It is a tragedy of epic proportions and spectacularly dramatic ironies. It is the saga of a self-fulfilling prophecy turned on its head, a narrative as twisted as the tale of a liar, cheat and philanderer becoming the leader of the so-called free world by persuading religious conservatives to rally to his cause, an economically illiterate con man being handed the power to cripple the global economy, a billionaire businessman posing as the champion of ordinary working people in order to line the pockets of the super-rich and revel in the societal, economic and environmental mayhem he'll cause along the way.

But this isn't Washington. This isn't the Bible Belt or the sunburnt lands of the rednecks. These are the shires of rural England.

It would appeal to fans of the kind of conspiracy theories he likes to peddle to suggest that the man who stands triumphant as he bestrides British politics like a Colossus of blathering boorishness, brash buffoonery and brazen bigotry, flaunting his toxic nationalism in our faces as if it were a badge of pride, intentionally engineered the catastrophes that have brought him to the brink of real power.

But that would be going too far.

Yet, with its meagre handful of small-minded parliamentarians, Nigel Farage's Reform UK slaughtered both the government and the lead opposition party at England's local elections on the first day of May by blaming them for the economic crisis that currently blights the nation.

There are, of course, a number of reasons for the situation in which the British economy finds itself. None of them involve the arrival in small boats of families seeking asylum in the UK, many of whom have fled conflicts in parts of the world which British foreign policy has helped to destabilise – and whose presence last year represented about three per cent of migration into the country. Mr. Farage nevertheless particularly likes to blame these unfortunate individuals for our socioeconomic woes.

These days, there are a few rather more obvious suspects which may have been responsible for the ills of the British economy.

These, of course, include the manic experiment in fiscal policy which the short-lived Prime Minister Liz Truss – an ideological soulmate of Mr. Farage – briefly attempted to impose and whose disastrous consequences continue to resonate through the costs of mortgages and goods.

They also today include the trade tariffs with which Farage's close friend Donald Trump has appeared determined to destroy the global economy.

(Farage has of course posed as the only politician who could seal a deal with the orange menace, but – imperfect though it is – Keir Starmer has managed to deliver one, while nasty Nigel has stood on the sidelines and jeered.)

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And they include the conflict in Eastern Europe (in whose impacts Farage has appeared to revel) and the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic (for which we probably cannot blame Farage – though he's done his best to blame others for its consequences).

But, of course, the main reason for the UK's economic downturn – and the reason why these other factors have hit so hard – is the distance that has grown between the United Kingdom and its biggest trading partner, the European Union, along with all the further self-destructive barriers to trade that the likes of Farage have sought to erect.

And the self-proclaimed architect of the great deceit which dragged Britain into Brexit was, as we all know, none other than Mr. Nigel Farage himself, the self-serving trickster who now seeks to establish himself as the feudal lord, master, and eternal sovereign of this increasingly barren land, a nation whose undoing he himself, advertently or not, has orchestrated.

He’s like a mad scientist who creates a new disease in his laboratory, infects the world with it, and then sells us a cure for it – a cure that doesn’t work.

So, either he's a weapons-grade moron, a shameless charlatan and a braying hypocrite – or he's a truly Machiavellian manipulator, a grand master of the art of geopolitical chess, a Mephistophelean figure whose dark heart is obsessively set on causing chaos and pain.

If he’s the latter, then his strategy exhibits a tactic typical of the camelhair mobster he is, the political equivalent of a false-flag operation, an attack on one’s own territory deployed as a ruse to justify war. It’s a classic protection racket: smash a few windows, break a few noses, and blame someone else, as a way to extort lucrative tribute and loyal support.

We in the UK are all now his hostages, and, unable to admit or believe our own stupidity, are the victims of a form of Stockholm Syndrome manifest at the scale of mass hysteria.

But that's democracy for you. Or at least, in this realm of shameless disinformation, in which the craziest lies command the strongest sway, it's the polar opposite of it... though not, it may seem, that we’d ever know.

And so, all hail the ale-swilling, smoke-breathing, hate-spewing beast, an electoral mesmerist who has managed to convince so many in the press and so many of the public that he will be, and deserves to be, the UK’s next Prime Minister.

All hail the prince of the night.

Or so you might say. But, as his minions prepare to unleash their incompetence and bigotry across the shires of England, we can only hope that those fooled into putting them into power will eventually come to see the truth: that the scales will fall from their eyes, that, in the end, his heinous lies won’t be able to hide from the light – and that this king of shreds and patches, this gammon-faced emperor of illusions, will be recognised for what he is, a vile slab of ruddy corruption, bloated by indulgence, fly-ridden, and at last exposed for all the world to see as the sad purveyor of hackneyed hatred and vacuous bombast that he has always been.