Nigel Farage’s astonishing diplomatic logic would helicopter Abu Hamza into the UK embassy in Iran

Is there any limit at all to the self-sacrifice Nigel Farage is willing to make for the country he loves?

For 20 years, this great patriot has borne the excruciation of working in the one place on Earth he hates above all others. With humbling stoicism, he has endured the horrors of what we’ll generously call his “working life” in Brussels. He has soaked up the gross indignity of accepting the generous salary and expenses of an MEP without a word of complaint.

Finally, after two decades of cruel and unusual punishment, an escape route from hell presents itself. It isn’t a sure thing, and the snowflakes would melt in outrage if it happened. But a job vacancy appears to be imminent in the place he loves the most – and by no standards, least of all his own, is there is a better qualified candidate to fill it.

It is a sign of Farage’s trademark self-effacement that he is, for now, resisting the popular clamour. Anyone in their right mind, and Donald Trump, would be thrilled if he consented to replace Sir Kim Darroch as Her Majesty’s ambassador to the United States. And yet he is demurring.

No surprise there. One shared and defining quality of all natural-born diplomats is a powerful aversion to bigging themselves up. They prefer to keep their innermost thoughts to themselves, pending a judicious leak of private correspondence to hostile newspapers.

So nothing establishes Farage’s aptitude for the job like his claims that he isn’t right for it and doesn’t want it. He cannot possibly mean the former. Trump himself tweeted two years ago that, as ambassador, “he would do a great job!”. Farage, as we know, never disagrees with Trump about anything.

As for not wanting it, that may need seasoning with the contents of Siberia’s third largest salt mine. On an estimated 147 occasions, Farage insisted the last thing he wanted was to be leader of Ukip. Approximately 143 times, he permitted himself to be press-ganged in the cause of the greater good.

And now we must ask him to do so again, to make yet another sacrifice. If Darroch is the wrong person for the Washington job because “he is totally opposed to the Trump doctrine”, as Farrage elegantly put it, who could be more right than him?

Buried deep beneath that quote may, admittedly, be a minuscule logical flaw. Brexit Party MEP Ann Widdecombe discounts her leader becoming our man in Washington on the encouraging grounds that he’ll be otherwise engaged as our prime minister. If she’s being realistic about that (and I must say, she does seem tremendously sane), you can foresee some practical challenges for the Farage administration when it comes to making diplomatic appointments.

If embracing the host regime’s political world view becomes an ambassadorial prerequisite, who would he send to represent his government in Damascus? Or Pyongyang? Or even, should we retain diplomatic relations with the EU, in Brussels?

Other major appointments look less tricky. The natural choice for Tehran is currently serving life in a US penitentiary after being convicted of 11 terrorism offences. But Trump would surely do Farage a solid, and pardon His Excellency Abu Hamza on request.

Given the US penchant for denying access to convicted criminals, an equally obvious pick might also require presidential dispensation. But if Tommy Robinson goes down in his trial this week, an executive order ought to clear his path to the Washington posting.

It may not come to that. Interviewed by Alex Jones, the voice of common sense on InfoWars, Robinson has appealed directly to the president for asylum. Days away from possibly receiving what with clinical legal accuracy he calls “a sentence of death”, he begs the prez for sanctuary. “I need evacuation from this country because dark forces are at work.”

Robinson is partially correct on both counts. He does need evacuation, albeit of the manual variety that generally involves a latex glove. And there are dark forces at work here, if not necessarily the ones he has in mind.

Those like Widdecombe, who foresee Farage’s arrival in No 10 as the light at the end of the tunnel, could be disappointed. In prime ministerial terms, Boris Johnson is likely to represent the high water mark for this generation of satirists.

On that basis, Farage would be wise to downgrade his ambitions, and settle for the job to which his talents so exquisitely suit him.

For far too long, the establishment – the dark force the Dulwich College-educated former commodity broker intends to smash to smithereens – has wickedly distorted the true nature of the ambassador’s duty.

To the snooty likes of the council-house-reared Darroch and his smugly privileged ilk, the purpose of the diplomat is to represent the interests of his or her country.

With his brilliantly incisive critique of the incumbent for failing to do Donald J Gump’s bidding, Farage presents his diplomatic credentials, and compelling they are too.

Could anything more perfectly celebrate reclaiming our national independence, the thing for which he has fought valiantly in Brussels over 20 hellish years, than a British ambassador to Washington who serves entirely at the pleasure of the president?