Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage are a 'dream team' no one wants to see wrestling naked – Aidan Smith

Will desperate Conservatives turn to the recently ousted Prime Minister and the 'the most demonised figure in national politics’ in search of electoral success?

It’s been called the dream ticket and I think this could play: Nigel Farage and that blond bundle of excitability, erraticity, and exhausting-to-watch buffoonishness, thinking everything a great big giggle. Yes, I’m talking about Farage and Sam Thompson, who on Sunday night was crowned king of the jungle, beating “Nige” and ex-boxer Tony Bellew to win I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! Sorry, which straw-haired clown did you think I was talking about?

On the day of the final, this was the news: “Tory MPs in dramatic plot to bring back Boris as only way to avert wipeout at election.” An unwieldy headline for an unwieldy concept, with below it a photograph of Farage in his bushtucker-trial attire of skimpy, spray-on shorts disturbingly similar to those worn by Wham! when George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley stuffed badminton shuttlecocks down the front.

Talk about a marmalade-dropper. Not in the Tory shires more commonly associated with that phrase but everywhere else in the land. Boris Johnson? Prime Minister again? Alongside – as the man himself admitted yesterday, having got out of the shorts and enjoyed a shave and a pint – “the most demonised figure in national politics for the whole of the last decade”? Honestly, what on Earth have we done to deserve that?

At roughly the same moment that Farage was bearing his backside in the Australian outback, Johnson was bearing his soul at the Covid Inquiry, seeking forgiveness, almost breaking down, but insisting that Partygate was a gross distortion of the cake… sorry, the booze runs with the family-sized suitcases… I mean the truth.

And at roughly the same moment that Johnson was having to explain his non-attendance at those five Cobra meetings, Farage was dodging real snakes – and real scorpions and rats and upturned buckets of fish guts. Nevertheless – and don’t blame me for these clunky, contrived attempts at connection, just look at what I’m working with – there doesn’t seem to be a real, serious future for the double-act, and nor should there be.

Obviously, the Conservatives are desperate. They’re some 20 points behind in the polls and are going to try just about anything. You wonder if Rishi Sunak – leaping from the eat-out-to-help-out frying pan after being interrogated about the pandemic at the inquiry and straight into the Rwandan fire of today’s Commons vote – might even be considering changing his name. But then it may already be too late for Rizzi Sunak, after the Gen Z term for charisma, newly confirmed as the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year.

Has the – still current – Prime Minister posted his Christmas cards? Did he dare risk a photo on the front of the family posed round the No 10 hearth? And, knowing Sunak’s expensive tastes, is the fireplace displaying stockings by Harry of London whose hosiery is made from the hair of rare New Zealand red deer and can cost more than £1,000? The festive season is always a tricky and often traumatic time to be moving house, especially when it’s forced upon you.

Who knew the Tory far right was a five-headed monster? Not me. In no particular order regarding influence or loony tendencies, the factions are: the New Conservatives, the European Research Group, the Common Sense Group, No Turning Back and the Northern Research Group. They’ve been dubbed the “five families” after the mafia dynasties of New York but I have none of their albums so if any of them are bidding for the Christmas No 1, I’m afraid I can’t offer much insight into who’s going to win.

The Common Sense Group’s name is the most presumptuous, inferring that the rest of politics doesn’t have any. No Turning Back’s name, according to Wikipedia, is shared by no less than 28 songs or albums, so plenty of theme tune possibilities there, one of the ditties being by the late Ian Stuart Donaldson, the one-time singer with skinhead punk band Skrewdriver, described as a man with a keen interest in “white power”.

You and I can call Johnson anything under the sun but some will always love him and believe there’s none better at winning elections. In their eyes, he’s the portly guy with the surest shot summoned onto the pitch for the penalty shootout in football or, in rugby, the chance of an overtime drop goal. He can only really do one thing, although what a thing.

But Farage? When he went into the jungle three weeks ago I thought he was going to be Nigel Barrage, as in the balloons, looming over the other contestants, full of hot air, argumentative, a bit of a bore – and the first one to be booted. But he mucked in and mucked out, being big on camp hygiene, and didn’t pick fights and wasn’t needy or unctuous like Matt Hancock last year.

He seems to have useful people around him. Aides who can advise that the I’m a Celeb trials offer volunteers 25 per cent of the airtime on any given episode. And who, in the aftermath of his 2010 plane crash, were reportedly able to prevent his wife and two girlfriends from bumping into each other in the hospital corridors.

Apparently, Laure Ferrari is “the mistress to have outlasted every other mistress” and dreams of life in No 10 with Farage. I’m not sure I dreamt of this and can you imagine them sharing the address with the Johnsons, the women having drifted off to bed, and these two big beasts playing a game of brag based round their many and complicated romantic liaisons – then rounding off with naked wrestling like Oliver Reed and Alan Bates in Women in Love? Crikey, where did that image come from?