A huge queue snakes around Bolton Wanderers football club, but this is no regular Saturday. These supporters are here for a political rally. It is mid-September 2018, and Leave Means Leave has just started a tour of Brexit Britain. This cross-party pressure group was formed in 2016 to ensure a “clean Brexit” – in other words, a hard one. Now, with Brexit looking anything but clean, it has decided to step things up. Half a dozen rallies have been announced, and the organisers promise this is only the start.

Outside the ground, people stand next to an open-topped Leave Means Leave battle bus to take selfies. Its colour scheme echoes that of the European Union flag, but with an extra fizz – blue and orange, instead of blue and yellow. The rally is sold out and takes place in a conference centre adjoining the stadium. It is packed with more than a thousand people, most of them middle-aged and elderly. On every seat, there is a little welcome pack for those who have paid their £5.98 to attend: a Stop The Brexit Betrayal banner, a Believe In Britain pen, a union jack flag.

Nigel Farage walks in and it feels as if the sea has parted. He holds his hands aloft as the faithful roar him on, a messiah without portfolio

Leave Means Leave’s chairman, John Longworth, is the former director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, while its founder and vice chair, Richard Tice, is CEO of the asset management group Quidnet Capital. They make for impressive frontmen – Longworth with his record in business, Tice with his Dr Kildare good looks. Longworth tells the audience that, wherever he has worked, he has had a direct link to Brussels. “I knew more than most people how the European Union worked. I knew what they were up to, and that’s why I voted to leave.”

But nobody is here to listen to him. “Ladies and gentlemen, the next person needs little introduction,” Tice begins. “He is one of the original Brexiteers. He has slowly but surely changed the course of British political history, and he, without question, will go down as one of the most significant political figures in the last 50 or 60 years… He has survived plane crashes that would have killed most people because he is a true patriot, ladies and gentlemen!”

Nigel Farage walks down the centre of the room and it feels as if the sea has parted. He holds his hands aloft as the faithful roar him on, a messiah without portfolio. While he has never been an MP, it is hard to argue with Tice’s proposition that he is one of Britain’s most influential politicians. At a time when rightwing politics are sweeping the world, Farage is the closest thing we have to a Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán or Jair Bolsonaro – a populist insurgent. In 2016, while the mainstream parties encouraged the British public to remain in Europe, he mobilised 17.4 million people to vote leave. Now, after two years away, Farage has returned to the frontline – and he is furious that the “political class” is trying to thwart the will of the people. If he is denied the Brexit he spent a quarter of a century battling for, where will he take the fight next?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Supporters at the Westminster rally. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

When he speaks, Farage makes it clear that his is a reluctant return. He could be making squillions in the City, or breaking bread with Trump, rather than addressing the Brexiters of Bolton. “I didn’t think we’d have to do this again,” he tells the crowd. “I thought we’d won on June 23 2016, in what was the greatest democratic exercise in the history of this nation. We voted to leave, and I thought our politicians would deliver. Well, they haven’t. So you know what, we’re back and we’ll fight them again!”

Two days before the rally, Donald Tusk, president of the European council, posted a photograph on Instagram of himself offering Theresa May a selection of cakes, accompanied by the caption: “A piece of cake, perhaps? Sorry, no cherries.” It was a reference to an earlier speech he had given, arguing that the prime minister could not cherrypick areas of the single market as Britain leaves the EU. Farage is apoplectic about this slight, which he sees as typical of the arrogance of the EU. His message is simple: no Eurocrat has the right to ridicule a British prime minister, however inept.

The EU, Farage states, is supremacist. Why should somebody from Europe have more right to live here than somebody from Africa or Asia?

He takes us back to the greatest day of his life. “Let’s remind ourselves what actually happened on June 23 2016, what happened despite the big political parties, despite the big companies, despite the big banks, despite big global politics, including of course President Obama coming to our country” – “Boooo!” shout the crowd – “to tell us what we should do. Despite the threats of disaster. Do you remember? From George Osborne there was going to be an emergency budget… They almost told us that if we dared to vote leave, a plague of black locusts would descend on our land. And despite all those threats, we voted to leave. We voted, folks, for independence.”

