Russell Jones's Week Moment: Facts Have Never Been a Speed Bump for Nigel

Nigel Farage is at it again, and the BBC are dancing merrily to his tune, argues Russell Jones

Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage at a Press Conference on Crime, Monday 21 July,2025. Photo: Justin Ng/Alamy Live News

Let’s begin this week with bit of light time-travel.

Rewind a millennium to the charming Romanesque town of Bernburg, Germany. One Christmas Eve in 1020, a church service was interrupted when a dozen otherwise unremarkable worshippers began to involuntarily, maniacally dance.

Nobody knew why. Not the priest. Not the dancers. Not the Bible, which—despite its reputation for having all the answers—was surprisingly vague on the subject of spontaneous jiving epidemics.

The dancing lasted for hours.

Two hundred years later and a few hundred miles away, another incident: a large group of children started to unwillingly dance, boogying out of town and 12 miles down the road, almost certainly starting the Pied Piper myth in the process.

Half a century on, a group of around 200 uncontrollable dancers were so vigorous they caused a bridge to collapse. In 1518, more than 400 people spontaneously gyrated for several days, and didn’t even stop when 15 of them danced themselves to death.

You might write this off as medieval folklore. But outbreaks of mass psychogenic illness—collective, compulsive behaviour with no physical cause—have a long and well-documented history.

In the 1960s, ambulances rushed to a school in Blackburn after dozens of girls began compulsively moaning, and then 85 of them fainted. Medics found nothing physically wrong with them. In 1970s Singapore, a group of factory workers began screaming and couldn’t stop for a week—despite the best efforts of paramedics and tranquilizers.

I mention this only in the hope that researchers might turn their attention to Clacton-on-Sea, where in 2024 a large group of people compulsively, inexplicably, and harmfully elected Nigel Farage.