Nigel Farage says he wants to be taken seriously, but can't stop playing dangerous games

Told that there's been a gas leak in the building, Nigel Farage is the guy who fires up a cigarette.

- Andrew Rawnsley

There's no situation so combustible that he can’t contrive to try to make it more frightening.

Witness the things he has had to say about the protests in Epping outside a hotel used to house asylum-seekers. Many of the protesters are locals, unhappy that the hotel is in their neighbourhood and angry that one of the inhabitants has been charged with the alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl, which he denies. Far-right agitators have swarmed to the site. On the other side are some antifascist and pro-refugee counter-demonstrators. The leader of Reform UK piled into this highly delicate situation by making the attention-seeking assertion that we are getting close to “civil disobedience on a vast scale in this country”. There was a further excursion into extreme hyperbole when he claimed that “lawless” Britain is “facing nothing short of societal collapse”. He added: “I don’t think anybody in London even understands”, retailing the sly trope that a cocooned metropolitan elite is entirely oblivious to what is happening in the rest of the country.

We can start unpacking this by saying that reasonable people will agree that Britain is not a happy place. Nervousness about a repeat of the racial violence seen on the streets last summer is unsettling the cabinet.