According to GB News, Nigel Farage sent a ‘brilliant’ response to Sir Keir Starmer over banning smoking outside pubs. Since this struck me as highly unlikely, I had a peep on the website, only to be kept out by the paywall, and needy pleading, “Don’t Let Them Silence You – Support GB News…”

Oh, I’d rather support anything else you might care to mention, so the ‘brilliance’ of Nigel Farage will remain a mystery to me, much as it always has done.

But I’ll tell you this, if GB News is short of money, they should stop bunging so much of it to old sulky-pants. His entry in the Parliamentary Register of Interests records that GB News paid him £97,928.40 for what amounts to 32 hours work a month.

After this story blew up, Farage told the BBC the amount was paid not to him but to his company, “which has significant expenses…sorry to disappoint the media”.

Whatever, it’s a lot of money. But I am not significantly interested to pursue this further. All you need to know is Farage has made himself extremely wealthy by bellowing far-right slogans and pretending to be a man of the people.

Also, as if you need telling, he is a shameless self-publicist and hypocrite, a man happy to spout pious asides such as “sorry to disappoint the media” while at the same time stuffing his pockets with media money.

There’s enough brass in that neck to fashion a whole bed.

True, he’s generally only paid by the right-wing media, with an extra £4,000 a month from the Daily Telegraph for so-called columns, but either he’s part of the media or he’s not.

And as he’s now the almost entirely absent MP for Clacton, he shouldn’t be in the media at all.

Anyway, it was smoking outside pubs that brought us to this juncture. In one of his Telegraph columns – the collective noun for which should surely be ‘argy-bargies’ or ‘spittle-spats’ – Farage said: “I’ll never go to the pub again if outdoor smoking is banned.”

Thank heavens for that. No more fag-ash fascism from the nicotine nasty; no more tarry disagreements. In one sulk he’d be demoted from number one pub bore to plain old bore.

One challenge in such matters is that the personal gets in the way of the general.

For Farage, the personal amounts to the ‘right’ to stage photo-shoots in pubs with compliant press photographers. And the ‘general’ is just to blow this into a bigger matter than it really is.

For me, the personal is a desire to avoid loathsome smoke outside pubs (alongside an undying antipathy to one smoker). It’s not a massive problem, to be honest, as pubs are so much nicer without indoor-smoking. For all that, it’s unsettling as a non-smoker to sit clouded in smoke.

The Express, rumoured to be a newspaper, splashed with: “Pubs warn of smoking ban violence”. That seems a bit strong, unless Farage is about to kick-off at his local, or we are about to see another of those riots that were nothing to do with him.

The stuffy silliness of right-wing newspapers has been heightened by their side no longer being in power. And by their insistence all wrongs are down to Labour, and nothing to do with the previous 14 years.

Further evidence of this was found over at the Mail, where Starmer’s reported removal of a portrait of Margaret Thatcher from what had once been her Downing Street study led to claims of ‘outrage’.

Nope, nobody was outraged by that apart from the permanently wrathful Mail.

Whatever you think of Starmer, it seems fair enough that he might wish to remove a painting of Thatcher. Would you want that on your walls? According to one unnamed former Tory minister, the eyes follow you around the room, which would certainly give one the creeps.

Still, a problem with Starmer’s leadership is that everything comes across as a downer. Banning smoking outside pubs seems fair enough on health grounds and is a much smaller step towards than banning indoor smoking was.

But, blimey, Starmer doesn’t go out of his way to bring joy, does he? Those of us who were thrilled at his election victory need to be given something cheerful to clutch.