Well I have to say, over the years I have had really quite a fun life, done an awful lot of things that were very interesting.
Not much really lives up to the last two or three days in America.
I arrived late on Sunday night, and I went first to a Donald Trump rally that took place in a town called Redding in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania seemed to be the absolutely key state in every way in this election, and I was really surprised and flattered that he noticed I was in the audience.
Nigel Farage congratulated Donald Trump on his US election win
GB News
But hey, I’ve been a very loyal friend over the course of the last nine years. I’ve never wavered or wobbled in my support of him, even at times when it hasn’t necessarily been that easy.
I went on the morning of polling day and I stood outside a polling station in Pennsylvania, just talking to voters as they were coming in and out. And the common observation was there are more Trump signs on lawns this time than we saw in 2020 or we saw in 2016.
Why is that? I asked, well, we’re not afraid to say we’re Donald Trump’s supporters anymore. That was very interesting. Suddenly, he wasn’t quite the devil that perhaps people thought he was or he’d be made out to be.
And I was literally in no doubt on the day that he’d win and win big. I went off to the Mar a Lago party, a private party, no press allowed in the room at all, apart from Tucker Carlson, who was given a room at the side. And it was just a remarkable scene.
There there were a few hundred people in the ballroom, drinks, food, and sitting in the middle of it all was Donald Trump with Elon Musk next to him. And people were whooping and hollering and Trump was just sitting there eating an ice cream, completely nonchalant, as if, well, whatever happens, happens.
And that was remarkable. Then it was off to the convention centre for the Trump acceptance speech, about 2000 of us crammed into a room and boy, it was noisy. He came on stage with all of his family, with Melania’s family, with the key people who’d supported the campaign and been part of it.
It was a very long speech. But hey, he won. And as it looks at the moment on the projections, he’s probably going to finish up with 312 Electoral College votes and all he needed was 270 to win. So it isn’t just a win. It’s a very big win, and he’s taken the Senate and it looks like he’ll take the lower house as well. This is a crushing, comprehensive victory for the Republicans over Kamala Harris and over the Democrats.
But there’s one figure in this that you probably haven’t heard much about, but it was very, very interesting. He’s a young man. He’s 18 years old. His name is Barron Trump. Incredibly polite, very well turned out, and remarkably smart. He told me more about my social media clips over the years than I can even remember.
And he is credited with convincing his father that for this election, they should do podcasts. And that’s what Trump did – podcast after podcast after podcast. Many of those podcasts aimed at young voters, many of them aimed in many ways at young male voters. And I think young Barron actually played quite a significant role in the victory of his father.
But the question for us is, is Donald Trump’s election good news for Britain? Now, I think it is because he’s instinctively pro-British. I think it is because when he was president, he was more than happy to do a trade deal with us. The problem was our Conservative government hadn’t got Brexit done. We weren’t in a position to be able to do so.
But given that Trump is saying 10 per cent tariffs on anything that comes in from anywhere else in the world, that I think presents a big dilemma to Keir Starmer’s government, there are other problems too. I suspect the handover of the Chagos Islands, casting long term doubt over the naval base that the Americans use on Diego Garcia. I suspect that could become a problem.
And not to mention some very disappointing things that have been said by very senior Labour politicians, including, of course, Sadiq Khan, who’s now ten years into an outright feud with Donald Trump.