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The long march to nowhere.

It's so easy to forget that they exist, poor sods. In amongst all the sturm und drang of this week's "Previously on Brexenders", the midnight meetings behind closed doors, the patently unhinged press conferences, the breathless media coverage, the rancour, the name-calling, golf-club bore Mark "TA" Francois cropping up absolutely sodding everywhere (rumours that it's because his interview fee is only a jumbo bag of pork scratchings, thus making him a reasonable option in these licence-fee straitened times, are a vicious falsehood started by me, just then), the giddy excitement of signing petitions and all the rest, one forgotten band struggles on, ignored and, if remembered at all, only with a mixture of pity and contempt.

Yes, Nigel Farage's Brexit march, for it is they, gamely struggling on somewhere in England's racist East, sustained only by the occasional lay-by snack bar. And to treat them with disdain is, I would argue, largely unfair. Whilst unkind souls might suggest that a bunch of angry old people wandering around a cliff edge in the fog is pretty much a perfect metaphor for Brexit, I would defend them thus: at least they're still sodding walking.

Yep, for all the misguided wrong-headedness of the whole cockamamie enterprise, there can be little that's more British than popping out for a walk to clear one's head, its just that, given how spectacularly wrong they are, it's turning into quite a big walk. But they're still doing it, albeit in rapidly depleting numbers, unlike, say, Farage himself. Were I slogging along with them just outside Peterborough I would be asking myself this question repeatedly. Where the hell is Nige? This was all his idea in the first place, wasn't it? Indeed, like the insistent drunk mate who drags you out and then cops off and disappears within half an hour, leaving you alone and feeling that strange mixture of bored and terrified that only a Friday night Wetherspoon's can conjure.

Of course, he's far too important to actually do any actual walking, and the forty Lambert and Butler a day probably mitigates against any exercise more strenuous than the odd bit of casual racism. But it's fairly typical of Nige to treat other people's earnest conviction simply as a chance to rock up for a photo op with a flat cap and a long coat, looking for all the world like a slightly porkier Barbour-sponsored Arsene Wenger. He's the bloke who's built a very cushy career on nod and a wink xenophobia, dressed up as fag and a pint Common Sense, which he parlayed nicely into a cushy number at the EU which he only jettisoned when it looked like he might make it on the US Chat-Twat circuit. Indeed, the fisheries bloke who never turned up to any fisheries meetings has a lengthy rap sheet when it comes to letting other poor sods do the heavy lifting. He formed a new Brexit party quite recently, then left, leaving others to tidy up the accusations of Islamophobia. This is shortly after making a pious display of leaving UKIP after they got into bed with Robinson, Dankula and all the other fun new neo-nazis of the 4chan age, despite his own brand of bigotry being the fire that fuelled their rise.

So this leaving his increasingly bewildered ultras to do the hard yards whilst he swans about a bunch of TV studios with too much airtime to fill, spouting the same old cod-nationalist bollocks of which he patently doesn't believe a word is of a piece with his entire history. A paid shill who games the destruction of democracy for his own enrichment, it's not really a surprise that he's left them to it. The astonishing thing is that anyone still follows him, even with the road surface recently done on the A303 and the weather turning out alright for the time of year.

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