

Nigel Farage seems to believe his party’s faltering campaign has turned a corner – if his enthusiastic sing-song celebration in a restaurant in Ramsgate on Thursday night is anything to go by.

A little before midnight, the well-wined Ukip leader stood on a chair in a small Italian eatery in the Kent town to bellow out a rendition of New York, New York to the delight of his dining companions.

Nigel Farage demands 'fair deal for the English' at St George's day celebration Read more

That performance came after several renditions of Hi, Ho Silver Lining, with Farage hollering down the phone to whoever happened to be calling.

A little unsteady on his feet, the Ukip leader then rounded off the night with The Wild Rover outside on the pavement, as aides persuaded him that moving on to a nightclub or revisiting his teenage days of skinny-dipping were not sensible for a party leader two weeks before the most important election of his life.

The immediate cause of Farage’s celebration was a Survation telephone poll commissioned by party donor Alan Bown that suggests the Ukip leader is nine points ahead in his target seat of South Thanet in Kent.



Halfway through the evening, after many glasses of red and some fresh seafood, he leaned across the table to his agent and declared with glee: “We’re bloody winning, aren’t we?”

Advisers on Team Farage were pleased and surprised by the exuberant St George’s Day kneesup – a virtual victory party. “We haven’t seen him like this for months,” one said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nigel Farage and reporters eat sausages during a visit to mark St George’s Day in Ramsgate. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters

An extra £1m party donation from Express newspaper owner Richard Desmond in the past week can have done no harm to his spirits. Neither can a story about his Tory opponent Craig Mackinlay owning a website that encourages Hungarians to come and work in Britain,; Ukip has made curtailing unskilled immigration from eastern Europe the key plank of its campaign.

To Farage, it must seem like he is now a whisker away from fulfilling his long-held ambition of entering parliament – on his seventh attempt – finally joining the Westminster bunch he professes to despise.

But Ukip’s campaign has seen ups and downs since the beginning of the year, which began with big ambitions for seats in double figures, narrowing almost exclusively to South Thanet, and now seems to have broadened out again to four to six constituencies.



Ukip’s support has been squeezed from the 19% peak in the autumn to below 14% but the Conservatives had been betting on it falling into the single figures this year. Ukip insiders now think their vote share will come in at about 12%.

It certainly got off to a shaky start, with Farage admitting so in an interview with the BBC’s Newsnight this week, saying he had made mistakes by trying to pack too much into his schedule.

The Ukip leader initially laid low at the beginning of the year, believing the voters were not yet ready to listen to election arguments. But this gave space to Labour and the Conservatives inevitably to frame the election as a two-way fight between the two men likely to be prime minister.

Farage then began the short campaign with a slightly shambolic traipse around the West Midlands and Grimsby, Humberside, during which he missed an appearance with HS2 campaigners because of the weather and stood up activists in a pub, which had named an ale after him, in order to fit in lunch with reality television star Joey Essex.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nigel Farage gets distracted by reality TV star Joey Essex while campaigning on Grimsby docks. Photograph: Sean Smith

The Ukip leader’s visits were so rushed that a billboard poster had to be unveiled in the middle of a busy road and the fisherman pictured on it, whose business had been “ripped apart by the EU”, said he might be voting Tory instead.

Farage was tetchy with the press during the tour and a picture of him with his face in his hands in the back of a car appeared to confirm suspicions that he was struggling with the pace.

At times, it has also looked like Farage did not make things easy for himself by choosing to fight the Kent seaside constituency – an unpredictable marginal that has elected MPs from both Labour and the Conservatives in the past. It is not the most typical Ukip territory, like the left-behind voters of Clacton or an area radically changed by immigration such as Boston & Skegness.

One of the first hitches in the Thanet campaign was the expenses scandal that forced Ukip MEP Janice Atkinson to resign as a parliamentary candidate in nearby Folkestone. Then the Mail on Sunday accused Farage of trying to suppress a poll paid for by another Ukip donor, Arron Banks, showing the Tories had a one-point lead.

