Nigel Farage is deeply divisive. Why is his reputation being fun-washed on I’m a Celebrity?

Nobody has to watch Nigel Farage on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! Thousands of you, I bet, have already made the decision not to and will have no trouble sticking to it. But the damage has already been done. Because I know that Farage, whenever he appears on anything, manages to fun-wash himself in some obscure way – he is not, after all, that fun, even when he is not blowing his poundshop dog-whistles. And I know that I’m a Celebrity, more than any other reality TV show, has a redemptive effect on even the most sullied reputation.

I first noticed this with Farage years ago, appearing with him on a now defunct radio show, Pienaar’s Politics. It was 2010, and everyone was hail-fellowing Farage because he had just survived a plane crash. He had been flying around Oxfordshire, with the banner “Vote for your country: Vote Ukip”. Back then, Farage’s shtick was mainly maverick/troublemaker. He had been a prominent Eurosceptic for nearly 20 years, was a founder member of Ukip and was the party’s leader for a time, but in those days Ukip was still saying the quiet parts quite quietly: he’d make vague noises about where the real people of the UK stood on immigration, for instance, but he didn’t start talking about a fifth column of Islamic extremists until later.

It was still pretty clear from the atmospherics that the guy was an old-fashioned ethno-nationalist, but it was by no means obvious that this would get him any further into the social discourse than the odd guest appearance on a really early morning phone-in. And besides, even if I had been able to see into the future, would I have wished him to perish in a light aircraft crash? Of course not; dispirited as I am by years and years of losing ground to the revivified hard right, I’m not yet at the point of hexing them.

So we all congratulated Farage on his survival, and then we talked about his other near-death experiences, including a car crash in the 80s, and cancer in the 90s, during which time one of his testicles swelled up to the size of a lemon and had to be removed. It was disarming: how are you supposed to engage meaningfully on the destructive rhetoric of a man whose absent testicle you were toasting five minutes before? After he left, everyone agreed: say what you like about his politics, he was a jolly nice man.

As nice-guy Nige arrives in the jungle to meet Ant and Dec 13 years later, we have a bit more context, and a lot more to complain about: he has given us Brexit, allied with the globe’s most vocal racist authoritarians, and sown political and social division as profound and sad as I’ve ever known. But I can guarantee that his strange nature – puffed-up triumph one minute, strange, open-hearted vulnerability the next – will completely wrongfoot anyone who tries to stick anything on him.

Then consider the mechanics of I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! It generally does have an obvious hate figure plucked from public life – last time it was Matt Hancock – but the other contestants rarely have the stomach to challenge them. They all want to be liked by the viewers, for one; but deeper than that imperative are the basic rules of human intercourse, that when someone is right in front of you, you try to be nice.

Not to worry, you’re thinking; there are a million people at home, ready to dunk the villain in a vat of insects or engorged, lemon-sized testicles. But it rarely pans out that way; the minute anyone gets even a whiff of an underdog, people start rooting for them. Hancock eating, sorry, yes, more testicle, more or less guaranteed his rehabilitation, and sure enough, he finished in the top three. We, as a populace, just have a predisposition for empathy and a very low tolerance for people looking sad. Those are good qualities, actually. A different format could channel them into something worthwhile: I’m a Refugee, Get Me Out of the Sea.