Not only, although not least, because he will, in his own words, "go completely apeshit" when he sees it reproduced on here, Damian Thompson writes:
Nigel Farage is so much more than a plain-talking bloke who enjoys a pint and a fag, quick on his feet in debate and always up for a laugh.
I've met him several times, heard him with his guard down over a boozy supper and had the chance to throw really sensitive questions at him.
What strikes me is how thoughtful he is, with a sharp instinct for the difference between PR setbacks that resonate only in Westminster and those that damage his party on the ground.
He's also a man who pushes himself far too hard for his or his party's health. He works crazy hours, under pressure from an excruciating back injury sustained when his plane crashed.
Still, at least for the past year or two he's been buoyed by Ukip's rising fortunes, many of them attributable to his good judgment.
The closet racists – to be found in every party, especially the Lib Dems – have been marginalised. Farage is not a racist, at all – and of how many leaders of Right-wing protest parties can that be said?
The Ukip manifesto is always a work in progress, like some East Coast professor's decades-old uncompleted novel, but tantalisingly close to a post-Thatcherite philosophy that addresses the real consequences of uncontrolled immigration, an impregnable public sector and the catastrophic mission creep of the EU.
But now Farage faces two problems that will tax his ingenuity. One is major, one (apparently) minor, and they're linked.
1. Support for Ukip may have peaked. I was very struck by John Rentoul in the Independent yesterday:
Ukip now has an unparalleled record for coming second.
Second in the Eastleigh by-election – beaten by the eclipsed Lib Dems, who show an extraordinary ability to hold on to what they have and lose their deposits everywhere else.
Second in South Shields, a Labour seat that was supposed to be the practice run for the Wythenshawe breakthrough.
And now, in light of a miserable 18 per cent share of the vote in Wythenshawe – miserable, that is, by protest-vote by-election standards – second in their share of the vote in the coming European Parliament elections in May too.
We hear that Ukip's showing in the local elections is more important in terms of predicting its vote in 2015. Maybe, but if Ukip doesn't top the poll in the Euro-elections then it will have been robbed of a victory that public opinion has taken for granted.
I wouldn't go so far as Rentoul in announcing "the end of the Ukip insurgency", but it will be a dark moment and support Rentoul's claim that Ukip has already taken as many votes off the Tories as it's going to. (Please also read Dan Hodges on this.)
2. Ukip's supporters are coming across as nuts online. Last week I took the mickey out of the semi-literate "LibLabCon", VOTE UKIP commenters that infest our threads and, boy, did it go down badly.
These angry folk are not a random sample of Ukip supporters, as Farage would be the first to point out. But add our page views (up to two million a week) to other big-traffic sites where similar messages are left, and Ukip has a problem.
The bitter ranting of the party's supporters on comment threads is profoundly off-putting to Ukip-friendly voters who read politics blogs and are looking for reassurance that this is more than an insurgency.
Subtly argued defences of Ukip's policies, the sort that give them a three-dimensional quality, are notable by their absence.
My question to Nigel Farage is: supposing you do come second in the Euro-elections, how are you going to stop your internet groupies going completely apeshit when they realise that Labour has overtaken them? It will be Conspiracy Central "under the line".
Small parties are fragile, as we saw at your conference (whose fiasco you handled with skill). I don't know how many clever people you have surrounding you, apart from Prof Tim Congdon (a hero among economists [which says all that needs to be said]), the formidable Patrick O'Flynn and well-briefed press officers.
But you need to acquire many more of them – fast – in order to come up with educated arguments to counter the idiot cries of "LibLabCon!"
Nigel Farage is so much more than a plain-talking bloke who enjoys a pint and a fag, quick on his feet in debate and always up for a laugh.
I've met him several times, heard him with his guard down over a boozy supper and had the chance to throw really sensitive questions at him.
What strikes me is how thoughtful he is, with a sharp instinct for the difference between PR setbacks that resonate only in Westminster and those that damage his party on the ground.
He's also a man who pushes himself far too hard for his or his party's health. He works crazy hours, under pressure from an excruciating back injury sustained when his plane crashed.
Still, at least for the past year or two he's been buoyed by Ukip's rising fortunes, many of them attributable to his good judgment.
The closet racists – to be found in every party, especially the Lib Dems – have been marginalised. Farage is not a racist, at all – and of how many leaders of Right-wing protest parties can that be said?
The Ukip manifesto is always a work in progress, like some East Coast professor's decades-old uncompleted novel, but tantalisingly close to a post-Thatcherite philosophy that addresses the real consequences of uncontrolled immigration, an impregnable public sector and the catastrophic mission creep of the EU.
But now Farage faces two problems that will tax his ingenuity. One is major, one (apparently) minor, and they're linked.
1. Support for Ukip may have peaked. I was very struck by John Rentoul in the Independent yesterday:
Ukip now has an unparalleled record for coming second.
Second in the Eastleigh by-election – beaten by the eclipsed Lib Dems, who show an extraordinary ability to hold on to what they have and lose their deposits everywhere else.
Second in South Shields, a Labour seat that was supposed to be the practice run for the Wythenshawe breakthrough.
And now, in light of a miserable 18 per cent share of the vote in Wythenshawe – miserable, that is, by protest-vote by-election standards – second in their share of the vote in the coming European Parliament elections in May too.
We hear that Ukip's showing in the local elections is more important in terms of predicting its vote in 2015. Maybe, but if Ukip doesn't top the poll in the Euro-elections then it will have been robbed of a victory that public opinion has taken for granted.
I wouldn't go so far as Rentoul in announcing "the end of the Ukip insurgency", but it will be a dark moment and support Rentoul's claim that Ukip has already taken as many votes off the Tories as it's going to. (Please also read Dan Hodges on this.)
2. Ukip's supporters are coming across as nuts online. Last week I took the mickey out of the semi-literate "LibLabCon", VOTE UKIP commenters that infest our threads and, boy, did it go down badly.
These angry folk are not a random sample of Ukip supporters, as Farage would be the first to point out. But add our page views (up to two million a week) to other big-traffic sites where similar messages are left, and Ukip has a problem.
The bitter ranting of the party's supporters on comment threads is profoundly off-putting to Ukip-friendly voters who read politics blogs and are looking for reassurance that this is more than an insurgency.
Subtly argued defences of Ukip's policies, the sort that give them a three-dimensional quality, are notable by their absence.
My question to Nigel Farage is: supposing you do come second in the Euro-elections, how are you going to stop your internet groupies going completely apeshit when they realise that Labour has overtaken them? It will be Conspiracy Central "under the line".
Small parties are fragile, as we saw at your conference (whose fiasco you handled with skill). I don't know how many clever people you have surrounding you, apart from Prof Tim Congdon (a hero among economists [which says all that needs to be said]), the formidable Patrick O'Flynn and well-briefed press officers.
But you need to acquire many more of them – fast – in order to come up with educated arguments to counter the idiot cries of "LibLabCon!"
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