Marina Hyde said in her column that she'd rather have a pint with Nigel Farage than the other party leaders. When the day came, she chose bottled lager from Europe …

Obviously gunpoint would be involved, but can you rank the three main party leaders in order of who you'd have a pint with? "Easy peasy," says Nigel Farage, leader of local elections breakout star the UK Independence party. "Clegg first. We were MEPs together for five years, and he's a perfectly nice bloke. The other two … well, Cameron last – he doesn't even like people, apart from his own narrow little set."

Would Ed Miliband drink a pint, I wonder?

"I think he'd have a fruit crush," giggles Farage. "But are they fun people who you'd want to have a pint with? No … "

I am having a pint with Farage – well, he's having a pint and I'm having a bottled beer, like the Lady Muck I am – because I wrote a column in which I said I could stand to have a pint with him, and the Guardian took it as a features pitch. I think Noel Edmonds calls this sort of wish fulfillment "cosmic ordering".

Farage, of course, hasn't had the best of luck in pubs, what with being barricaded in an Edinburgh one by Scottish lefties, so we eschew the Gorbals in favour of St James. As we walk to meet him, Ukip's press officer insists this is categorically the last time anyone is going to be allowed to photograph him with a pint in his hand. "That's what they say," laughs Farage later, "but they won't get to me." The walk takes a while, because Farage has mistaken which Red Lion we're supposed to be meeting in. We wander between various Red Lion pubs looking for Farage, which feels vaguely like it might be a metaphor for Where We At as a nation, before finding him having a pint (bitter, naturally) and a fag (Rothmans, naturally) outside somewhere called The Golden Lion.

Speaking of metaphors, I say when we're settled, let's talk about that light aircraft crash you somewhat miraculously survived during the 2010 general election. To recap: you nosedived to Earth, on polling day, in an accident literally caused by Ukip branding, in that your plane became tangled in a party banner it was trailing. Lesser men than you might have seen that as some sort of sledgehammer political omen.

"Quite the reverse!" hoots Farage, who came through a car smash and testicular cancer in his early 20s and since then has opted to "just not worry about anything too much". "Looking back on that plane ride, it was a ridiculously stupid thing to have done, like so much of my life."

As expected, Farage delights in telling a story against himself, a disarming trait which has assisted him in his rise from affable, pint-toting anti-politician to affable, pint-toting anti-politician who might conceivably, in the increasingly bizarro world of British politics, hold some sort of balance of power at some point in the future.

Over a couple of pints, we cover all the big stuff: Victoria Beckham, rivers of blood, what it'll be like being deputy PM to Boris ("Boris needs me; he needs lightening up"), and the attempt to ban menthol cigarettes. (I need hardly tell you which joyless international political body is planning that, but the good news is that Farage has promised to get on a plane to Brussels and ruddy sort them out.) We establish that he'd never do reality TV, unless they do Strictly Come Drinking, and marvel that Ukip has got where it is with a mere nine – nine! – paid staff, and a war chest Farage classifies as "two bob and a bag of marbles". He cheerfully admits he couldn't name a favourite novel even from the days he still had time to read them, and can only narrow down his cinematic tastes to "spy stuff" and Richard Curtis-style "English stuff".

Scrupulous about standing his round, he stresses that as a point of principle, he'd never, ever, involve his wife or four children in his work, which is partly the reason he was up in the plane that day – to avoid the cliched snap of them all striding en famille to the polling station. Of the other leaders, he marvels: "They talk about doing school runs and things like that. I do that twice a term." So do they, probably. "Well, who knows, but they all tell you how wonderful they are with children. They're really good at doing the nappy changes and all this sort of thing, and I've got to tell you: I'm useless with young children. Completely useless. I mean, so bad it's frightening."

In the absence of domestic-bliss propaganda, perhaps the Ukip message would benefit from some celebrity endorsement? "I'm working on some big ideas," Farage confides. No names, no pack drill, obviously, though he will say that: "Jamie Oliver's comments were very interesting the other day. When I get time off, I'm going to follow up and go and see him. Posh Spice," he adds, "is vehemently Eurosceptic. She's made some very, very strong comments about it."

My gut feeling is that she'll stay out of it. "I don't know," he replies, shortly before confirming his personal credo as: "I travel optimistically".

But, light entertainers aside, who are his political heroes? Mandela, I imagine… "He's a human hero," declares Farage. "That day he came out of Robben Island and stood there and forgave everybody, I just thought: 'This is Jesus.' I don't regard him as a political hero – I think he's on a rather higher plane than that."

