Farage sips tea and talks contradictions in the Last Chance saloon
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Version 0 of 1. Nigel Farage has spent a lot of time in saloons over the years. And while on the last day of campaigning he steered clear of a bar, preferring to pose with a cup of tea at the Ship-Shape cafe in Ramsgate, it might as well have been a saloon named the Last Chance. The polls in South Thanet are locked in a two-way tie between Ukip and the Conservatives and Nigel has made it clear that if he loses the fight to become an MP he will have to step down as party leader. Whether he or Ukip can survive without each other is a more delicate unknown. For a man under so much stress, Nigel looks like ... a man under stress. He doesn’t appear quite as ropey as he did earlier in the campaign, but the blokey ‘People’s Army’ perma-smile still seems forced. Although he insists his party’s vote will hold up better than the polls suggest, Ukip have been more of a side-show than he had expected. Nigel doesn’t thrive without a camera and an audience. As his Land Rover Discovery pulls up outside his Ukip office in Ramsgate, Farage struggles under the weight of dozens of copies of the Daily Express, whose owner – and Ukip’s second-largest donor – has generously allowed him to write the paper’s front page. “It’s not just our office,” says a Ukip worker. “It’s also our call centre.” I’ve heard it has seven or eight phone lines. “Really,” I reply. “How many people do you have answering calls.” “A lot. It depends.” “Between what and what.” “Quite a few.” Nigel is also unusually keen to manage expectations, talking up the number of council seats his party is going to win rather than the ones up for grabs in Westminster. “The electoral system needs to be reformed,” he says. Steady, Nige. Don’t you know we’re British? That sounds almost European. Once the walkabout proper gets under way, Nige begins to perk up a bit. There is an audience. True, it’s mainly the media, but several well-wishers stop for selfies and autographs, and even a Stop Ukip campaigner with a whippet is made welcome. With Nige, it’s always been about the numbers. He drops in to say hello to staff working in a shop selling air-rifles and large knives. It’s hard to work out whether this is a pre-planned PR coup – “Arm yourselves, everyone. The foreigners are almost at the beach” – or a PR disaster. Then almost everything about Nigel is harder to decode than you imagine. Tricky questions are always batted back with a gag, making it harder to distinguish between spin and reality. It could even be both. “There are two criteria I apply to any politician,” he says. “Would I employ them and would I drink with them?” It’s a benchmark very few MPs in Westminster would pass – not least Douglas Carswell, Mark Reckless and Tim Aker, the only other Ukip candidates who, along with Farage, have a reasonable chance of winning on Thursday. So if Farage were to lose, the next Ukip leader would have to be someone he didn’t particularly rate. These kinds of contradictions sit so easily with Farage, it’s not always clear he’s aware they even exist. Take BingoGate. On Tuesday he had been scheduled to be guest caller at the 4pm session at the Broadstairs Mecca Bingo. This was then postponed at the last minute to 6pm. Shortly before his scheduled arrival, he cancelled. “This is a serious election,” he said, “and bingo is a bit trivial.” Only the bingo is now apparently back on for 7pm this evening. From trivial to serious and back to trivial within a heartbeat and no one any the wiser. Not even if he decided to once again revert to serious Nige and cancel for a third time, which he did later that evening, leaving dozens of journalists disappointed outside. The bingo players didn’t seem quite so bothered. To them, bingo isn’t such a trivial matter. “Jolly good chaps,” he said at the end of the walkabout. In Nige speak, women are also chaps. “I’ve got things to do now. Thanks for coming along. And if you believe any of it then you’re silly.” |