Nigel Farage's 'crisis' in the Channel is a second wave of nonsense

What a pleasure to have the news agenda still dictated by former drivetime radio presenter Nigel Farage, who resists the suggestion that it’s time to declare an emergency in his career by announcing: “It’s time to declare an emergency in the Channel.”

Initially it was to be hoped there would be only one wave of Farage before a cure was discovered, but scientists have long accepted that we will simply learn to have to live with him, albeit in slightly diminished form with each outing, until he has finally infected so many layers of our culture that he is effectively spent. Think of it as a turd immunity strategy.

Related: Don't be fooled by the myth of a 'migrant invasion' | Daniel Trilling

In his current strain, Farage presents as a sort of distress voyeur, hanging about the Dover coastal area with a cameraphone and practising what he imagines to be some kind of haute journalisme by filming the arrival or rescue of any migrant boats he manages to spot. I’m afraid police felt obliged to speak to him about his behaviour during lockdown.

Yet compulsively he returns. One can only imagine the quickening in the Farage journalistic loins when, after several hours of fruitless sea perving, he finally spots a small craft full of desperate people coming into his sights. Yes! I’ve got a bite! The dog has seen the rabbit! Perhaps Nigel imagines himself to be a sort of lone special forces operative – special farces would be more accurate – a Mittyish pose that allows him to deploy expressions like “oh-five-hundred hours” and “I’ve got eyes on a target”. And doubtless various other quasi-military phrases he would have been able to use for real during the second world war that he so pantingly fetishises. Or rather, he would have, had he not been born nearly two decades after it ended, chosen to pursue an extremely indifferent City career in commodities trading instead of military service, and not been given to appearing at far-right German rallies. I don’t want to go out on a limb here, but I suspect the latter in particular would have been a bit of a dealbreaker for British military recruiting sergeants in 1939.

So here we are in 2020, with Farage repeatedly talking about “invasions” and “beach landings” – another reminder of the essential truth about him. Namely, that had he lived at the time of his precious war, he would have been so terrified by the scale of its daily realities and so incapable of keeping calm about any of it, that he would have had to be interned for spreading panic. “Invasion” is a ridiculous turn of phrase for what is happening in the Channel, designed to do absolutely nothing to address the problem and absolutely everything to whip up frenzy.

Needless to say, Boris Johnson’s government is yet another administration so terrified of being outflanked on the right by Farage that they tack towards him. Furthermore, this is Johnson’s government’s favourite kind of crisis, which is to say it is not one. It involves relatively very small numbers of people, drives vastly bigger numbers of its base mad – but in a helpful way – and is a useful distraction from any number of real crises that it is failing to deal with. Things like the spectacularly hopeless U-turning on test and trace, or not having a post-transition Brexit deal, or treating a generation of children as an afterthought to the pub trade. These and many other ongoing horror stories are hugely more significant. Exactly how far down the government’s list of priorities events in the Channel should currently be is a matter of opinion, but it certainly wouldn’t be breaking the top 10 any time soon.

So yes, Johnson himself couldn’t be less interested in this sort of thing – he couldn’t be less interested in anything much at all, really – but understands its value as a diversion. Thus yesterday the prime minister took to the airwaves to brand migrant attempts to cross the Channel “a very bad and stupid and dangerous and criminal thing to do”. When you consider that refugees are in the majority young men sent in desperation by their families, it DOES seem strange that they prefer to get their stupid criminal kicks by doing bad things like making perilous sea crossings. They would surely be much better off donning black tie to smash up an Oxford restaurant.

Bafflingly, this wasn’t the line Priti Patel went with yesterday on a visit to Dover. The home secretary is now apparently deemed such an interview risk that her trip was covered by a personal videographer as opposed to news crews. Inevitably, she judges the military and their hardware the answer. RAF planes, Royal Navy ships … it’s very “all the gear, no idea”, like using a Formula One car to pop down to the shops. Indeed, in this same martial spirit, Patel has “issued an ultimatum to France”, giving our nearest neighbours the best opportunity to participate in a diversionary conflict since the Franco-Prussian war. A war footing would certainly suit our own Otto von Jizzmark, Dominic Cummings, who seems cut out for pitching into simple enemies like “the EU”, but stuck on rather bigger tasks like “running a government” and “doing your own childcare even when you’re ill”. Perhaps you reap what you sow. Or as the PM’s official spokesman preferred it yesterday: “At the end of this year we will no longer be bound by the EU’s laws so can negotiate our own returns agreement.” Exciting! Can’t imagine how that’ll turn out.

This article began with one unflushable, though, and it must play out with another. Who should be on hand with his own take on the Channel crossings but Theresa May’s former longtime chief of staff, Nick Timothy, who declares the system so broken that the time has come to process migrants offshore. This isn’t a new idea, naturally – Tony Blair once pushed the idea of Ukraine as a “safe haven” for asylum seekers, indicating his preference for using other countries as locations in which to fight our metaphorical wars as well as our literal ones.

Even so, Timothy’s unsinkable sense of rectitude does set one dreaming of a Britain where a certain type of political attention seeker could be “processed offshore”. Instead, he spent barely a summer holiday in the political wilderness after his spectacular tanking of the 2017 Tory election campaign, emerging with a column in the Daily Telegraph, which was initially branded “Ways to Win”. Talking about broken systems, the one that failed to regard Timothy as even remotely defective for more than five minutes is arguably the most broken of the lot.

Yet on it goes. There will always be a place for him and Farage and all the other guys. We don’t seem to do political has-beens in this country, which is intriguing given the sheer scale of clusterfuckery over the past few years. In fact, the one thing you can be absolutely sure of is that all of the people cocking things up now will be on hand for the rest of your lives to offer lucrative advice, misdirection from their mistakes or freelance clifftop video-journalism. We really are a soft-touch country – just not in the way they claim.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist