How will future generations understand Nigel Farage, now that his phone-in radio show has been torn down?

Is it fair to judge the ex-Ukip leader on the values of today?

They don’t hang about, the new Taliban, do they? They’ve only been going since Sunday and already their influence reaches far enough into the deep state to have drummed Nigel Farage out of his phone-in radio show on LBC.

Just, for background, the new Taliban was born in Britain on Sunday, when Nigel Farage got very upset watching the Black Lives Matter protests on telly, and declared that “a new Taliban has been born”.

Poor, poor Nigel. It must be hard, watching actual widespread civil disobedience on the television, when you yourself have threatened it more than 10 times in four years but no one has turned up.

Who can forget, back in 2016, when Nigel Farage was going to lead a “100,000 strong people’s army” to the Supreme Court, and in the end, could only rely on that mad Irish priest that wants to mine the asteroid belt?

This, ultimately, was the problem. People were actually there. They weren’t just threatening to protest, which Nigel Farage is obviously completely fine with, having done it so many times, they actually went ahead and did it, and that won’t do.

Letting Farage go is quite the call to make. With all due respect to Eddie Mair, James O’Brien, Nick Ferrari and the rest, one suspects none of them can bag an exclusive interview for a London phone-in radio station with the president of the United States.

There are the usual free speech arguments to trot through but ultimately, LBC like virtually all other things in life, is a commercial operation, that has decided Mr Farage’s presence was no longer worth the stain on their brand.

To reach for an entirely random example, there was a 17th-century merchant, or to use the more accurate term, slave trader, called Edward Colston who, knowing that he’d made all his money from the abduction, rape and and manslaughter of tens of thousands of his fellow human beings, dabbled in a bit of personal brand management by parting with a small amount of his cash to pay for some schools.

For several hundred years, it worked. There was even a statue erected of him in Bristol, fully 60 years after the slave trade had been abolished. But it didn’t work forever, and at the weekend, he discovered, with a splash, that his brand had been somewhat re-evaluated.

Of course, these issues are immensely complex. Now that Nigel Farage no longer has a radio show, how will future generations be able to understand him? You can’t just tear these radio shows down, and hope that the stains of the past will wash away.

We must have the confidence to confront our history, mustn’t we? Surely the right thing to do would have been to let Nigel Farage carry on hosting his talk radio show, every weekday evening for hundreds and hundreds of years?

Why should Nigel Farage, whose values are entirely unchanged since he marched round the Surrey countryside as a schoolboy singing Nazi songs, be judged on the values of today?

How can we understand our past, specifically the bit where millions of us were taken in by the greatest political fraud in our nation’s history, if people are no longer free to call him up on a Wednesday evening and pretend they’ve been kicked in the head by a horse?

Still, we wish Mr Farage all the best on the next stage of his journey. He has, by my count, promised 12 times that we will never hear from him again, and yet we continue to do so. Brexit might have got done, but there will always be another hard-right cause for Mr Farage to hang his phoney tweed jacket.

In the meantime, and in the very short term indeed, Britain is going to find itself very uncomfortable with its recent past, specifically the bit for which Nigel Farage bears responsibility. There’ll be a reckoning to be had about all that, when Britain finally finds itself confronted by the present, and the future it voted for.

At that point, it’s possible Nigel will be relieved that people can no longer phone him up every night to tell them what they think of him.