He says it is now up to Leave Means Leave supporters to ensure that Brexit is not betrayed. “The vast majority of our politicians want to dilute it, suspend it, overturn it. And one or two former senior politicians like Tony Blair” – “Boooo!” “Lock him up!” – “do not want to give us Brexit.”

Farage foments the crowd with consummate skill. As he reaches a climax, every word becomes a sentence. “With Mrs May’s Chequers plan, the very best we would get is Brexit. In. Name. Only. And. That. Is. Not. Good. Enough. Is it?” It may be pantomime, but his anger is visceral. The language is clever and deliberate. Like his friend Trump, Farage is careful to distance himself from the political class. He might still be a member of the European parliament, but he is not One of Them. He is here to fight for the Everyman and the Everywoman, struggling to make themselves heard in a world dominated by globalisation and liberal elites.

Play Video 8:51 How Ukip normalised far-right politics – video explainer

In June 2016, Farage was less subtle. He posed in front of that notorious Ukip poster with the slogan Breaking Point: The EU Has Failed Us All, showing hundreds of refugees, most of them non-white, crossing the Croatia-Slovenia border in 2015. The poster was reported to police for inciting racial hatred, and even Farage’s fellow Brexiter Michael Gove said it made him “shudder”.

Since then, Farage’s frame of reference has become more coded. Blair, Obama, the BBC, London: he doesn’t need to say much more than this to generate a boo from his followers – just the name, the institution, the city is enough. It’s dog-whistle politics on a new level, although the crowd occasionally give him away: at a mention of London, an audience member heckles, “They’re all foreigners in London!”

Now 54, Farage is in many ways a throwback to a Britannia that ruled the waves, when men and women were addressed as ladies and gentlemen, and prejudices were hidden behind tight smiles. There is a nihilistic sentimentality to his politics; his Britain is one where we still happily smoke our way to cancer and drink ourselves silly before lunch – because no bloody bureaucrat, least of all a European, is going to tell us what’s good for us. But beneath the patriot-next-door persona, Farage has changed in many ways – in his language, his alliances, his status across the world. As Ukip has become increasingly irrelevant (membership was down from 39,000 in July 2016 to 23,600 in August 2018), Farage’s global influence has grown.

His friendships now cross continents, but they tend to be with white, male, rightwing populists: Trump, Steve Bannon or Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán. Last April, Farage tweeted his support for Orbán, who has been accused of Islamophobia and antisemitism, calling him “the strongest leader in Europe and the EU’s biggest nightmare”. The pair share an antipathy towards the Jewish Hungarian investor and philanthropist George Soros, who has given away much of his vast fortune through the Open Society foundation, “to build vibrant and tolerant democracies”. In June, Farage told Fox News: “Soros is actively encouraging people to come across the Mediterranean, to flood Europe… Thank goodness Viktor Orbán and Hungary have got the confidence to stand up against him… If you criticise Soros, his media friends accuse you of being an antisemite. It is quite extraordinary. I really feel that Soros in many ways is the biggest danger to the entire western world.”

Today’s rally in Bolton is coming to an end, and Tice asks everybody to wave their flags and placards, and to make as big a noise as possible. “Stand up and let the world see that we believe in Britain, and we want to stop the Brexit betrayal!” The room cheers as one.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Those who have paid £5.98 to attend get a Stop The Brexit Betrayal banner, a Believe In Britain pen and a union jack. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

“God bless Great Britain!” shouts a voice from the back of the hall.

I start to feel self-conscious. “Aren’t you going to wave your flag?” says the man next to me.

On the way out, I meet a woman dressed in floral pinks and purples. Joan Johnson was chair of Bolton Ukip, until she defected back to the Tories after Britain voted to leave; like many Ukip members, she felt the party had served its purpose. But she’s still a Farage fan. Is he Britain’s greatest populist politician? “Yes, I think he is.” What does it mean to be a great populist? “It means he’s a good leader. He’s very outspoken, and he tells the truth. He is popular and he is populist, in that he’s a leader of the people.”

“He’s not a typical politician,” adds Diane Parkinson, Johnson’s friend and another former Ukip activist. “There’s no diplomacy, no sitting on the fence. He’s an outcast.” Farage has this in common with other successful populists – an ability to portray himself as the outsider: little David with a fag in one hand and a pint of bitter in the other, kicking out at the all-powerful Goliath.

