Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Has anyone seen Nigel Farage?

‘Ukip seems to have imploded,’ one ‘mainstream’ politician remarked to me yesterday. ‘We haven’t heard anything from them.’ True, Ukip have been rather quiet since Christmas, but anyone in the Tories or Labour who is dancing around imagining that they’re set fair for an election without Nigel Farage has got rather carried away. The truth is that Farage’s party has decided to stay a little quiet for a few weeks, at least while the main parties slug it out over who would really cut the deficit and who really cares about the NHS.

Sources tell me that they think the effect of all these launches, counter-launches, dossiers and dossiers debunking dossiers is to make the electorate even more fed up with mainstream politicians. They don’t need to do very much at all, other than let the parties get annoyed with each other.

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