U.S President Donald Trump speaks at the inaugural Board of Peace meeting at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 19, 2026. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
After being President Donald Trump’s “bestie” for ages, British leaders are trying to leap out the window at his approach, says Guardian columnist Marina Hyde.
Parliament member Nigel Farage’s, is trying to “consciously uncouple from Donald Trump,” despite being “most firmly lodged” up his backside for “the past decade,” said Hyde.
“Nigel’s made such a massive, self-satisfied show of his real estate in the presidential large intestine for 10 years now that I actually don’t think non-surgical extraction is possible at this stage. He doesn’t just get to walk away whistling. The only way out is a full Faragectomy. I’ll give the president a piece of drone fuselage to bite down on,” Hyde said.
Hyde said Farage is not the only British leader trying to duck the U.S. president “as Operation Epic Facepalm rapidly unspools.”
“A whole posse of Britain’s political and pundit class greeted Keir Starmer’s failure to jump two-footed into Israel and the US’s Iran operation as a truly calamitous error,” said Hyde. “Yet these days, you can’t move for the spectacle of the initial cheerleaders reverse-ferreting. ‘I don’t like to see our prime minister be berated by foreign leaders,’ was Wednesday’s emanation from Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick, who, little more than two weeks ago, absolutely loved to see it. Starmer, Jenrick explained back in the first week of March 2026, was handling the Iran crisis ‘just about as badly as you could possibly go about it.’”
No one in British politics has sucked up as long or as hard to Trump as Farage, said Hyde, claiming “he was still at it two weeks ago. At the end of the first week of the war, Farage announced he was flying out to dinner at Mar-a-Lago and would be making various foreign policy points to Trump,
Now, suddenly “the relationship between the two populist politicians has cooled since 2024”
“I always fly to Florida on the off-chance of having dinner with someone with whom my relationship has cooled,” said Hyde, adding that Farage “very, very belatedly, appear[s] to have grasped what the polls have long indicated – that most British people really don’t like Donald Trump. And that was before he screwed their energy, food and mortgage bills and threatened to start the third world war.”
“Yet we are now being asked to forget that Farage really, really did like Donald Trump. Hero-worshipped him, in fact. What a hostage he made himself to a very predictable fortune,” said Hyde.