Bolton is an ethnically diverse city; in 2011, 20% of its population did not identify as white British. Yet everybody here today appears to be white. “Yes, I noticed that,” Johnson says, before adding that there is no tension between the city’s white and Asian populations. She does not believe relationships between Bolton’s Asian and European migrants are as harmonious. “A lot of the Indians and Pakistanis have their own businesses and they work hard at it. But then you’ve got your people from eastern Europe coming in, perhaps also wanting to set up businesses, and there are fights.”

“Too many cultures,” Parkinson says. “The eastern Europeans saw an opportunity to come over. I’d do the same. It’s all about survival. They’re taking low-paid jobs, but the British people don’t want those low-paid jobs because they’ve got the benefits system to fall back on.”

On the bus back to Manchester, I meet Alexa Michael, a Conservative councillor for Beckenham in London. “Nigel says what a lot of ordinary people are thinking but are too frightened to say,” she tells me. “He’s got the common touch, even though he’s got quite a posh background. It’s no surprise that people in Bolton, the old mill towns, what you might call working-class areas, were more inclined to vote leave than some of the more prosperous areas.”

And yet the Bolton audience more closely resembled her – smartly dressed, very middle class – not the working-class voters we are often told Farage appeals to.

***

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

It’s a week later, and the battlebus has moved on to Birmingham’s National Conference Centre. Again the event is sold out and the 1,000-strong crowd is every bit as white and grey as Bolton’s. A dozen miles away, the Conservative party is holding its annual conference. “I want you to make a big noise today,” Longworth tells the audience, “not least because we want those people down the road to hear you.”

Tice takes over, to drum home the purpose of the meeting. “We know why we’re here, don’t we? We want to send a very simple message that they should just Chuck Chequers.” Chuck Chequers; No Deal? No Problem; Leave Means Leave: the leavers have both the simplest arguments and the strongest soundbites.

He makes a joke about the battlebus. “We had such fun deciding how big a number we were going to put on the bus.” This is a reference to the £350m Boris Johnson emblazoned on his Vote Leave bus, the sum we were meant to be saving on EU membership and spending on the NHS every week (he had not accounted for rebates, grants and subsidies). “I was all for putting ‘Save £39bn’!” Tice says. He pauses to let the audience laugh. “Unbelievably, I was outvoted – but I believe in democracy.” Thirty nine billion pounds is now the anticipated Brexit divorce bill.

Conservative MP Peter Bone takes to the stage. He talks of the horror of being at the mercy of Europe. “We didn’t fight world wars…”

“No more German cars!” shouts a member of the audience.

“… to be subservient,” Bone continues. “We want to make our own laws in our own countries... The thing that annoyed people enormously was, when we make laws they’re not judged by our own judges, they’re not decided in our supreme court – they’re decided somewhere in Europe by a bunch of judges, half of whom are not qualified anyway.”

“No, they aren’t,” cries a woman at the back.

This might be Margaret Atwood’s Gilead; you would fear for the safety of those European judges were they here today.

Bone does a decent job of whipping up the anger, but he knows he’s only the warm-up act. “I think there’s someone else,” he says.

“Mr Brexit!” calls a voice in the crowd.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘May is too weak to negotiate with the European commission,’ says Farage. ‘I’d rather we sent someone like Trump.’ Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

“Nigel Farage! Mr Brexit, as somebody says at the front.” Bone gets his biggest cheer, and Tice takes over for the already familiar introduction. “The vilification, abuse, threats to his family, what he’s put up with is unbelievable. His courage manifested when he was unfortunately in a very serious plane crash on one election day. It would have killed many people. Bless him: he dragged himself out, wiped away the odd bit of blood, dusted himself down and promptly lit a cigarette. He is a true patriot. He is possibly the original Brexiter.”

Again the sea splits for Farage, and again he looks more spiv than saviour. There is a touch of Private Walker, the black-market wheeler-dealer in Dad’s Army, whose absence from the regular armed forces was explained by a corned-beef allergy. “Good afternoon, Birmingham,” he begins. “I’ve given the best part of my adult life, battling, fighting, campaigning for one thing – that we, the British people, should be masters of our own destiny, running our own lives, in control of our own country. And. That. Referendum. On. June. 23rd. When. We. Won. That. Vote. Was. The. Happiest. Day. Of. My Life.”

