Yet it is hard to see how Ukip could have fought its way out the fringes, held together a following comprised of free-market libertarians and tax-and-spend nostalgics, and ridden a seemingly endless succession of race rows and scandal without Farage’s charisma, rhetorical agility and undisputed dominance of the party machine. The on-air dressing down of Patrick O’Flynn over the ‘wag tax’, the tearing up of the 2010 manifesto of “drivel”, the ousting of the Ukip candidate in Clacton, were notable not as expressions of chaos, but of his strength.