Over 1,000 complaints made to Ant and Dec about Nigel Farage participation on ‘I’m A Celeb 2023’ after being paid £1,500,000 by ITV

Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Over 1,000 complaints made to Ant and Dec about Nigel Farage participation on ‘I’m A Celeb 2023’ after being paid £1,500,000 by ITV..

Some I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! fans are calling on hosts Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly to speak out as over 1,000 sign a petition over Nigel Farage’s appearance.. 

Farage, known for his inflammatory rhetoric and divisive role in British society, would enter the jungle just one week after nine police officers were injured in London by a far-right mob. In the past, he has been criticised for sharing platforms with homophobic, antisemitic and Islamophobic figures.

In response, Best for Britain has launched a new campaign calling on the public to pledge to boycott the show in opposition to its platforming of figures such as Farage.

In the first couple of hours since launching, the campaign has prompted more than 1,000 people to send a written complaint to Ant and Dec. It was still pretty clear from the atmospherics that the guy was an old-fashioned ethno-nationalist, but it was by no means obvious that this would get him any further into the social discourse than the odd guest appearance on a really early morning phone-in. And besides, even if I had been able to see into the future, would I have wished him to perish in a light aircraft crash? Of course not; dispirited as I am by years and years of losing ground to the revivified hard right, I’m not yet at the point of hexing them.

If you won’t be tuning in to #ImACeleb because they have chosen to pay £1,500,000 to the horrible Nigel Farage, and you hate his vile and offensive rhetoric. So we all congratulated Farage on his survival, and then we talked about his other near-death experiences, including a car crash in the 80s, and cancer in the 90s, during which time one of his testicles swelled up to the size of a lemon and had to be removed. It was disarming: how are you supposed to engage meaningfully on the destructive rhetoric of a man whose absent testicle you were toasting five minutes before? After he left, everyone agreed: say what you like about his politics, he was a jolly nice man.

As nice-guy Nige arrives in the jungle to meet Ant and Dec 13 years later, we have a bit more context, and a lot more to complain about: he has given us Brexit, allied with the globe’s most vocal racist authoritarians, and sown political and social division as profound and sad as I’ve ever known. But I can guarantee that his strange nature – puffed-up triumph one minute, strange, open-hearted vulnerability the next – will completely wrongfoot anyone who tries to stick anything on him.

Naomi Smith, CEO of Best for Britain, said: “While the thought of Farage mingling with other creepy-crawlies may seem appropriate, anything that normalises or amplifies his toxic views must be opposed.

“After a weekend that saw police injured at the hands of a far-right mob, and after years of his politics poisoning our society, we want the public to send a clear message to Ant and Dec, ITV and the media at large, that giving a divisive populist like Farage a nightly primetime platform is not good for our country.”