Farage has an advantage over many politicians in knowing how to make his audience laugh. “We were told by the party leaders that whatever we decided they would abide by,” he says. “Indeed, do you remember Mr Cameron?”

“Boooo!” comes the catcall.

“That’s surprising, because most of the country has forgotten about him!” There is laughter across the room.

“Mr Cameron spent £9m of taxpayers’ money putting that outrageous leaflet through every door in the land.”

“Shame! Shame!” Cameron is heckled in absentia.

“How I enjoyed posting mine back through the letterbox of No 10,” Farage continues, “with a few suitable annotations, but not ones I am going to share with you on a public platform.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Then he’s back on the attack. “Now we are told that we didn’t understand what we were voting for. You. Are. All. Thick. And. Pig. Ignorant. They even have the effrontery to tell us that people were lied to – despite the fact that the greatest lie of all was told back in the 1970s, when my parents’ generation were told they were joining nothing more than a common market which was about friendship and free trade. Even if Boris’s figures on the side of a bus were a bit on the high side, it is nothing to the half a century of lies we have been told by the establishment.”

Farage’s argument here is straightforward. The referendum was nothing to do with the terms of leaving, and nobody thought it was; we were simply asked whether we wanted in or out. He even attempts to claim the moral high ground when it comes to the migration argument. The EU, he states, is supremacist. Why should somebody from Europe have more right to live in our country than, say, somebody from Africa or Asia? It’s the only line that is not met with a resounding cheer.

But by the time he is done, calling on the audience to stop the Brexit betrayal, they are chanting for more. Lynne, a friendly, middle-aged woman who has been sharing her Polos with me, is on her feet. I ask her why she feels so strongly. She talks about the need for sovereignty, to be able to make our own laws and reclaim our pride. Is it anything to do with immigration? “No,” she says. “Not really.” She pauses. “But Birmingham isn’t as clean as it used to be. Is it? They leave their furniture in the street.” Who – the Europeans? “No, the Muslims. There are areas that are predominantly Muslim. I’m not racist. They’re not to blame. But they don’t love our country like we do. They put mattresses in the street. They all drive nice cars, mind – Mercs and BMWs. And then they’ve got their rubbish piled up.” She offers me another Polo.

I look for Farage, but the man of the people has done a disappearing act. The last time we met, in 2009, he took me to his local pub for breakfast (three pints of Landlord), told me his political hero was Enoch Powell, and talked with pride of his German wife Kirsten and his love of a good lapdance club. But the more renowned this populist becomes, the less accessible he is; Farage declined to be interviewed for this article.

Meanwhile, the less starry members of Leave Means Leave are happy to talk. I ask Peter Bone what populism means to him. “Doesn’t populist mean what most people want?” he says.

Longworth comes up with a similar definition. “It’s to do with being popular among people, so if populism means we’re actually supporting people’s democratic rights, I’m all for it.”

The language is tough and militaristic, and Farage’s delivery chilling: ‘Meet your MPs face to face. Make them feel the heat'

As the audience leave, I scan the hall for somebody who looks a bit younger, and spot Jared Day. He is in his 20s, and a wheelchair-user. Day is a smart, engaging man who voted remain but has since become a leaver. Why? “The EU’s lack of respect. I thought the photo that Donald Tusk posted was very distasteful.”

Unlike many politicians, Day has no problem explaining why populism means much more than being popular. “Populism is more about nationalist lines, the nation state. When you hear about populist governments, they tend to be more internal-looking, almost isolationist.”

Contemporary populism is by its nature oppositional. In his 2016 book The Populist Explosion, a study of how the great recession shaped US and European politics, author John B Judis distinguishes between left- and rightwing populism as follows: “Leftwing populists champion the people against an elite or an establishment. Theirs is a vertical politics of the bottom and middle, arrayed against the top. Rightwing populists champion the people against an elite that they accuse of favouring a third group, which can consist, for instance, of immigrants, Islamists, or African-American militants. Rightwing populism is triadic: it looks upward, but also down upon an out group.” This feels very much the Leave Means Leave approach.

