What Nigel Farage said about a no-deal Brexit before the referendum, according to James O'Brien

Nigel Farage's belated return to the political frontline as head of the Brexit Party isn't going as smoothly as he might have hoped.

The pint-bothering populist endured a torrid interview with Andrew Marr on the BBC on Sunday morning in which he was grilled over his past statements about the NHS, climate change, gun control in the US and Vladimir Putin, losing his temper and hitting out at BBC "bias" for its lack of interest in promoting his current agenda.

Still fuming on Monday evening, Farage took to The Daily Telegraph to complain about his treatment at the hands of the veteran broadcaster.

The ex-Ukipper wrote:

One of Marr’s most outrageous assertions was that during the referendum I did not fight for a no deal Brexit. In fact, I did.

But Farage's claim has already been swiftly and brutally fact-checked by LBC radio host James O'Brien, increasingly the voice of reason in a mad world, who accused Farage of "rewriting reality".

Speaking on his show on Tuesday morning, O'Brien said:

This claim that's getting out there now that Mr Farage invented the phrase 'no deal is better than a bad deal'... He didn't.

What he did was say during a campaign debate in June 2016 was say that 'no deal is better than the rotten deal that we have at the moment'. 

So he was comparing no-deal to EU membership, not to all those future deals that everybody spent the entire campaign telling us would be easy to achieve.

O'Brien went on to brand Farage's historical revisionism "deceptive, disingenuous and entirely deliberate".

He continued:

It's a statement that completely ignores the entire referendum campaign being built upon the fact that we were going to sign a trade deal - or some sort of deal - that would be better than what we currently had...

Mr Farage claimed that the current arrangement was so awful that even no-deal would be better than that.

He was citing no-deal as the lesser of two evils, he was not citing it as the thing that people voted for.

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