“HITLER did it with gas! Merkel does it with paperwork!” From the bow of his trawler, bespangled with anti-EU banners and bobbing on the grey Thames outside the Houses of Parliament, a rubicund fisherman bellowed at the crowds on Westminster Bridge. Baffled tourists posed for selfies as he ranted in the background. Leave supporters cheered and babbled: “When will Nigel arrive?” Word rippled through the assembly that the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), along with his pro-Brexit flotilla of fishing boats, had been held up at Tower Bridge. Yet another establishment stitch-up. “We want our country back!” they chanted.

Then it was glimpsed around the bend in the Thames: a Dunkirk of trawlers, barges and dinghies, buzzed by speedboats with “In” flags (“Cameron paid them,” a matronly Middle England type informed Bagehot as others cried “Traitors!”) and a cruiser from which Sir Bob Geldof, an ageing Irish rocker, yelled “Farage! You’re a fraud!” Last of all came the flagship, emitting a boozy whiff as, to loud cheers, it swooshed under the bridge. Holding court on deck, surrounded by cameras and wine-slurping, blazer-wearing “Kippers”, was the man himself: a male Britannia with a ciggy between his fingers and a smirk across his face. This was “The Nigel Farage Show”, and he knew it.

Such has been Britain’s EU referendum. David Cameron first promised the vote in 2013, spooked by UKIP’s success in local elections and importuned by UKIP-inclined MPs on his Conservative benches. The result has been an unedifying campaign that has both bolstered Mr Farage and carried his imprint. It has been divisive, misleading, unburdened by facts and prone to personality politics and gimmicks. What might have been a hard-nosed debate about Britain’s future, about the pros and cons of EU membership, has turned into a poisonous row about the merits of what is ultimately Mr Farage’s vision of England: a hazy confabulation of content without modernity; of warm beer, bowler hats, faces blackened by coal dust; of bread-and-dripping, fish-and-chips, hope-and-glory.

The outcome has been a contest with the logical architecture of an Escher drawing: Remain and (in particular) Leave issuing assertions that double back on themselves, Möbius-strip arguments that lead everywhere and nowhere. Knowledge has been scorned (“I think people in this country have had enough of experts,” huffs Michael Gove, the pro-Leave justice secretary). Basic facts have fallen by the wayside: Mr Cameron claims Brexit would help Islamic State; Leave implies Turkey, with its 77m Muslims, is about to join the EU. The complicated reality of an evolving union and Britain’s relationship with it has been ignored.

Instead that chant on Westminster Bridge—“We want our country back!”—has echoed through the campaign. Back from whom? Johnny Foreigner, mostly, as well as a conniving, cartoonishly evil establishment; at a recent Leave event your columnist witnessed Tories and Kippers urge their supporters to take pens into the polling booth on June 23rd to prevent the intelligence services from doctoring their votes. The referendum has been marked by a pin-striped nihilism dressed up as common sense.

Thus it is easy to forget that it was meant to reunite the Tory tribe. Mr Cameron issued his pledge in 2013 to “settle” the Europe issue. Today that aspiration reads like a joke. As trawlermen outside the Palace of Westminster came alongside Sir Bob’s craft and attempted to board it (prompting an intervention from policemen in a speedboat), inside the House of Commons Mr Cameron was skirmishing with his own buccaneering MPs. David Nuttall, one of the 131 (of 330) to back Brexit, pointedly asked when the prime minister would meet his pledge to cut net immigration to tens of thousands (from over 300,000 today).

The mood in the Conservative base is even more vitriolic. Most members want to quit the EU. Many of them hold their leader in utter contempt following a campaign in which they believe he has betrayed his principles and abused his position. On June 12th your columnist attended a pro-Brexit Tory rally in Leigh-on-Sea, in Essex, organised by David Amess, the local MP. The star speaker was Ann Widdecombe, the sturdy doyenne of the Conservative right, who paraded about the hall badmouthing the prime minister: “The claims Cameron has been making do not stand up!” she trilled, to applause and shouts of “hear, hear!”

To some extent the referendum has revealed things that were already present: the growing void between cosmopolitan and nativist parts of the country, the diminishing faith in politics, the rise of populism, the inadequacy of the left-right partisan spectrum in an age when open-closed is a more salient divide. Yet it is hard not to conclude that the campaign has exacerbated all of these trends. Polls suggest that trust in senior politicians of all stripes has fallen. And that is just the start. If Remain wins on June 23rd, Brexiteers will tell voters they were conned. If Leave wins, Mr Cameron will go and his successor will negotiate a Brexit that does not remotely resemble the promises of the Leave campaign, which trades on the lie that Britain can have full access to the European single market without being bound by its regulations and free-movement rules.

The neverendum never ends

Either way, politics is coarsened. Voters will believe their leaders less. Short of a total reconfiguration of the party-political landscape (possible but unlikely), the existing Westminster outfits will look increasingly at odds with political reality. The currency of facts will be debased, that of stunts inflated, that of conviction sidelined. It will be de rigueur to question an opponent’s motives before his arguments, to sneer at experts, prefer volume to accuracy and disparage concession, compromise and moderation. Mr Farage’s style of politics has defined this referendum. It will live on in the muscle memory of the nation.