On my way out, I catch two pairs of sisters chatting. Like Day, their youth makes them stand out. Jill and her sister, who does not give her name, are wearing Brexit sweatshirts, while two identical twins, who also won’t give their names, are formally dressed in skirts and jackets; they could be extras for a film about the suffragette movement.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Attendees show their support in London. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Jill is a chemistry teacher from Sheffield who says she wants Brexit for her pupils. She believes there will be more money for them when we leave, and they will have a better chance of getting decent jobs. One of the twins also teaches, and is looking forward to a brighter future. All four women tell me they despise the mainstream media, particularly the Guardian, because it is a purveyor of fake news. What they dislike most is the notion that they must be ignorant or bigoted to have voted leave. The twins take up Farage’s theme, finishing each other’s sentences.

“They demonise us…”

“… And make out we’re really stupid…”

“… That we don’t know what we voted for…”

“And I think that’s disgusting.”

Jill, who is wearing union jack trainers, says: “Demonise is the exact word. I so object to that. I’m not far right or racist. And that, I’m afraid, is the media.”

The women talk about wages being undercut by EU workers, how hard the trade unions have fought for the minimum wage, the need for controlled migration and to look after our own.

As for the notion that British people don’t want many of the jobs the Europeans do, Jill is not having any of it. “Absolute rubbish,” she says. “That’s like saying the kids I teach are lazy. They’re not. They want a job and can’t get one, because it’s been taken by somebody from the European Union.”

All four women sing from the same hymn sheet, despite coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum. “The main thing that got me into politics was the magnificent patriot Nigel Farage,” Jill says. The twins are Corbynistas, dismayed that the Labour leader has suppressed his anti-Europe instincts.

The conversation leaves my head spinning; in some ways, left and right seem an irrelevance in Brexit Britain. Perhaps that’s why some Labour MPs have been happy to align themselves with Leave Means Leave. Yet look more closely and you realise that the group is not as cross-party as it would have us believe. All six members of its advisory board are white, male Conservatives. Of the 25 MPs it names as supporters on its website, 24 are Conservatives or members of the DUP. The one exception is the independent MP Kelvin Hopkins, who was suspended from the Labour party in 2017 after it was alleged he sexually harassed a local activist. (He has denied the claims.) Of the 44 prominent members pictured on Leave Means Leave’s website, all are white and 43 are men; Andrea Jenkyns, the Conservative who succeeded Ed Balls as MP for Morley and Outwood, is the only woman.

***

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Balloons in Bournemouth – every rally is sold out. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

It’s a Tuesday night in October and we’re in Bournemouth, which voted to leave Europe by a margin of 9%. Like the other events, tonight’s rally is sold out. Before the speakers start, the audience is shown a film about how intransigent the EU has been in negotiating Brexit. The narrator asks: “When we asked for cooperation on security, the boys in Brussels said Non! When Mrs May offered flexibility on Labour mobility, the boys in Brussels said Non! Mrs May even offered them more of our money, and this time the boys in Brussels said they wanted more! The UK has consistently offered the boys in Brussels huge concessions yet it is never enough for these unaccountable Eurocrats who, let’s remember, spend an awful lot of their time… drunk.”

On the screen, a cartoon inebriated Eurocrat topples over, and the crowd cheer. Alcohol is a recurring theme tonight. JD Wetherspoon boss Tim Martin was due to make an appearance, but he has gone down with a tummy bug, so we are played a video of him addressing a rally in Torquay the previous week instead.

“Lord Bamford, Sir James Dyson, Tim Martin… have you noticed how all the great entrepreneurs are Brexiters?” John Longworth says. “Tim set up a chain of almost 1,000 pubs.”

“And Nigel’s drunk in most of them!” heckles a man in front of me affectionately.

Tice has perfected his introduction over the past month. “He is possibly the original, truest Brexiteer!” he begins.

“He should be prime minister!” cries a voice from the front.

Tice tells the story of Farage’s helicopter crash, this time leaving a gap for the audience to applaud each heroic act. “It would have killed many people, but not our good friend. He dragged himself out of the plane, wiped away the blood from his head, from his eyes, dusted himself down… ”

“Hoorah!”

“Put his hand in his pocket... ”

“Hoorah!”

“Reached out for a packet of cigarettes and lit a fag.”

