Farage forgets which country he aims to govern

The central fact of journalism is that we have to write something. So, now and then, we make too much of an alleged social trend for which the evidence is less than airtight. America’s “loneliness epidemic” of a few years ago was a classic. Another is the “quiet revival” of Christianity in Britain. That one always reeked of smoke and mirrors to me, and lo, the revival is now falling apart under scrutiny. The percentage of Britons who say they are Christian and attend church regularly is down to single digits. Among the young, it is 6 per cent. “If it doesn’t look like a duck, it may not be a duck,” says the UK’s most recognised psephologist about the supposed boom in belief. Journalists have an excuse: all that space to fill. Politicians don’t. What on Earth was Nigel Farage’s Reform UK thinking when it did God last month? The party talked about “Britain’s Christian heritage” and “crisis of meaning”, a phrase that must have struck whichever undergraduate poet wrote it as deep. Some Bri

The central fact of journalism is that we have to write something. So, now and then, we make too much of an alleged social trend for which the evidence is less than airtight. America’s “loneliness epidemic” of a few years ago was a classic. Another is the “quiet revival” of Christianity in Britain. That one always reeked of smoke and mirrors to me, and lo, the revival is now falling apart under scrutiny. The percentage of Britons who say they are Christian and attend church regularly is down to single digits. Among the young, it is 6 per cent. “If it doesn’t look like a duck, it may not be a d