EU referendum: At the Leave.EU party, Nigel Farage is determined to go down drinking - whatever the result
The Ukip leader now exists in two simultaneous states: dead and dead. If we vote Leave, his party is over. If we vote Remain, his party is over
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Your support makes all the difference.Whatever happens, he’s going down drinking.
There’s champagne and lager behind the bar, there’ll be (three of the original members of) Buck’s Fizz on the stage, Union Flag party hats and a whole cavalcade of hostile European news crews looking on with fingers crossed for the final crash of the Ukip fun bus. If the polls, the bookies and the mask of conciliation that’s been hung uneasily on Nigel Farage’s face all day is to believed, there wil have to be the greatest of great escapes to do it from here.
And what if he does? The votes have been cast. The ballots are closed. Not quite like Schrodinger’s Cat, so the thinking goes, Mr Farage now exists in two simultaneous states: dead and dead. If we’ve Voted Leave, Ukip are over. If we’ve voted Remain, Ukip are over.
In the final moments before the polls closed, men in jeans and bomber jackets were trying to get their heads round ‘Why the Remainiacs have done it.’
“Well, they all live in big houses don’t they. They love the EU. They’re doing great out of it,” they pondered, as they sipped on champagne laid on by Leave.EU’s main backer, Arron Banks, a self made multimillionaire who now lives mainly in South Africa.
First thing this morning, at his polling station in Biggin Hill in Kent, Farage said the result would hinge on “soft remainers”. Could they be arsed to save their nation in its hour of gravest need? In this weather? The anecdotal evidence, not least a desperate press release from the Leave camp showing Londoners in a ‘leafy London suburb’ queuing round the block, and calling on their so-called heartlands to come to the rescue.
This was the missive that has prompted many to suggest this referendum has either created or revealed a divide in the nation, and a class based one too, though how whole swathes of Remain backing half-impoverished Scotland cut across that is one for the sociologists.
How can ‘Remainiacs’ so loathe their opponents for ‘hating Johnny Foreigner’ when they hate half their own with the same passionate intensity, so the argument goes. Well it appears to go both ways.
But that evidence is only as anecdotal as all the rest. There’s no exit polls, no statistically relevant historical data. And at the general election last year, in the moment before that exit poll came out, the price on a Conservative majority was 11 to 1 - far longer than Remain currently is at even the most generous bookmaker.
Leave.EU has its own private poll coming out at 10pm. Mr Farage will be addressing the assembled masses at “eleven or later.” We won’t know the result by then, of course, that won’t come formally until 7am, but Mr Farage’s tone will tell all.
Already, people have been brave enough to dare to say that the perceived swing that followed the killing of an MP by a man with mental health issues is enough to invalidate the result. That, and the MI5 plot to tamper with votes cast in pencil.
If the expected happens, will these things add up to a raison d’etre for Mr Farage and for Ukip? Maybe, but one extra thing is certain.
In the last few weeks, the Leave side has narrowed to little more than an anti-immigration protest group. But even the Leave side have failed to say that net migration will go down, only that they will “take back control.”
Whatever the result, there will still be immigration, there will still be anger, and wherever those two things meet, there you will find Mr Farage.
Breaking point? Don’t bet on it, whatever the odds.
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