Last month, one of England's most publicity-hungry narcissists hit the headlines yet again when his bank decided to close his account.

The bank breached confidentiality rules to leak to the media the story that his exclusive account, reserved for the super-rich, would be closed because it didn’t hold sufficient funds. It later emerged that they also wanted to terminate their dealings with him as they didn’t like his politics.

Following unprecedented – and perhaps unwarranted – pressure from the top of government, the scandal eventually prompted the resignation of two senior bankers, including the chief executive of the National Westminster Bank, who’d admitted revealing her notorious client's account details to the BBC.

Most unfortunately, however, it shone the spotlight once more upon – and even elicited some public sympathy for – the unedifying figure of the customer himself, the former commodity trader and architect of the United Kingdom’s current economic despair (or, as he calls it, Brexit), the redoubtable – yet deeply dubious – Mr. Nigel Farage.

Among his other infamies, Mr. Farage is currently one of a ragtag cadre of rabid right-wingers who broadcast their vile views on a minority-interest TV channel which calls itself GB News.

GB News has been the subject of multiple investigations in relation to its alleged breaches of those impartiality guidelines imposed on all British broadcasters.

Alongside Farage, it employs Boris Johnson’s most terrifying acolyte, the lead character in a story H. P. Lovecraft might have considered too surreally awful to write, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg.

It also numbers on its payroll the former actor Laurence Fox, a failed politico whose opposition to COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, and what he condemns as “political correctness,” has made him the laughing stock and whipping boy of social media, a role he appears to relish in fits of manic glee (and sometimes in blackface).

It even provides a platform for the grinning provocateur Dan Wootton. Earlier this month, the Mail Online suspended its professional relationship with him in response to allegations of significant misconduct.

Such paymasters as GB News serve merely to add fuel to the fires that are trying to consume what might remain of a nation’s natural openness and common sense. Nigel Farage himself is a former politician who, like many such desperados, seems desperate to maintain his public profile in order to hang onto his place in the limelight and justify his generous broadcasting fees.

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(I’ve no idea what he earns, but frankly anything more than a clip round the ear would be magnanimous.)

The furore over his banking crisis certainly succeeded in supplying him with the outrage which he so blatantly nurtures and on which he so brazenly feeds. It’s a false outrage, a fabricated sense of injustice committed against an individual of extraordinary power and privilege, a spoilt brat prone to the most public of tantrums.

Yet it's given him a new cause, a further casus belli upon which this belligerent old toad might hang his bloated ego for a few more months – a parody of a moral crusade, a manufactured quest for justice led by this king of cant.

Like his friend and ally Donald Trump, he's a monster both hated and created by the mainstream media, which, like Victor Frankenstein hooking him up to his lightning cable at the furious peak of the storm, have just imbued him with yet another lease of destructive life.

Mr. Farage claimed that his bank had discriminated against him on the grounds of his legitimate political beliefs. This would of course have been unlawful – a clear breach of the Equality Act 2010. Ironically, this is precisely the kind of human rights legislation which Nigel so enjoys railing against.

Others might suppose that his bankers were simply making a sensible commercial decision that they didn’t want to be associated with a person whose public expressions of xenophobic opinions have at times bordered on hate speech.

But we relish our opportunities for petty outrage. This month, for example, British news headlines were briefly hit with reports of a couple who were indignant that a budget airline had charged them additional fees to provide the level of service generally expected on a full-frills flight. Social media went wild. How dare an airline famed for its streamlined approach treat its customers that way? How dare they try to charge for their extra services?

Rather than reserving our outrage to address the climate crisis or fight social injustice on a global scale, we prefer to exhaust our moral energies on such trivia.

(Indeed, there’ll doubtless be those who’ll continue to rage against various refereeing decisions in this month’s World Cup final for years to come.)

That’s the true tragedy of the coverage given by even the more progressive players in the mainstream media to the self-serving, attention-seeking bigots behind Brexit and Britain’s ongoing lurch towards shamelessly racist immigration policies.

It’s not only that the things they say and do are utterly appalling in themselves, it’s that they also end up distracting us from the really important stuff – which is, of course, what they were always meant to do.