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It is a grim reflection that no contemporary British politician better understands the networks, dynamics and ever-changing rules of modern politics than Nigel Farage.

He is as effective as he is awful. His fledgling Brexit party is not fielding candidates in Thursday’s local elections – though its baleful spirit will surely loom over the battle for control of 248 English councils, in which the Tories are expected to suffer serious losses.

Instead, Farage is keeping his powder dry for the European elections that will be held on 23 May, assuming Theresa May has not secured Britain’s exit from the European Union by then.

In the latest Opinium poll of voting intention, his new movement is level pegging with Labour on 28% – 14 points ahead of the Tories.

This is merely embarrassing for Labour, as the party that hopes to form the next government. For the Conservatives, a true catastrophe looms. I am struck by the number of senior Tories who are simply stultified by the disaster engulfing them. “What should I do?” one experienced and normally stoic MP said to me last week. “I just have no idea what to do.”

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Farage is indeed the nemesis of the party he tried repeatedly to represent at Westminster but finally left in 1992, disgusted by the Maastricht treaty. It is not quite true that he single-handedly drove David Cameron to embrace a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. But there is no doubt that Ukip’s surge under Farage’s leadership – and its consequences for Conservative unity – was uppermost in Cameron’s mind when he initiated the six-year saga that became Brexit.

As if to confirm his worst fears, Ukip went on to win the highest share of the vote in the 2014 European elections. Farage, since becoming leader in 2006, had transformed his party from a marginal club of cranks obsessed by national sovereignty and the minutiae of EU directives into a cultural movement united in its fixation with, and opposition to, immigration.

In so doing, he wrote the horrible script for the 2016 referendum, in which his Leave.EU campaign acted as the provisional wing of the pro-leave cause.

While Boris Johnson and Michael Gove promised bounteous trade deals, an NHS spending bonanza and a fresh start for the liberated UK, Farage poured poison into political discourse – most notably with his vile poster showing a long queue of Syrian refugees under the slogan “breaking point”. It was seriously nasty, and it worked.

View photos Brexit party rally at Clacton-on-Sea, Essex. More

‘He wrote the horrible script for the 2016 referendum.’ Brexit party rally at Clacton-on-Sea, Essex. Photograph: Martin Dalton/Rex/Shutterstock

Who is this man? A talkshow host, a spiv, a political groupie, a hanger-on – as likely to visit Julian Assange as Donald Trump. Watch his toe-curling performance talking to Steve Bannon in the recent documentary The Brink for a study in fidgeting awkwardness (Farage knows this is not a good look) mixed with irrepressible adulation (he hangs on Bannon’s every word).

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