“Hoooooorraaaaah!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘This. Campaign. Is. About. Right. And. Wrong. We are simply asking our politicians to do what they promised,’ says Farage. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Farage begins with a humblebrag. “Good evening, Bournemouth. I’m going to take issue with the deputy chair’s introduction. I’m not the original Brexiteer. That was Henry VIII.” He appears to be in a jovial mood. “My day started when I got off the battlebus in Christchurch. I went round Christchurch market, and I met some stallholders and members of the public, and then it all went wrong.” Pause. “We found a pub.”

This is Farage the seaside standup, and the audience lap it up. “The day after the referendum, there was an emergency debate in the European parliament. I thought I’d better show up, you know, ’cos I’ve worked quite hard over there. I’ve always tried to make positive and helpful contributions. And there waiting for me was European commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, who came up, put an arm round me, and said… ‘Bastard!’”

The hall erupts. Then Farage flips the mood. “I said to them, ‘That morning when I came here, 17 years ago, I said I would lead a campaign to take the United Kingdom out of the European Union, and you laughed at me. Well,’ I said, ‘you’re not laughing now, are you?’”

And suddenly Farage flips again; now he’s mobilising his troops. “This is the most important campaign that has ever been fought in British history. This. Campaign. Is. About. Right. And. Wrong. We are simply asking our politicians to do what they promised.”

This is the first rally in the heart of remain-land – London – and the mood is darker. There’s a sense of the battle lines hardening

There was a time, he says, when he trusted May when she said that no deal was better than a bad deal. “She kept on telling us Brexit means Brexit, but little did we know that she is a woman who is too weak to negotiate with the European commission.” He pauses. “I’d much rather we sent someone like Trump, personally!” The audience applauds.

Now it’s time for strategy, as Farage tells supporters how to confront MPs. “I don’t want you writing letters to them. Go and visit them at their surgeries, queue around the block, meet them face to face, make them feel the heat, make them understand that being part of a customs union, being a vassal state with laws made somewhere else, is unacceptable. And that if they do this, you will never give them your vote again. Make. Them. Feel. The. Heat. We in Leave Means Leave are reactivating the people’s army.”

The language is tough and militaristic, and Farage’s delivery chilling. He warns that if he is forced to fight a second referendum we’ll see a very different Farage: “This time, no more Mr Nice Guy.” I can’t help thinking back to his victory speech after the referendum, delivered at 4am on 24 June 2016. Farage boasted that Brexit had been achieved “without a single bullet being fired”. It was only eight days after the strongly pro-EU Labour MP Jo Cox had been murdered on her way to a constituency surgery. Her killer, Thomas Mair, shouted “Keep Britain independent”and “Britain first” as he shot and stabbed her. But Farage appeared to have forgotten that.

***

On 13 November, Theresa May announces that the UK and the European Union have reached an agreement; the next day the Cabinet signs off on the deal. Leave Means Leave organises a protest outside Downing Street. On 15 November, Brexit secretary Dominic Raab is one of four ministers to resign amid calls for the prime minister to step down.

Britain remains gridlocked; Westminster is in chaos and yet nothing changes. On 10 December, the day before the Commons is due to have its say on the deal, May announces the vote will be delayed. The following day Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 Committee, announces that the threshold has been reached for a vote of no confidence in the prime minister; at least 48 letters have been submitted by Tory MPs. Although May survives, winning by 200 votes to 117, she appears to have as little chance of getting her deal through the Commons as she did before.

Meanwhile, there is a similar upheaval in Farage’s world – revolution leading to stasis. On 22 November, Ukip leader Gerard Batten announces that he has appointed far-right activist and former EDL leader Tommy Robinson as a special adviser on “rape gangs” and prison reform. In an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Farage says he is “appalled”, that Ukip is becoming a party of “street activism”, and that Batten has sabotaged his own efforts to make Ukip “a non-racist, non-sectarian party”. This is the same Farage who masterminded the Breaking Point poster; the same Farage who talked only days ago about mobilising a people’s army. On 4 December, he announces that he is quitting Ukip “with a heavy heart”: he has lost his battle to “professionalise” the party he helped found in 1993. But the truth is, he has outgrown Ukip. Its once marginal voice is now mainstream, and Farage has bigger political fish to fry.

