LEAVE/Remain, Yes/No, Larry the cat/Dilyn the dog. It would not be British politics without a binary choice. On yesterday's politics shows the divide was between the grumpy mob and the demob happy.

In the furrowed brow camp, according to some of the Sunday papers, was the entire Cabinet, reportedly irritated that the EU was not going to give the UK a loose, Canada-style trade deal and would instead be insisting on regulatory alignment.

Nigel Farage, reviewing the papers on The Andrew Marr Show, also counts being a “rule taker” as a red line. You could normally rely on him becoming very animated on the subject, but this was a new, post-Brexit Nigel on display.

Calm, chipper, strolling on the sunny side of the street, he did not look like a man who had just lost his job and was, with Brexit now done, surplus to requirements.

That was certainly not how Mr Farage saw it. When the Brexit Party’s MEPs left Brussels last week they were facing uncertain futures. Some would be heading straight for their local JobCentre Plus office. Not so Mr Farage. Nigel, it turns out, has been busy making plans for Nigel.

He was pleased to hear the Prime Minister was taking a hardline stance ahead of a speech on trade today. 

“He’s saying all the right things, he’s being consistent with the manifesto upon which he was elected.”

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Recollecting his last day in the European Parliament, when the chair muted his microphone because the Brexit Party MEPs would not stop waving Union Jacks, Mr Farage said he sensed the balance of power had shifted.

“For the first time since the vote in 2016 they’re a little bit more frightened of us than we are of them.” What the EU feared most was a competitor on its doorstep, he added. “That terrifies them.”

Mr Farage’s last intervention in UK politics was to stand down his Brexit Party candidates at the General Election, leaving the way clear for the Conservatives. Now that the UK was out, did the Brexit Party still exist, Marr wondered.

Oh yes, said Mr Farage. He had been fooled before into thinking his services were no longer needed.

“In 2016 after the referendum I was so thrilled that we’d won, I had been doing it for so many years, I actually believed Theresa May when she said Brexit means Brexit, very stupidly of me. I think I gave the impression that I rather walked away. I’m not going to walk away this time. The Brexit Party will still be there. It will be more an insurance policy in case things go wrong.”

A new think tank is to be set up, called Brexit Watch, and in the next 11 months the party would “praise the Government to the high heavens when they are getting it right but ring the alarm bell if they are not”.

Also in the Farage diary is a trip to the US. In the giddy days after the EU referendum there was talk of Mr Farage becoming the British ambassador to the US. President Trump loved the idea, tweeting that he would do “a great job”. It did not happen then and it is not going to happen now. What he is going to do in the US was unclear, with Marr saying only that the former City trader would be “sitting alongside” Mr Trump, which conjured up visions of a ventriloquist act.

Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, did his usual trick of giving an alfresco interview to Ridge on Sunday en route to Marr. He backed his boss on not aligning with EU rules, or as he put it: “Legislative alignment – it just ain’t happening”. Sounds like a slogan for the side of a bus.

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Mr Raab had positioned himself in the grumpy camp earlier by telling UK representatives not to be pally with their former EU chums if they met at international talks. They should “sit separately”, he said.

Leo Varadkar, the Taoiseach, called this “petty” and said it sounded like the sort of thing that happened at school. Otherwise, Mr Varadkar was strangely upbeat for a man whose party is in the middle of an election and behind in the polls.

First prize for being a sunbeam went not to Mr Farage or Mr Varadkar but to Marr’s main guest, Donald Tusk.

The now former president of the European Council can be relied upon to say something newsworthy. It was Mr Tusk, you will recall, who said there would be a “special place in hell” for those who promoted Brexit but had no idea how to do it safely.

At the end of last week the SNP asked the EU to “leave a light on” for an independent Scotland to return. Mr Tusk duly appointed himself lamplighter in chief, and an honorary Scot to boot. “I’m very Scottish now,” he said, gesturing to his heart. “Especially after Brexit.”

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The Foreign Secretary took a frosty view of this warm welcome, calling it “frankly rather un-European and rather irresponsible given the secessionist separatist tendencies in Spain, France and Italy”.

A Conservative minister scolding the former president of the European Council for being un-European. Now that does raise a smile.