'In our recent travels across the toxic landscape of British politics,' said a spokes-compass for the Royal Geographical Society, 'we have encountered a remarkable new phenomenon which we have named the 'Nigel Mirage'.
'A Nigel Mirage occurs when the leader of Reform announces what seems from a distance to be a radical and ruthless new policy proposal but which, when you get closer to it, suddenly disappears.
'For example, we saw Nigel claim that he would cut off welfare payments to migrants and save the Treasury £260 billion a year. But on closer inspection, it turned out there were hardly any categories of people that Nigel could actually take money away from, so the idea dissolved into thin air.
'Similarly, with Reform's schemes for mass deportations to El Salvador and Afghanistan. They loomed up in the shimmering distance, looking like monumentally important party policies. However, at the precise moment that Nigel started getting cross-examined in press conferences, these schemes magically vanished. All you could see in their place was Nigel shaking his head while claiming to have been misquoted by the media.
'The strange thing,' said the RGS spokes-atlas, 'is that moderate voters believe Nigel when he tells them that these hardline policy ideas were mere tricks of the light, and that he's actually a moderate guy.
'However, for voters on the hard right, these Nigel Mirages stick in the head and continue to look very real indeed. These voters carry on having the clear impression that if Reform gets into power, it will let migrants starve and then throw them out of Britain.
'It's almost as though,' the spokes-trigpoint mused, 'the Nigel Mirage was designed to work that way.'
Image: Newsbiscuit Archive