***

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg at the London rally. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

It is 14 December, and all the big guns are out for the Leave Means Leave rally at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, opposite the Houses of Parliament. Jacob Rees-Mogg, JD Wetherspoon boss Tim Martin, the DUP’s Sammy Wilson and, of course, Farage, line up to deliver the same message – No Deal? No Problem – only with more urgency. There is a new chant: “Let’s go bigger than Europe. Let’s go Global. Let’s Go WTO.” Inconsistency appears to be a virtue for this populist campaign; globalism is now presented as a positive rather than a negative.

Tonight, the two Labour MPs who have spoken at previous rallies, Kate Hoey and Graham Stringer, are on the same bill, giving the event a more genuinely cross-party feel. But there is nothing diverse about the audience, and the whiteness is, if anything, even more stark than at previous rallies – not least because nearly every security officer on the door is black.

This is the first rally held in the heart of remain-land – London – and the mood is darker, more defiant. There is a sense of the battle lines hardening: only two days ago, chancellor Philip Hammond described hard Brexiters as “extremists”.

Let us be ready for that referendum – if it comes we’ll win it next time. By. A. Much. Bigger. Majority

Tonight, all six speakers have the knack of being able to incite the crowd or make them laugh – even the antediluvian Rees-Mogg, dubbed the honourable member for the 18th century. Hoey asks how we can trust the government to take us out of the EU when it is led by a prime minister who is a remainer, a chancellor who regards Brexiters as extremists and a Speaker “who has a Bollocks to Brexit sticker on his car”. Tim Martin concludes his speech by quoting Paul Simon (“You just slip out the back, Jack/Make a new plan, Stan/You don’t need to be coy, Roy/Just get yourself free”). Puce-faced Sammy Wilson delivers a barnstorming unionist speech (“The EU is demanding the price for leaving is splitting the United Kingdom. Never!”) and says that not even Arthur Daley would have had the brass to flog the Chequers deal to the British public.

As always, though, Farage is the star turn. He makes the familiar jokes about booze, dismisses the “jumped-up foreign bureaucrats” of Brussels, and describes the Italian government (which has scrapped humanitarian protection status for asylum seekers) as “rather splendid”. But this is a more muted, restrained Farage. He admits he is worried.

“I’m afraid, folks, I don’t see the great Brexit betrayal as anywhere near finished. I’m now more fearful than at any time I have been during this process that, outrageous and monstrous though it is, we’re going to finish up being sent back for a second referendum… My message, folks, is it would be wrong of us not to get ready, not to prepare for the worst-case scenario… Let us be ready not just to fight back, not just to be ready for that referendum, but if it comes we’ll win it next time. By. A. Much. Bigger. Majority.” Back in January 2018, Farage surprised everyone by calling for a second referendum, on the grounds it would deliver a bigger leave majority. But it was a classic Farage blip, and he has never called for one since. Last August, he dismissed the idea as “not the people’s vote, but the George Soros vote”.

After his speech in London, Farage is mobbed. A huddle forms around him, comprised mainly of the few young people in the audience. A woman in her 20s, draped in a union jack, asks for a selfie. Her friend, also draped in a union jack, pushes her way forward. “Excuse me, seeing as I got her these tickets, the least you can do is give me a kiss,” she says to Farage.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nigel Farage is mobbed by supporters at the Westminster rally. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

This is the closest I’ve been to him in three months of following the Leave Means Leave campaign – within shouting distance. So I do just that. Earlier this evening, someone in the audience asked who people should vote for, now that Farage has quit Ukip. The question went unanswered, so I ask again. “Nigel, who should we vote for?”

“Who asked that?” he says.

“I asked that,” I bellow, deep within the bosom of the Faragistas. He looks at me.

“Well, let’s find out, shall we? At the moment I couldn’t vote for anybody. But let’s see how this plays out. The cards haven’t fallen yet. I meant what I said tonight. All the Eurosceptics are hoping we’re going to get through this, but I’m actually more pessimistic.”

Do we need to mobilise? “Yes. When you build an army, you don’t do it wanting to fight a war. But if a war happens, you’ve got it. And that’s what we’ve now got to do.” And with that he’s off, flanked by two security men.

I shout one of his own slogans after him as he walks away. “Nigel, no more Mr Nice Guy?” He turns on his heels, walks back and looks me in the face. For once there isn’t a hint of a smile. “Oh listen. Listen. If they make us do this again, I shall be a bit tougher than last time.”

• This article forms part of the Guardian’s ongoing series, The new populism; read more here.

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