So it’s goodbye from Nigel and Chris…

TWO hundred miles, that’s all it was, two hundred miles. By the time we arrived, Nigel Farage had quit as UKIP leader and Chris Evans had announced he was leaving Top Gear. I think I should go on more long journeys.

Isn’t it odd that Farage should quit as UKIP leader now? His reasoning  was as follows: “During the referendum I said I wanted my country back… now I want my life back.”

Thanks for that, Nigel. All those endless years of banging on about how much you hate Europe, while also being paid handsomely to sit in the European Parliament moaning and annoying everyone, and now that you’ve got your way you want to quit after engineering that piece of vandalism known as the referendum.

So run that by me again. You’ve landed us in the shit so you’re walking away to get your pub back. Sorry, life. Or maybe life and pub are the same thing, you know, equivalent entities in Planet Farage (a place few of us wanted to visit, so the planet came to us).

But what will you do with yourself now that your ambition has been exhausted in victory? Sit on a barstool somewhere and bore on endlessly until everyone within hearing distance find that their brains have rolled out of their ears. So just the same as always, but with a pub crowd instead of a national audience.

Of course, Nigel, you resigned your sorry ass on us before, and then came back with unseemly haste. Are you really going for good this time? I do worry that without what Margaret Thatcher once called the oxygen of publicity, you might well shrivel up and just disappear, never again to trouble the country you just got back.

Incidentally, Nigel, now that you’ve got your country back, can I have mine back, too? You know, the decent, tolerant, accepting country you’ve done so much to pollute with your Europe-hating, racist-inclined views and generally dislikeable behaviour? Only I am worried that the decent Britain many of us believed in has been poisoned by your behaviour, and the way your unpleasant antics convinced David Cameron that he had to hold that ruinous referendum just to shut you up. You and the endlessly duplicitous Boris Johnson are more or less responsible for this unholy mess.

And now you’re walking away. While I won’t be sorry to see you go, and please stay away this time, isn’t this all a little hasty? It’s often said that if you want something bad enough, when it finally happens you will be disappointed. Is that the problem? Well, plenty of us are mightily disappointed that your view prevailed –  especially by the sort of margin you said wouldn’t be enough to win the referendum if the scores had been the other way round.

Incidentally, I cannot believe that Nigel Farage is only 52. How did that happen? I am seven years older than that and still think Farage belongs to an older, crustier generation. Weird or what…

As for Chris Evans, his Top Gear wasn’t that bad, no worse than the original on a poor day, of which they were many. Matt Le Blanc was good fun. I’m not that keen on Evans, but he was okay. And sometimes you need a nonsense show like Top Gear to escape the world.

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