An interviewer’s
Job is to make something look like a conversation – even if weeks of negotiation, days of preparation and hours of preparing the room and the camera angles have fed into it – while actually eliciting new and exciting information from the subject. The minimum required of an interview is that it is interesting to watch, but at its best it should be newsworthy: just think of Emily Maitlis’s infamous sit-down with Prince Andrew. Sadly for both GB News and
Nigel Farage, their interview on Tuesday evening with former US president
Donald Trump did not obviously clear either of those thresholds . Put simply, Farage is visibly too keen to keep the famously volatile Trump on side and so doesn’t push any questions, doesn’t ask anything likely to upset Trump, and doesn’t challenge him on any of his points. As a result, Trump is left to suggest that the Mar-a-Lago property (“the winter White House”) in which the interview took place is worth a billion or more, directly contradicting the verdict on a
New York legal case he recently lost, without challenge. Claims on law and order, the border, and more are all repeats of things Trump has said many times, and aren’t challenged. Despite the interview being badly done, though, it is still somewhat telling about Trump – in terms of what he’ll say about things of which he knows little when he thinks that’s what the audience wants to hear. When it came to the
UK, Farage focused in on the
Royal Family, which (in fairness to him) might not be the most important thing facing the country or the world at the moment, but which is certainly occupying a lot of our time. For all that he is a bitter and divisive figure, Trump showed his need to be a people-pleaser in these answers, giving the responses he imagined that Farage, and the
British public through him, might want to hear. On the issue of the non-appearance of the Princess of Wales, he was on side with her and against the press, predictably enough. No such courtesy was extended to Prince Harry, of course, with Trump suggesting that under his presidency Harry might even face deportation – a right-wing US group is currently suing to see whether Harry discussed his admitted past drug use on his visa application form. Trump knows which are the “good” royals and “bad” royals for Farage, and assumes that extends to the public at large. Naturally, that meant he had to be enormously supporting of the late
Queen Elizabeth II, despite evidently knowing almost nothing about her reign. Repeatedly saying “she never made a mistake”. In reality, even the Queen’s biggest admirers would admit the palace had made mistakes during her long reign: delaying the divorces of her children, the palace’s slow response to the death of Princess Diana, and her protection of Prince Andrew being just a few examples of the Queen missing the public mood. Read Next ITV, GB News, Talk TV - linear TV is at crisis point Trump also at one moment said he had managed to strike up a very close bond with the former Queen while also admitting she had told him nothing. At their dinner, Trump said, he had repeatedly pushed her as to which of her prime ministers was her favourite, or which of the US presidents she had met she had most liked – getting no answer beyond “I liked them all” on either topic. Most of us would interpret that as perhaps the most boring of deflections someone in the Queen’s position could possibly make, the royals at their most guarded: given Trump’s famous indiscretion, the Queen (very properly) making sure there was nothing whatsoever that could be taken out of context and used to cause a scandal. Trump, however, marvelled at the response as if it were some kind of genius. But evidently, to him, it is. What he had spotted in the Queen’s response was an ability to stay out of an issue upon which there is no need for you to have an opinion, and yet at virtually the same moment he had intervened on a nuisance lawsuit against
Prince Harry on which he could have totally demurred – and which was the main headline out of the interview. Farage threw Trump softball after softball, and as ever Trump flailed and batted each delivery off in random directions. But the combination of his need to please, his sense of what he thinks an audience wants to hear, and his “insight” into the late Queen are revealing of the man all the same. The question for GB News and Farage, of course, is whether this is enough. Any fool can get access to top politicians if they never take advantage of it. Farage gave Trump 30 minutes to repeat the sort of things he says every day in campaign speeches, with a bonus sideswipe at Prince Harry. Did he really not hope for more?