I got an unexpected message last week from a former colleague whom I haven’t heard from in 20 years. I was all over her TikTok, she said, so she reached out to say hi. Such was the furore caused by Nigel Farage bizarrely raising an incident that took place in the House of Commons nearly six months ago that I suddenly found myself trending on social media. That had not been on my bingo card for budget week.

I was at home, having just got back from London, when I received a message telling me that Farage had referenced “the incident”. I looked at the footage of his press conference and was completely dumbfounded. Because this “physical altercation”, as he described it, was something I’d chosen not to discuss in public at the time, and something that, if I were him, I’d have kept quiet about.

But, no, not Nigel. Here he was, scrabbling around for excuses to explain why he wasn’t in the chamber for the budget , and this had to be the strangest one he could possibly have used.…