Nigel Farage has been pipped for the title of Time magazine’s Person of the Year by US President-elect Donald Trump.
The former Ukip leader was named on the shortlist for the US magazine’s 90th annual choice of the person who “had the greatest influence, for better or worse, on the events of the year”.
Donald Trump is TIME's Person of the Year 2016 #TIMEPOY https://t.co/5pTGOksevE pic.twitter.com/N8BtqTu9Nl
— TIME (@TIME) December 7, 2016
But there was little surprise when Mr Trump was chosen to receive the prestigious title and feature on the famous Time front page photo.
The magazine said it had picked him “for reminding America that demagoguery feeds on despair and that truth is only as powerful as the trust in those who speak it, for empowering a hidden electorate by mainstreaming its furies and live-streaming its fears, and for framing tomorrow’s political culture by demolishing yesterday’s”.
Everything you need to know about TIME's Person of the Year https://t.co/Zs0m5qWq2v pic.twitter.com/xNAamcnD6P
— TIME (@TIME) December 7, 2016
Describing Mr Farage as “the 52-year-old soothsayer with the arsonist’s grin”, the magazine said he had become “a kind of roving ambassador for Trumpism … giving speeches and campaigning for the dawn of a new world order- or at least the destruction of the old one”, but added that he had “no clear idea of what to put in place of that establishment”.
Mr Trump follows a sequence of US presidents who were Person of the Year winners, and which also includes Winston Churchill, the Ayatollah Khomeini and Adolf Hitler.
The last UK winner was the Queen, on her accession to the throne in 1952.
