the British have the perfect tradition to mark wow deeply stupid our election is.

Over here in the U.K., we like to throw milkshakes at politicians. It is just something that we like to do. Some have tried take “milkshaking” stateside: It looked for a minute in June 2019 like Republican congressman Matt Gaetz got one in the face leaving a town hall in Florida, but the beverage in question turned out not to be a milkshake but some kind of fruit juice. But for now, it seems like this noble tradition belongs firmly to the Brits. And a particularly photogenic incident of milkshaking took place Tuesday, against the former U.K. Independence Party leader and Brexit agitator Nigel Farage.

A milkshaking has seemed likely since the general election here was called a few weeks ago. There is a feeling in the U.K. when a general election gets announced that things are about to get stupid very quickly. And they have. There was the way the election got called in the first place. Having promised mere weeks earlier that there would not be an election this summer, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced it for July in a suit getting wetter and wetter in torrential rain outside No. 10, as someone blared out the Labour 1997 campaign theme “Things Can Only Get Better” from a speaker, drowning him out figuratively as well as literally. Then, practically the first thing Sunak announced as part of his reelection campaign was the return of a year’s mandatory military service for young people, with no evidence at all that anybody had thought about how that might work in practice. Not to be outdone, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, was photographed falling off a paddleboard multiple times in a row on a campaign visit to Lake Windermere to highlight his party’s plan to deal with Britain’s sewage crisis. Much more to come, no doubt. We only have to put up with campaign nonsense for six weeks over here, whereas it seems like in the U.S. this stuff drags on month after month after month. You have our sympathies.

But back to the milkshake. Tuesday’s incident, which saw Farage doused in a McDonald’s banana milkshake during his election campaign launch by a 25-year-old woman outside a branch of Wetherspoons (read: shit but beloved because cheap) pub in Essex, is not Farage’s first rodeo. He was a recipient of one of the first dairy dousings back in 2019 that sparked this trend. It initially kicked off with Tommy Robinson, a far-right “activist” who got into an altercation with a member of the public when he was campaigning to become a member of the European Parliament. The member of the public in question just happened to be holding a milkshake and decided to throw it over Robinson in the heat of the moment. A nation’s imagination was caught by one simple idea: Let’s throw milkshakes at the far right. Later that same year, Farage got one, and a UKIP candidate called Carl Benjamin was milkshaked no fewer than four times while campaigning in the West Country.

But this latest milkshaking is a particularly beautiful instance of the visual potency of the practice: the Hokusai wave of the shake itself arcing toward Farage’s face, the beverage lid soaring free in the air. The perfectly turned-out eyelash and hair extensions of the woman who threw it. The fact that she then told the BBC that she didn’t intentionally go down to Farage’s campaign launch to throw her milkshake at him; she “just felt like it” when she got there.

Milkshaking during a U.K. election is now considered inevitable but so too is the round of discourse prompted by it. “That milkshake could have been acid,” Robinson said when he received the inaugural drenching back in 2019. Sure, it could have been. But in the immortal (to Brits) words of television chef Gino D’Acampo when asked to consider whether a pasta dish could be described as “British carbonara” (I know you’ve never heard of this incident; I am obliquely begging you to look it up on YouTube): “If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike.” Carbonara isn’t British, and Tommy Robinson wasn’t attacked with acid. It was a milkshake. There are always going to be people who see a neofascist getting milkshaked and cry, “Won’t somebody please think of the racists?!” as part of a generalized plea against political violence. I would argue that it is not violence, because it’s a milkshake.

Is it assault to throw a milkshake at someone? Legally, yes. The woman from Tuesday has been arrested. But as protest goes (and precious little protest is legally allowed in the U.K. these days anyway), it seems both powerful and ultimately…