Farage’s attempt to use the Lord’s Prayer as a smokescreen failed - David Behrens

Beverley in the East Riding is one of several seats of local government where normal business has been overshadowed by a confected debate over whether the Lord’s Prayer should or should not be said when councillors convene for meetings.

The usual observance was replaced at the last meeting by a few moments of contemplation during which councillors could incant something under their breath. It could have been the Lord’s Prayer or Humpty Dumpty; no-one could hear.

I saw a recording of it and it seemed to me to be a storm in a Town Hall teacup. But if you listened to the council’s Reform members, this was the Last Judgment. Were we not still a Christian country?

It was one of the most reported items of council business that day, even though Reform has just three members in a Tory and Lib Dem-dominated administration. And it was part of a pattern. In Essex and Kent, where Reform is in charge, the Lord’s Prayer has been made mandatory at council meetings.

It’s a classic case of moral grandstanding on a superficial issue instead of trying to achieve meaningful change. In the process, religion has been made a weapon to foment divisions within society. If you object to the Lord’s Prayer you’re not truly British, that’s what Reform is implying. But they’re not saying it out loud because they don’t want to get their fingers dirty. When the fire starts they want to vanish into the smoke.

Unfortunately, they’ve picked the wrong country. Britain, unlike the USA where this sort of thing happens all the time, is now largely secular. Not everyone even knows the prayer any more. People will mumble unto themselves that Harold be the Lord’s name and that He will deliver us from eagles. Say what you want about the Synod but at least they know the words.

The analogy with America is not incidental. Its traditions of hell-fire preaching are ingrained in Reform like ‘Blackpool’ in a stick of rock.

It’s why Nigel Farage, prior to his climactic gesture of resigning his seat before he was pushed, chose to affiliate himself with Stephen Clayden, an Essex street preacher handed a banning order for sermonising that eternal damnation awaited “all thieves, all blasphemers, all liars, all mockers” and sundry others. Hell is going to be pretty crowded, then. Actually, it sounds like Essex on a normal day.

Farage gravitates to extremists because extremism is his home church. He sees this as a free speech issue and free speech is something he will fight to defend – except, of course, when it is used against him.

He could not bear the criticism of the company he kept with the fraudster George Cottrell or the cryptocurrency tax exile Christopher Harborne so he framed himself as a victim of the Establishment and pitted himself against them in by-election that has descended into a who’s-got-the-stupidest-head contest with Count Binface.

Asked about his £5m gift from Harborne on TV and radio, he told the interviewers in so many words that it was none of their business, which is not the sort of thing one usually says unless one is trying to hide something. Can you imagine the furore there would have been if Keir Starmer had said that about his free pairs of glasses?

Farage has been quite open about advocating tax breaks for crypto billionaires like Harborne and pretends to be baffled by the perception of cronyism. The Establishment has it in for him, he bleats.

That’s rich coming from an old boy of one of London’s poshest private schools, whose cohorts are some of the best connected people in the country. Reform is the Establishment’s mongrel child and don’t you believe otherwise.

It’s why Farage needed the smokescreen of another culture war to try to deflect attention from himself. It didn’t work this time and the publicity stunt of throwing his toys out of the pram was an act of desperation.

His by-election will not make the allegations go away and if proved, there may have to be a second one.

But even that isn’t the point. Farage is extremely rich; he doesn’t need to be an MP. His calling is to be an agitator, a self-appointed martyr. That puts him in at least two of Stephen Clayden’s categories of sin.

He might want to take a long look at what it says in that prayer he’s so keen on making everyone recite.