You don’t need to make things up about Nigel Farage to loathe him – he's done enough already

Farage insists his relationship with Laure Ferrari is wholly platonic, and that suggesting otherwise is ‘crackers’ – a pithier version of what another notable Brexiteer called ‘an inverted pyramid of piffle’

Nigel Farage currently shares his £4m house with a female French politician (Getty)

Nigel Farage’s wacky race through life took another madcap twist this weekend, with a Sunday newspaper hinting that the Dick Dastardly of British politics has his hands on a Ferrari.

For anyone who assumed Nigel is embedded in the Oval Office, helping that cuddly Steve Bannon keep the Trump presidency on its reassuringly even keel, the truth is more prosaic and more entertaining.

Nige isn’t elegantly perched on the Donald’s right hand after all. Not yet, anyway, though the call may come. It seems unlikely that this administration won’t be short of vacancies. Once Trump has exhausted the phone directories of the entire eastern seaboard, it’s even money that Nigel will be asked to serve at the pleasure of the President.

For now, however, the multiply former and doubtless future leader of Ukip is living in Chelsea, some 3000 miles from DC and a mere 22 miles from his marital home in Kent. While he has chosen to style this borrowed residence as a “bachelor pad”, he is not living there alone.

The Mail on Sunday faithfully reports that Nigel, 52, is sharing the property, a £4m Georgian house owned by an unnamed businessman, with a certain Laure Ferrari. Far from being a scion of the Italian luxury car firm, she is a French national who was born in Alsace 37 years ago.

Mlle Ferrari, who has led a far right French party called Arise the Republic, heads a Eurosceptic grouping called the Alliance for Direct Democracy in Europe. She is also director of an associated think tank, the extremely differently named Institute for Direct Democracy in Europe. In a classic instance of Jungian synchronicity, the ADDE is under an Electoral Commission investigation for funnelling about £400,000 to Ukip for domestic campaigns.

Nigel not only denies any infringement of electoral funding law. He insists his relationship with Laure is wholly platonic, and that suggesting otherwise is “crackers” – a pithier version of what another notable Brexiteer called “an inverted pyramid of piffle” in vaguely similar circs. He is simply putting up a friend in need of lodgings, he says, as any gallant Englishman would.

Laura, whom he met in 2002 when she waited on him in a Brussels restaurant, and whom he took to a Trump inauguration bash in Washington, comes tantalisingly close to being equally categorical.

“You are putting two and two together,” she tells the paper, “but it is not as simple as that. I am not pleased to be in this situation, and I am sorry it is bringing awful things on Nigel’s life and on my life.” As blanket denials go, this lacks the crystal clarity of “crackers”. Meanwhile, the newspaper adduces the fact that in 2013 Mlle Ferrari retweeted the headline “Why do more women want to bed Nigel Farage than David Cameron?” to press home its insinuation.

Why innocently having or being a house guest would bring awful things on anyone is one of various mysteries. Another, of course, is the status of Kristen Farage, Nigel’s German wife.

Over the years, Kirsten has joined an elite group of fictional spouses – Captain Mainwaring’s Elizabeth, Dr Niles Crane’s Maris, Arthur Daley’s “’Er Indoors” – whose legendary status rests on never being seen or heard. Lavishly eyebrowed Soviet consorts like the late Mrs Brezhnev had a far higher public profile.

Frau Farage’s immaculately dignified disdain for commenting on her husband’s endeavours has yet to rub off on Katie Price. After difficult encounter with Nigel last week on ITV’s ‘Loose Women’, when naive viewers thought her “out of her depth” on geopolitical issues, Katie counterstruck – never underestimate the Pricey! – with a sortie into the arena of the psycho-sexual therapist. “From what I’ve heard and sensed about him up close,” she posits, “I think the problem with Nige is that his German wife has put up very firm borders around her knickers, and all that sexual frustration has turned him into a racist bigot and a bully.”

Well, it’s certainly a theory, if not a particularly original one. Claims of sexual inadequacy and/ or genital deficiencies have always been used as propaganda against enemies. The CIA spread it about that Saddam Hussein had a tiny penis, and you need no reminding of the ditty about Hitler’s gonadic shortfall, the other allegedly stored (for reasons never explained) in the Albert Hall.

If and when Katie and Nigel debate the genesis of his Euroscepticism at the Oxford Union, and surely it has to be when, she’ll probably cite Nigel’s loss of a testicle to cancer as the source of his muscular distaste for allowing foreign bodies into the national bloodstream.

Until then, we are free to speculate as pruriently as we wish – it’s only odious European countries like Mlle Ferrari’s native France which legally protect public figures’ privacy – about the private life of a man who has infinitely more cause than David Beckham to resent being denied an honour.

Operating under deep cover of buffoonery, he conned us into giggling at him while he earnestly and relentlessly set about changing our country beyond recognition. For that alone, however much one loathes the accomplishment, he should be given a peerage. For selflessly continuing to amuse us now that there is no political advantage in doing so, he deserves nothing less than a Dukedom.