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There was a time when the name Nigel Farrow barely stirred the national pot. Just another man in a striped tie with a fondness for flags and flat beer. But in a country starved of conviction and drunk on nostalgia, he became something far more dangerous.
And the BBC gave him the match.
They lit the podium for him - polished it, buffed it, and turned the camera so the light caught just right on his brass cufflinks and uncooked grin.
He first appeared on Question Time in 2009, surrounded by suits with more nuance and less bile. He was a curiosity then—a red-faced relic from an imagined Britain. He admonished Bulgarians he’d never met and pints that were ‘too European.’ The audience laughed.
The producers noticed.
By his third appearance, they booked him intentionally. He was good for ratings—people tweeted in rage, tuned in for outrage. Every Thursday became a Farrow spectacle. Five panellists and a populist. Five experts and him. He never changed his answers; only the questions did.
Soon, viewers stopped remembering the other guests. They called it ‘the Farrow show.’
By his tenth time, the audience clapped for the punchlines that once horrified them. ‘Why shouldn’t we leave the EU?’ he’d bark. ‘They want to ban kettles!’ Roars of laughter. Half the crowd, planted. The other half, placated.
A young woman once challenged him:
‘Why do you stoke fear? Why do you scapegoat migrants?’
He paused. Smiled.
‘Because it works.’
The crowd howled. The producers smiled. The camera did not cut away as security removed the young woman for ‘shouting.’
As the years ticked on, Nigel Farrow’s face became more familiar than the Queen’s. More permanent. A fixture of British reality like drizzle and derelict high streets. Question Time didn’t just platform him - it bowed to him.
He’d be invited back again.
And again.
And again.
He became the most frequent guest in the show’s history. 35 times. Then 50. Then 77. No government minister matched his tally. No opposition dared question it.
‘It’s balance,’ they said.
‘It’s democracy,’ they lied.
A spineless Director-General once joked:
‘Well, he’s not wrong all the time.’
That man was later knighted.
Then came the ‘Incident.’ A year of strikes. Food queues. A ferry of asylum seekers sunk off the Kent coast.
Farrow went on Question Time the next night. He called it a ‘regrettable necessity.’
‘We are not a dumping ground,’ he said.
The audience clapped.
When one panellist - a mild-mannered lawyer - called the tragedy a ‘crime against humanity,’ the feed mysteriously cut. When it returned, Farrow was smirking, the lawyer gone.
‘Technical glitch,’ the BBC apologised.
He never left after that.
The news desk dissolved into his personal mouthpiece. ‘The Nigel Farrow Update.’
BBC Parliament became ‘The National Broadcasting Centre.’
The Corporation’s charter was rewritten overnight. The word ‘impartial’ was replaced with ‘patriotic.’
Question Time, once a place of scrutiny, now opened with a choir:
‘One nation, One Nigel.’
The panel? Gone.
Now just him.
Every Thursday, for an hour, Nigel Talks To The Nation.
He spoke from the same podium, now carved from English oak and draped in his own crest: a lion strangling a dove. He wore the same striped tie, and when he smiled, you could feel the country stiffen.
The opposition disintegrated. What was left of it lived underground, scrawling slogans on brick walls.
‘There’s a swastika on your chest,’
read one.
‘Y O U R E A F A S C I S T C U N T,’ read another.
They were painted over by morning.
The BBC called it ‘urban decay.’
Nigel called it ‘anti-British vandalism.’
People disappeared. Poets first. Then professors. Then punk bands.
Universities were renamed after Farrow.
The National Curriculum included a weekly Question Time history lesson:
‘Lesson One: The Great Betrayal.’
‘Lesson Two: Why We Had to Take Control.’
Statues of Churchill were replaced with statues of Nigel holding a pint and pointing somewhere ominously.
One day, he stopped doing Question Time.
There was no need.
There were no more questions.
Only time.
He spoke from the balcony of his Thames Palace, beneath red and black flags, and told the nation:
‘You asked for this.’
‘You voted for this.’
‘You cheered for this.’
And they had. Not all. But enough.
They had laughed when he joked.
Clapped when he scapegoated.
Voted when he fearmongered.
And sat silent as he rose.
They made a podium for him.
And from that podium, he built a nation in his image: sneering, small, and afraid.
And on every wall, every screen, every Question Time rerun, his face remained. Smiling.
Forever.
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