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There's a famous episode of The Simpsons in which Homer builds a bed for Bart after he outgrows his crib.

To make the boy “laugh himself to sleep” he turns the headboard into a giant clown’s face, but instead of Bart bonding with his new buddy he has a violent ­reaction to it and wakes up shaking and muttering the words: “Can’t sleep, clown will eat me.”

That’s kids and clowns for you. Parents think they love them when they actually make them poo their pants, because they sense behind the frozen smile there is pain, sadness and an unfulfilled capacity for evil.

This fear of clowns is called coulrophobia, and it’s not just kids who suffer from it.

I do whenever I see the man who Ken Clarke described as one, Nigel Farage, honking, joshing and ­self-deprecating away, allowing the likes of Ian Hislop to lash buckets of water on him to appear a bloody good laugh.

Well, he’s one of us, isn’t he?

The no-nonsense bloke at the end of the bar with the smoker’s laugh who you’d love to share a pint and a dirty joke with.

The antithesis of the bland, never-worked-in-the-real-world, robotic politicians who populate Westminster.

But behind the clown’s mask lurks a calculating operator leading a party which, given ballot box approval, would become a haven for Right-wing xenophobes, allowing them to creep into town halls under the guise of respectability.

It already has.

As the spotlight has shifted away from a jovial Farage supping a pint down the Nag’s Head, speaking up for the “silent majority” who want to put the “‘Great’ back in Britain”, maggots have been exposed.

We see their Nazi salutes, their “ethnic banter”, their Holocaust denials, their former memberships of the BNP and National Front, with Farage shrugging it off with a wink and a “look, some of my best friends aren’t neo-Nazis” gag.

I understand UKIP’s appeal to voters who are disillusioned with the policies – and the lack of courage – of the mainstream parties.

I get why some people like the sound of a maverick telling them the way to sort out the mess we’re in is by pulling out of Europe, closing our borders, paying less in tax and building more prisons.

But look beyond the hatred of yooman rights, ’elf ’n’ safety, wind farms, gay marriage, political correctness and a country that’s gone to the dogs ’cos we’ve let too many foreigners in, and you’ll see no ­solutions at all. Just a spilling of bile.

They offer nothing tangible and positive.

Nothing that promises to take us forward, only backwards to some mythical white, crime-free paradise which never existed.

If you’re thinking of voting UKIP today, do yourself a favour as you enter the polling booth.

Think like Bart. Think “can’t sleep, clown will eat me”.

Then fling a custard pie at Farage..

More from Brian Reade: Michael Molloy, Old Etonians, Kerry Katona, Danny Cipriani and the five big questions of the week