Recently, former UKIP leader (and later, leader of the Reform Party) Nigel Farage – who has never held a seat in the UK’s Parliament – was on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here! program. His appearance attracted controversy, especially following the appearance of Tory MP Matt Hancock last year, leading to the suggestion that ITV’s selection of hard-right politicians – and no counter-weight – was designed purely to stir up a hornet’s nest.

Farage did remarkably well in the show, reaching the final three, which was quite surprising. Or was it?

It seems there has been an organised campaign among diehard followers of Farage to boost his votes. Whilst a great many ‘gammons’ have decried his eventual defeat as a fix, the cold hard reality is that his reaching the top three was in itself a form of rigging. There was an organised campaign to artificially inflate his popularity, and even that couldn’t get him over the finish line.

Farage is something of an odious figure, he’s rabidly pro-Brexit, despite having the benefits of dual-citizenship and an EU passport. His failure to win I’m a Celeb has left a lot of his fans distraught, and that has been quite entertaining! It’s a pity that Brexit was the one project of his to succeed, given the damage it has done, though the tide is steadily turning against it:

Find more statistics at Statista

The more deluded Brexiteers out there seem to believe we’ll never, ever re-join, yet poll after poll continues to show that more and more Britons see a future in the European Union. It is only a matter of time before Farage’s folly is reversed, to the benefit of the nation, and no amount of rigging and fixing can stop it.