At this point, his trusted senior adviser, Raheem Kassam, was dispatched from London to Ramsgate to tighten up and get a grip on the campaign, alongside agent and key organiser, Chris Bruni-Lowe.

Farage was redirected to concentrate his efforts on the constituency. He now claims to have done 26 public meetings in South Thanet, shaken 15,000 hands and undertaken several hours of door-knocking a day.

Out canvassing in Ramsgate on Thursday, he tried to charm and flirt with almost everyone he saw, taking the phone from one woman and telling her husband: “Hi Melvyn, I’m rather busy with your wife at the moment.”

An aide at his side held his cigarette during doorstep visits and carried “souvenir” Ukip placards that Farage autographed for residents to display in their windows. The strategy is to encourage waverers by showing their neighbours are unashamed to vote Ukip.

He appeared to be focused on a council ward already held by Ukip, and most of the time activists ran ahead to make sure voters wanted to meet him before he knocked on the door. But he took umbrage at the suggestion that he was fixing the walkabout and began to approach random doors, where the reception was no less appreciative, with demands for selfies and invitations to come in for tea.

One supporter who answered the door suggested that a major obstacle to Farage becoming prime minister was that there were too many foreigners in the UK and they would not vote for him.

When asked later in London about the comments, the Ukip leader said the supporter might have a point, but subsequently revised his reply and claimed the party had a lot of backing from ethnic minorities.

He said that only white people thought Ukip was racist, saying that, in a petrol station in Catford, south-east London, that morning “everybody was black, getting petrol, buying newspapers … and they all wanted selfies and pictures”.

“Come with me to a black part of south London, walk down the street and you will find black people going: ‘Hey man, good to see you,’” he added.

Nigel Farage’s senior adviser Raheem Kassam Photograph: PR

Encouraged by Kassam, who is not afraid to take risks or court controversy, Farage has began to adopt a “shock and awe” strategy to get himself noticed in the leaders’ TV debates.

In the first contest, he was deliberately provocative by bringing up Ukip’s opposition to treating immigrants with HIV on the NHS. More recently, he has made headlines by saying the UK should only take Christian refugees from north Africa and warning that millions of immigrants could be allowed to come to the UK if Brussels agrees a common policy to address migrant deaths in the Mediterranean.

On top of that, Farage has upped the English nationalist rhetoric, warning against the “terror” of the Scottish National party and placing a consistent emphasis on standing up for veterans in the face of Conservative weakness on defence spending.

Undoubtedly, Farage and his team are convinced they have stablised a wobbly campaign, counting four seats, South Thanet, Clacton, Rochester and Thurrock as virtually in the bag. They are already planning an outdoors rally somewhere in Ramsgate just before polling day and a celebration for the night itself.



Farage said he was widening attention from about a dozen to an ambitious 22 target seats, aided by the Desmond money to buy extra billboards, poster trucks and mailshots.

And next week, the Ukip leader will get back on the road again, visiting some Labour-facing seats in the north, including Hartlepool, the old political turf of Blairite architect Lord Mandelson.

There are dangers for Farage, though, in overconfidence and inflated expectations. The other parties have more well-oiled, experienced get-out-the-vote operations in their target seats, as well as supporters more used to heading to the polling stations. Not only that, there is a concerted anti-Farage campaign going on in Thanet, orchestrated by groups such as Hope Not Hate and the Stand Up to Ukip movement.

The Tories are throwing their big guns – including London mayor Boris Johnson and footballer Sol Campbell – at the seat in the hope it will end Ukip altogether if Farage fails and resigns as leader, as he has promised to do “within 10 minutes” of defeat.

Farage countered all this by saying Ukip had been consistently underestimated in recent years, but added: “My biggest challenge is to mount an operation to get those people who are not in the habit out and voting. If I can do that, I’ll walk it.”

