So it’s goodbye from Newt, eventually…

So farewell, then, Newt Gingrich: we knew you well. He’s expected to quit the race for the Republican nomination next week, although the exact timing remains hazy. He has, according to the latest reports, “spoken to Mitt”, but there’s probably a bunch of paperwork to complete, or whatever. All this might come as a surprise to those who thought the former House speaker dropped out ages ago, after he stopped winning any delegates or raising any money.

But no! It takes more than a few massive electoral defeats and a complete deficit of funds to stop Newt, or rather it did, until now. He had been campaigning hard in the tiny state of Delaware, pinning his final hopes on its doughty band of voters. Sadly for him, he couldn’t stave off a landslide win by Mitt Romney. As his adviser Bob Walker put it: “I don’t think we can lose by 30 points in Delaware and feel good about it.” Ouch.

Living in the real world

As for Gingrich himself, it was hard to miss the disappointment in his voice as he admitted “I think you have to, at some point, be honest with what’s happening in the real world, as opposed to what you’d like to have happened.” At some point! In one sentence, that nixed the very mantra of the Gingrich campaign, which has shown a daring disregard for the real world, and an awful lot of chutzpah about they wanted it to be.

So farewell, then, Newt’s vow to carry on until the convention: farewell too, his undiminished capacity to believe himself still a major player. Although he only managed to win two out of the 36 states which have voted so far, and one of those was his home state of Georgia, he managed to overcome a succession of killer political blows which would have felled many a lesser man.

Yes, Newt may have been brash, uncompromising, and certainly unconventional, but he did at least provide some of the more memorable moments of the Republican primary campaign.

Memorable moments

Like the television interview with his second wife, Marianne, days before the crucial South Carolina primary, when she revealed that Newt had asked her for an open marriage. And, she claimed that 48 hours after he had asked her for a divorce so that he could marry his mistress, he delivered a speech on family values.

In June of last year, his entire staff walked out en masse, citing his decision to take wife number three, Callista, on a Greek cruise, at a time when he should have been channelling all of his efforts into his fledgling political campaign. His soon-to-be-ex spokesman commented drily: “The two week vacation was not helpful”.

Then there was the small matter of that $250,000 credit line at the high-end jewellery store, Tiffany’s, at a time when most of America was struggling to tighten its collective belt. Claims of a second line of credit, possibly as high as a million bucks, emerged. Newt, on CBS, was unrepentant. “Go talk to Tiffany’s”, he told Face the Nation. “All I’m telling you is we are very frugal. We, in fact, live within our budget. We owe nothing.”

Headline writers were further thrilled when the irrepressible Newt proposed setting up a permanant colony on the Moon, while courting Florida’s primary voters along the state’s Space Coast. “I accept the charge that I am grandiose”, he declared.

In other pronouncements, he dismissed child labour laws out of hand, suggesting students should take part-time work as janitors. He suggested the right to bear arms should be a universal human right, and described Romney as “fundamentally dishonest.”

Winning whose future?

The fact that he lasted this far into the race was entirely down to the casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his family, who inexplicably funded the Winning Our Future group which backed the Gingrich campaign, to the tune of $21.5 million. Their cheques have recently stopped arriving. Presumably Winning Our Future is now considering its future.

Apart from today’s flurry, Newt was last in the headlines earlier this month, when he was bitten by a penguin in St Louis Zoo. As we said, he will be sorely missed. Not by Mitt Romney, perhaps, who is free to give up any pretence of pandering to the right, now that Newt and Rick Santorum are out of the picture.

As for Newt himself, self-belief and a vast ego were simply not enough to propel him into high office: as Carter Eskew, the former strategist for Al Gore’s White House bid, put it: “He lacked any contingency plan for success.” The Republican hierarchy might be breathing a sigh of relief that they can finally unite around their chosen nominee: but the US presidential race just got that bit less entertaining.

Felicity Spector writes about US politics for Channel 4 News