Heavens, we all love getting ourselves in a tizzy. During the post-Christmas fug, the London Times gave social media a vigorous poke by naming Nigel Farage, leader of Ukip, as "Briton of the Year". If everybody who threatened to cancel subscriptions were in earnest then the Times really must have worked out how to monetise the internet. There seemed to be thousands of them.
Any number of less divisive figures were suggested: William Pooley, the nurse who survived Ebola; Alan Henning, the taxi driver beheaded by Islamic State; Stephen Sutton, the late charity campaigner and cancer patient.
Most Ukip supporters would, surely, agree that those three men showed greater courage than their saloon-bar Garibaldi.
Mr Farage, in contrast, divides his time between fags, beer, aggravating EU nabobs and sacking members of his party who have exceeded even its intergalactic tolerance for racist and sexist language.
"The established political parties have not been able to ignore Ukip, however, whatever they may think of its more toxic members," the Times explained.
Godwin’s Law
Oh, really? Well, so-called paper of so-called record, you leave us no alternative but to trigger Godwin’s Law. If that is your view then, despite the “toxic” nature of the Nazi Party, you would probably have named Adolf Hitler “man of the year”.
It did not take long for correspondents to point out that Time magazine did just that in 1938. The same periodical identified Stalin as man of the year on two occasions. Ayatollah Khomeini took the title in 1979.
Who knew Henry Luce's venerable organ was such a tool of fascist, communist, Islamicist entryism? Time is, of course, no such thing. Like the Times of London, the magazine was merely acknowledging the most significant, not the nicest, bravest or most honest, figure of the era.
The current digital diarrhoea encourages people to take premature violent offence. Within hours of the appalling attack on a Pakistan school last month, respectable folk were, long before any such conclusion could be drawn, wondering why the siege in Sydney had received so much more coverage.
Pulling on woolly moral outrage makes us feel so much warmer inside.
Anyway, the point is that, for all the bleating, the Times probably had it right about Nigel Farage. Virtually no political commentator writing 12 months ago imagined that the United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) would advance quite so far.
To that point, Farage and his mob of curtain-twitchers, had seemed merely a distraction at the margins of the conversation. Combining the swagger of Mr Toad with the social sensitivity of PG Wodehouse’s Roderick Spode, Farage was still regarded as a largely benign figure of fun.
Indeed, there was, in liberal circles, some relief that the spoilers on the far right were now mere suburban reactionaries rather than radical revolutionaries such as the becalmed British National Party or the near-extinct National Front.
Warm-beer values
Therein lay the danger. Unlike the French, who have voted for the National Front and the Communist Party in significant numbers, the British have rarely shown much enthusiasm for the political extremes.
By selling itself as a gang of ordinary chaps who want a return to warm-beer values of the 1950s, Ukip dismisses any fears that, in the event of an unlikely Farage premiership, tumbrels may appear on Whitehall. Those duffers making cracks about women not cleaning behind the fridge seem harmless enough to an older demographic that once laughed at Jim Davidson. Farage sacks the proper racists. Doesn’t he?
The relative cosiness of Ukip (relative to outright fascists that is) allowed the party to secure 2½ extraordinary byelection victories in 2014. Douglas Carswell, a seemingly sane, if egg-headed, former Tory, won handsomely in the overpoweringly white Clacton-on-Sea.
Mark Reckless, another escaping Conservative, won in less friendly Rochester and Strood. Arguably more astonishing still, John Bickley came terrifyingly close to beating Labour’s Liz McInnes in Greater Manchester.
All of which leaves the Briton of the Year in an odd position. Farage must realise that too much success in the 2015 general election could herald downfall.
Any (still unlikely) coalition with the Tories would surely prove disastrous. The cock-ups and gaffes that seem amusing when committed by rising insurgents appear a great deal less hilarious when attached to parties in power.
More particularly, should such a grouping force through a referendum on EU membership, then Ukip, whose core purpose is exit from that body, would find itself in an inescapable bind. Lose and they can no longer claim to speak for a silent majority. Triumph and they no longer have any reason to exist.
Mr Farage should enjoy his elevation by the Times. There are few obvious paths to a second title.