You can always tell when a centrist is crapping himself: he plays the Hitler card. He goes rummaging in the darkest moment of modern times in search of an insult to fling at the person who’s put the wind up him. Witness David Lammy’s mad claim that Nigel Farage once ‘flirted with Hitler Youth’. It’s not true, of course, but it revealed a truth – that Labour is flailing like crazy in response to the threat posed by Reform UK to Keir Starmer’s government and the very foundations of British politics.

It was after Sir Keir’s speech at the Labour conference in Liverpool on Sunday that Lammy dropped the H-bomb. In a vain effort to sound more passionate, but coming off like a short-circuiting android, Starmer slammed Reform’s promise to scrap indefinite leave to remain for immigrants as ‘racist’ and ‘immoral’. Later, on the BBC, Lammy was asked if he thought Farage was racist. It’s even worse, Lammy hinted – he’s Adolf-adjacent. ‘I will leave it for the public to come to their own judgements about someone who once flirted with Hitler Youth when he was younger’, he said.

That “flirting” must have been a serious case of necrophilia, considering that Farage was born almost twenty years after the end of WWII.

Choose my ‘decency’ over Farage’s ‘division’, said Starmer. Coming off like a Temu Winston Churchill, he said to Farage: ‘You are the enemy and we will fight you.’ On the beaches? In the fields? Starmer’s readying of the Labour troops for war against the ‘racist’ and ‘immoral’ Farage generated some of the most batshit newspaper headlines I’ve seen in years. ‘Starmer vows Labour will never surrender Britain to “enemy” Farage’, cried the Independent, conjuring up an image of wet, woke hacks sobbing into a warm beer and playing ‘Nimrod’ on a loop as they vow to defend Britain – well, Hackney Wick – from the menace of Faragism.

Home secretary Shabana Mahmood clearly got the memo about madly obsessing over Farage. She told reporters that what Farage is doing is actually ‘worse than racist’. So he’s ultra racist, super-racist, the most racist? With his promise to get tough on immigration, he’s blowing a ‘very, very loud dog whistle to every racist in the country’, she said. For heaven’s sake, can we please retire the ‘dog whistle’ slur, that grossly elitist vision of the masses as a canine-like mob just waiting to be sprung into depraved action by a coded cry from one of their demagogic controllers? It’s still true, it seems: scratch an ‘anti-fascist’, find a classist.