“NI-GEL, NI-GEL.”

The Tories have buried their heads in the sand, trying to pretend the European elections aren’t really happening next week. Labour has only a slightly firmer grip on reality. Just make it go away. Don’t mention the war.

Nigel Farage has never found a political vacuum he wasn’t desperate to fill. A voice for any spare, free-floating grievance. The establishment man for the anti-establishment. And at the Featherstone working men’s club, he is made to feel right at home. This part of Yorkshire voted nearly 70% to leave the EU and it had been standing-room only long before the Brexit party leader had made his appearance on stage to a saviour’s welcome.

“NI-GEL, NI-GEL.”

These days, Farage is being kept on a strict leash by the Brexit party chairman, Richard Tice. Nothing is being left to chance. Even the seemingly unscripted moments are tightly rehearsed. And it was Tice, part millionaire wheeler-dealer, part faux man-of-the-people used car salesman, who opened the rally shortly after 11am with his by now familiar patter of betrayal and humiliation. Politicians, businessmen, the civil service. All of them, enemies of the people. What the country needed was people with the confidence and belief to Make Britain Great Again. A straight lift from the Donald Trump playbook, but no one in the audience cared. They could mainline this stuff all day.

Chipper Nigel Farage grins and barely tries to sound plausible | John Crace Read more

“You couldn’t make this stuff up,” yelled the next speaker, John Longworth, the former head of the British Chambers of Commerce and Brexit party candidate for the north-east. Except he did make it up. He lied through his teeth. He told the crowd Brexit had won an overwhelming majority at the referendum, rather than a 52%-48% majority. He told them Westminster was denying them their birthright, forgetting to mention the reason the UK had not already left the EU was because of Brexiters voting down a deal for which they would have given their back teeth three years ago. He told them a no-deal, World Trade Organization Brexit would turn Yorkshire into the land of milk and honey.

Others came and went promising much the same. The local MPs Yvette Cooper and Jon Trickett were booed and openly denounced as traitors. The person to my left to whom I had been chatting before the event advised me not to mention I worked for the Guardian. As if I needed telling. This was the blitz spirit being whipped up into a lynch mob. There was a time when a Farage event always came with an element of humour. As if neither he nor his audiences were expected to take him entirely seriously. This is now something else. Ice-cold calculation tapping into a crowd worn down by austerity and waiting on deliverance. No retreat, baby, no surrender.

Next up was Ann Widdecombe. Under any normal circumstances, a celebrity joke, best known for embarrassing herself as a piss-poor panto act on reality TV shows. A former Tory MP who would have been eaten alive in this Labour stronghold. Instead, she too was greeted with unquestioning adoration. Brexit means Brexit. Democracy betrayed by the rich and the powerful. A lifetime of servitude under the EU. LIES. More lies. She even managed to cram in an impression of Theresa May. That’s how bad it’s got for the prime minister. To be taken apart by a national joke.

“NI-GEL, NI-GEL.”

Farage acknowledged the applause, his plastic perma-smile stretching into a fixed grin. These weren’t really his people, but he needed to make them believe they were. He needn’t have worried. The crowd of overwhelmingly white over-50s men and women weren’t there to make any demands on him. They just wanted him to sprinkle a bit of stardust their way. Nigel relaxed a little. Though not too much. This was the new, reinvented Farage, not the slightly pissed joker of years gone by. Stay on message. Give them what they want. Then give them more of what they want.

What you get now is Farage from the head, not the heart. A professional politician, masquerading as the outsider and playing the percentages. A man who has spotted an opening and is kicking it ever wider. This wasn’t his finest speech, but it didn’t need to be. No one was going to ask him any tricky questions about the racism of previous campaigns, his doubts about climate change or how he’d previously advocated a Norwegian-style Brexit. No, he wasn’t going to explain exactly how his no-deal Brexit was going to produce untold riches for everyone. Manifestos were only lies anyway. So all he was asking was that they believed and it would come true. And they did believe, because they were that desperate.

“NI-GEL, NI-GEL.”

Here was an all too possible version of the future. One where nuance and complexity have given way to soundbites and populism. Where lip service is paid to healing divisions, providing it’s everyone else who is making the compromises. It was one of the most genuinely disturbing political events I’ve ever attended. And Westminster ought to be shit-scared.