A fortnight ago found Ed Miliband telling a radio show that he thought Rosamund Pike would be the perfect person to play James Bond. Now, Nigel Farage has gone one better, telling the same station he thinks the next 007 should be... himself.
The UKIP leader dodged the question of whether Idris Elba should be the first black James Bond, telling Magic Radio host Nick Snaith that "you’ve got to be faithful to Ian Fleming and the original writer". (Isn't that Ian Fleming? Anyway...)
Compare...
Nigel added, "It has to be male, it has to be a rogue of some description. I'm not handsome enough but I'm certainly rogue. I'd give it a go. How about that?”
How about that?
...And contrast
Nigel also shared with listeners his views on...
Music:
“What do I like in terms of music? We're all products of our time. I left school, went to work in London in the early eighties.
“There was a sort of fantastic optimism about the new romantics and whether it was Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet. All of that stuff was terrific fun.
“I suppose if I had to pick a group that I wanted to listen to? I just think Madness is such great fun.
“I remember being 19 and I just passed my driving test and I've got a car. And I'm kind of, "I like driving in my car… " you know what I mean… "it's not quite a Jaguar…", great fun stuff.”
The NHS:
“The first thing to recognise is we've got a real crisis with our health service. We've got fewer GPs per head than any other country in Europe. We've got waiting times at A&E that have just in some parts of the country, rocketed to unacceptable levels. And there's a reason for this but no one dares talk about it. Our population's gone through the roof. Our population is ten million bigger than it was 25 years ago."
UKIP's controversial policy to bring back smoking in pubs:
“It's about freedom of choice that's the point. Thirty pubs a week are closing and a lot of them particularly in built up areas where they haven't got a big food trade. They rely on people going into the pub at five, six o'clock after a hard day's work and a lot of those people might not smoke all day but they wanna smoke with their drink that evening.”
“What we're saying is this: allow the back room of the pub to be an area where somebody, if they want can smoke, it doesn't hurt anybody else. Would that burden the health service?
"Well let's put it like this: the NHS says, that smoking related illnesses cost it two billion pounds a year, alright? Tobacco tax is twelve billion pounds a year so I don't quite buy the argument."