This Milkshake Spring isn’t political violence – it’s political theatre

What a lot of crying over a spilt milkshake. Since broadcaster and sometime politician Nigel Farage got covered in sticky banana and salted caramel in Newcastle on Monday, the air has been thick with condemnation.

“Normal campaigning is becoming impossible,” tweeted the far-right leader, before pleading for “civilised democracy” – a new tune from a man who warned that unless he gets his precise flavour of Brexit he would “don khaki, pick up a rifle and head for the frontlines”. The dousing was “horrible and ridiculous”, said Tony Blair, famed for his excellent judgment on weapon threats. And so the professionally outraged have taken to social media and TV studio sofas, bemoaning the debasement of our politics and whatever else they can squeeze into their allotted two and a half minutes.

Related: Man charged with assault over Nigel Farage milkshake incident

Although no fan of lobbing objects at others, or indeed of high-sugar dairy products, I must confess that my greatest upset was not on behalf of the contemptible Farage but at the revelation that milkshakes now cost £5.25. Nor did I shed a single tear when the far-right Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, took repeated dousings after he publicly accused “every single Muslim” of “getting away” with the 7/7 bombings. And when it was the turn of Carl Benjamin, whose most notable life achievement has been to joke about the MP Jess Phillips getting raped, I laughed. If this is Britain’s Milkshake Spring and these are its targets, then I can imagine worse.

British politics currently bestows its largest rewards on those talking the most hyperbole. Even so, a bit of context wouldn’t go amiss. First, small and ultimately harmless projectiles have been on the fringe of our democratic terms of trade for a long time. When, in the 1970 general election, the prime minister, Harold Wilson, took a raw egg to his suit, he quipped, “If the Tories get in, in five years no one will be able to afford to buy an egg.”

Compare such sangfroid with the reaction of Robinson’s gang to the twentysomething Asian lad whose drink “slipped” out of his hand, or a rather soggy Farage blasting his phalanx of bodyguards for their “complete failure”. Then again, Wilson had lived through an actual world war, which would teach anyone a sense of perspective, while today’s extremists are simply plastic hardmen who hail any passing scrap after closing time in a market town as “going to war”.

More importantly, the serried ranks of self-appointed grownups who tut that milk protesters are setting Britain on a (very) slippery slope to major violence get things precisely the wrong way round. We have had major violence very recently in our politics, and it has been authored by the far right. Never forget that during the EU referendum campaign of 2016 the Labour MP Jo Cox was shot and stabbed to death on a Yorkshire street by a man shouting “Britain first”. Hours beforehand, Farage had unveiled a poster showing a long stream of migrants at the Croatia-Slovenia border under the slogan “Breaking Point”. Days later, he basked in a poll victory that he claimed had been won “without a single bullet being fired”, even as the gunman, Thomas Mair, was about to face a court.

By contrast, chucking a milkshake is not political violence at all; it is political theatre, of a kind shared down the ages and across countries. Indeed, the best modern example comes from Bogotá. In 1995, Antanas Mockus became mayor of the Colombian capital, winning a landslide on his promise to root out corruption. No professional politician, Mockus had been a philosopher at the National University until he moonied a lecture theatre of unruly students. He defended himself by referring to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, as one would, but HR wasn’t buying it.

He brought a similar approach to tackling one of Bogotá’s most intractable problems, the chaos on its roads. Colombian tough guys paid no heed to red lights, while traffic policemen were figures of state authority it was a solemn duty to threaten. Result: jams, crashes, gridlock. Mockus’s answer was to hire 420 mime artists to stand at key junctions across the city. Jaywalkers were followed by clowns in facepaint, imitating them. Similar mockery was dished out to impatient drivers. And which machito wanted that? Within months, pedestrians obeying traffic signals jumped from 26% to 75%.

This traffic-buster relied on humour and context – just as the milkshake protests do. Britain today is infested with violent thugs and gutter politicians, who pretend that just because they can put on a suit they are legit. And just as in Bogotá, the normal checks and balances of our democracy are not working. Blair and the other Serious People shake their heads over Robinson’s aggression but, they caution, those immigrants really must try harder to integrate. As for Farage, he gets a programme on LBC, and a near-nightly showing on the BBC. Neither a cabinet minister nor, despite all his attempts, an MP, he has appeared on Question Time 33 times, the last just a few days ago.

So in comes the milkshake, to reduce men of pomp to figures of ridicule. For once, the news-satire shows won’t feature Farage as a guest of honour but as a butt of humour. The milkshake knows no triangulation. It has no truck with “legitimate concerns”. It reminds everyone that these grotesques aren’t “normal”; that they are purveyors of hate and guzzlers of largesse from the transnational rich. For all its flaws and inadequacies, the Milkshake Spring is a reminder of what actual politics from below look like, even while the media play along with the idea that ex-BNP convicts and men who laugh about rape are somehow in line with “real people”.

Even if the Brexit party romps home in Thursday’s polls, the final sound ringing in Farage’s ears won’t be applause and cheers. It will be the screeching laughter of the boy following him as he squelched his way out of Newcastle city centre and back to a taxi. Because to many decent people in this country, that’s what Farage is: a bad joke. As for his suit, I’m sorry about the mess, but perhaps Arron Banks can buy him a new one.

• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist