on this occasion Farage didn’t seem to get into place in time.
So he was stuck behind a load of MPs also trying to join the procession. I was on a flight of stairs and he demanded to get past. I told him to wait his turn like everyone else and he clearly didn’t like that, so he grabbed me by the arm and I ended up shoved to one side so he could push through.
My colleague thought I was going to fall down the stairs, so he grabbed Farage and had a word with him about his behaviour. I reported it to the parliamentary authorities and they asked him to apologise in writing. That never happened – of course – and I chose not to say anything about it publicly.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
