Pop quiz. Of whom did Donald Trump say admiringly: “I also learned that he loves his country very much”? And: “He wrote me beautiful letters. And they are great letters. We fell in love”?

If you answered “Nigel Farage”, then I’m sorry. The Reform UK leader might have spent this pre-party conference week in his happy place – lodged several feet up the US presidential colon – and rhetorically demanding of US lawmakers: “At what point did [the UK] become North Korea?” But those Trump compliments were in fact previously made about Kim Jong-un, the dictator of … well, you know the rest.

We always want what we can’t have, of course, which is why Trump this week had to settle for Farage grinning gormlessly next to his Oval Office desk like a competition winner, while Kim laughed it up with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping at a vast military parade in Beijing which featured, among other deranged martial curiosities, robot wolves. Good times. If you regard China as the US’s chief rival, then you can definitely see putative prime minister Nigel casting the UK as North Korea in the equivalent western pecking order. In a few short years, Farage might well be honking with laughter as the US’s robot coyotes slink past at Washington’s biannual Big Beautiful Ballistic Parade.

Anyway, back to the present day for now. Although his presidential colonic timeshare must be maintained – use it or lose it! – Farage was ostensibly in Washington to slag off Britain, launch the US outpost of a TV station he works lucratively and tax-efficiently for, and beg for US help in combatting “the really awful authoritarian situation the UK has sunk into” on free speech.

Before we go on, a quick word on that point. The UK isn’t in the greatest place on free speech, and could do with a serious rethink on where its priorities lie. Or at least, a serious think about making it make sense. Take those who agree with the new Green party leader that it’s entirely “proportionate” to arrest someone over tweets, but also reckon that Palestine Action has done nothing wrong. But also, take Farage himself, whining this week about the “really awful authoritarian situation” in the UK, while his underlings exacerbate it in a quite ludicrous piece of free-speech hypocrisy. We’ll come to the full details of that in a minute. But you shouldn’t be able to have it both ways – even if the lessons of the past decade might have suggested to people on both sides of politics that you can.

Still, no one on this Earth is having it both ways harder than Trump. No offence, but do we really have to take lectures on free speech from a country where his administration recently wrote a letter to the Smithsonian mandating a review of some of its museums and exhibits “in accordance with Executive Order 14253, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”? This compulsory review, they added, was “to ensure alignment with the President’s directive” that museums say the things he wants them to say.

Do we really have to take it from a country where universities are threatened with being defunded because they aren’t teaching in the way he wants them to teach? Do we really have to take it from a country where the president attacks the press at every possible opportunity and frequently seeks to weaken it? Do we really have to take it from a country with a leader who openly admires a whole array of grim dictators who have eliminated free speech in their countries? Do we really have to take it from a country with book bans? Not to be a bad sport, but I rather think we don’t.

Nigel would disagree, of course. In fact, he’d love to help them out with the hypocrisy. Just as Republicans would much rather be conveniently preoccupied with European domestic laws while their own first amendment rights get eroded right before their eyes, so Farage would much rather swan off to Washington to be used as a pawn in partisan misdirection than stay at home and get involved with a free-speech horror show he most definitely can do something about.

To Nottingham, then, which, while not as much as a glitzy power trip for Farage as Washington, is nonetheless a town where the council is run by his Reform party. And where, alas, the Nottinghamshire council leader banned his councillors from engaging in scrutiny by the local press. Last week, Reform’s Mick Barton announced that because of a story about local government reorganisation, none of his councillors could speak to the Nottingham Post, its online arm Nottinghamshire Live, or a team of BBC-funded local journalists. This week, in the wake of a backlash against his fundamentalist huff against free speech, Barton updated to say his ban only applied to himself. Now, following Farage’s congressional committee session in which various contradictions saw the Reform leader being asked: “Do you agree with yourself?”, Nigel has finally said he would “have a little chat” with Barton.

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About time. Much, much easier than having the balls to “have a little chat” with Trump about his intriguing understanding of the first amendment – or indeed the national guard deployments/military parading/insurgency-fomenting/election delegitimising/ally pardoning/all the many other things which certainly do at least have the vibes of a genuine “really awful authoritarian situation”. Run down Britain, and effectively invite it to get slapped with a tariff or two. Maybe Nigel loves his country as much as Kim does after all.