A tiny, awfully uncharitable part of me wonders momentarily if that might be an instance of the same expedient moral revisionism which saw the 49-year-old Farage recently declare tax avoiders "the common enemy", only for it to be revealed that he'd once been at it himself with an Isle of Man trust. "Things that we thought were absolutely fair practice 10 years, 20 years ago, 30 years ago aren't any more," was what he said about that.

Anyway, Mandela's saintliness mutually agreed, we cast around for other major influences. There's Keith Joseph, whose talk at Farage's school made him join the Tories. Bits of Thatcher. "And I did admire … the intellect of Enoch. But he was a very bad politician. And I think in many ways his legacy is that we paid a terrible price for the speech in '68, because it made discussing immigration too difficult after that."

On the succession of Ukip local councillors revealed as being far-right horrors, Farage is clear: "That was totally unfair." I tell him this position slightly remains me of that joke that ends with the Welshman fuming: "You shag one sheep … " You field a mere four Nazis … But apparently, if the other parties had been subject to the same social media scrutiny, they'd have looked just as bad. As for the polls, which currently put support for Ukip between 7% and 18%, Farage finds most of them "laughable". "ICM are the company that had us on 7% in March, a few weeks before we polled 25%!"

Policy-wise, we agree convivially that no one has an earthly what Ukip's are on matters other than the obvious, even though he tells me they've got a real NEC (national executive committee) and everything. But then, at the last election, the party's former leader admitted he hadn't even read Ukip's manifesto. It's just a hunch, but I sense you and the outfit you built might not be "details people". "We're not technocrats," twinkles Farage. "Is that what you're saying?" Yes. I am only paying you compliments. "Anyway, that manifesto was a complete Horlicks."

As for the next one, on the eve of the local elections there was some story about internal emails revealing your policy vacuum. "So what?" shrugs Farage, who is very relaxed about buying cheap policy straight off the shelf from thinktanks, which for some reason makes me think of Brits loading up the boot with booze in Dieppe before getting the ferry straight back. "Why wouldn't you just buy their stuff off the shelf, and when Paxman says: 'These figures don't add up', you can say well, the IEA [Institute of Economic Affairs] has actually said they do."

It's certainly a self-effacing approach to politics. Why don't the others do it? "Too much money!"

And this is arguably Farage's most endearing quality, in an age of professional politicians whose self-styled expertise has left the entire world wondering where experts have got us: his absolute refusal to mystify his work. In the end, he says quite credibly, he's in it because he loves people. When I mention that I live near Tony Benn, and often see him taking an hour to buy a pint of milk because he patiently engages with every passing waif and stray who wants his advice on something or other, Farage's eyes light up. He admires that hugely, and contrasts it with Cameron's distaste for even momentary encounters with "plebs".

Elsewhere, he loathes disloyalty, thus finds himself in two minds about the conventional wisdom that sees political defectors as prizes. So what happens when Nadine Dorries – "Pops the question?" chuckles Farage. Hmm … " You'll be wanting a pre-nup, I hazard. "Look, I'll say that she's interesting … different … she appeals to a segment of the population that very few politicians do these day. I think she's got some principles. If Nadine wants to come and join us that's great." He hasn't made his mind up on where to stand in 2015 – "and no one will get a dickie bird before the little earthquake I want to cause at next year's Euro elections."

As a rising star, has he been feted by the US right yet? Any invitations to the Republican convention? No, and even if they were to come knocking, Farage has a lot of problems with America. He's been against all military interventions from Afghanistan onwards; the ongoing surveillance revelations "worry the pants off me" – and as for the US prison population, he declares that "really, really horrible". "If you look at what's happened to the American judicial system since 9/11 it's just horrific," he laments. "I'd far rather go to Canada. What an amazing country that is."

But the UK is naturally where the heart is. Farage is easily most animated when discussing his Common Sense Tour of last year, an auto-parodic-sounding meet-and-greet odyssey around the country, but one of which he speaks so fondly that you can't begrudge him it. "There wasn't much common sense in the evenings, I can tell you that!" he laughs, before turning serious. "I loved that fortnight. It was me. It was me. Didn't bother to answer the phone, no emails, sod everybody – loved it. Probably in the best humour I'd been in 25 years. I loved it. Working like crazy, meeting people, then off to the pub … which curry house is open latest in this town?"

And that, in all its unhateable Ron Manageresque mistiness, is the world according to Farage. For all that he stands on the cusp of having truly made it, you can't help but suspect there's a big part of Farage that misses the laugh of those years spent under the radar. "I remember one brilliant party conference," he says with such a faraway look you feel he'd almost swap the chance to be 2020's kingmaker to be there again. "You look back and think, God, how did we get away with that … "