Degenerate Art

Remarkably enough, despite the virtual omnipresence across British television, radio, social media and our free and balanced Press of the Farage Falange's strutting ex-Caudillo, visitors to the Royal Academy's summer exhibition have unanimously declined the opportunity to have the great man's image smirking down at them from a wall in their very own home. Even at the modest price of the late Head Boy's garden shed, no buyer could be found for the modern icon, whom the court painter David Griffiths has depicted smiling with modest self-satisfaction, as after an invigorating crusade against the Turkish horde, and apparently in the process of trying to remember how to fold his arms properly. The background is a sullen British grey, which sets off the sullen grey-green of the strutting ex-Caudillo's shiny snakeskin suit and the washed-out purple and yellow of his patriotically pickled visage; while the pocket-flap of the suit appears to have no pocket beneath it, symbolising the strutting ex-Caudillo's preference for keeping his hand in other people's.

A portrait of the strutting ex-Caudillo's acolyte, Jacob Rees-Mogg, sold for one fifty-fifth of the Griffiths altarpiece's asking price. Given the double-breasted vacuum inside the suit, we may be grateful for the small mercy that the subject kept his clothes on; but it remains as yet unclear for whose attic the horror was destined.