Farage is loathsome – but he may become a saviour for Remainers if his Brexit Party splits the Tory vote

Nigel’s heroism knows no bounds in stepping back from taking an eighth run at parliament, but if he stops Boris getting a mandate many across the country will be cheering

Nigel Farage is no more a guy to do things by halves than to drink them in view of a camera, when the foaming pewter pint is his everyman identifier of choice.

Yet even by his stellar standards, the two JFK moments he manufactured this Sabbath left the BBC1 viewer reeling in stupefaction.

None who saw it will forget where they were when Farage revealed he won’t be standing for parliament. Nor will they forget where he was when he revealed it.

Back in September, after a ferocious savaging from the ovine Andrew Marr, Farage vowed never again to appear on the BBC. Summoning the Dunkirk spirit, he likened that experience to being a Nazi on trial at Nuremberg.

It pays tribute to his stoicism that he was prepared to revisit the scene of that trauma so soon. The BBC may not have hosted such pure courage before. You might make a case for the Doctor returning to Skaro to renew hostilities with Davros. But never in a non-fictional context.

Had Farage limited his self-sacrifice to that, you’d adopt the position he takes in Donald Trump’s presence. You’d be on your knees to him, with a family-size tube of Vaseline in one hand and the cash deposit for a holiday villa in his colon in the other.

Yet the heroism went deeper. For Farage to abandon his Commons dream, after only the seven failed attempts, and with the Brexit Party polling in single figures... words cannot do justice to the selflessness.

So rather than restrict himself to one constituency, Farage will be touring hundreds in his noble quest to… but this is where it gets trickier, due to a tiny question mark about motive.

So many of his erstwhile fans in the national press are turning on him, and in such similar terms, that you might almost – I must stress the almost – wonder about a joint endeavour coordinated with Downing Street.

Anyway, they all seem to agree with Aaron Banks, his old confrere, that the source of Farage’s antipathy to Boris Johnson’s deal is ego. All Nigel really wants, claims Banks (harshly, you may feel, given his reversal of that BBC boycott) is oodles of airtime on the telly.

It is agonising to watch a schism develop between those welded together by shared hatred of privilege. Banks, the quarter billionaire with diamond mine in Lesotho, was such a dear, dear friend to Farage, the anti-establishment warrior in the gratis private jet. Now the Bad Boys of Brexit movie needs a poignant new ending.

The ending to Brexit itself may also need a rewrite. Farage didn’t become Britain’s single most influential political figure since Thatcher by being a poor communicator. We snorted at him and his vulgar messaging for years, until we awoke one June morning in 2016 to find he’d nicked our country.

This election will turn on a wide cabal of factors, as elections generally do, but currently the most decisive appears to be whether Farage still has that oratorical touch, or whether he’s a busted flush.

If the ultra Brexity share the Banks view, and ascribe Farage’s megaphone yell of treachery to attention-seeking deficit order, it will be the end of him as anything grander than a second-rate shock jock and galaxy class Trump sycophant.

But if his screechings about Brextrayal gain enough traction seriously to suppress the Conservative vote, specifically in the traditional Labour northern strongholds the party needs in droves to offset the expected Lib Dem and SNP gains at its expense… who knows?

No one knows. This is the only thing, not to be too Rumsfeldian, everyone knows. The unreadability of this election is absolute. Dramatic regional variations, tactical voting on a massive scale and generally extreme volatility threaten to make national opinion polling more risibly useless than ever.

But what evidence there is suggests that for every vote the Brexit Party costs Labour, it will take two from the Tories. In one of those delectable little ironies that garnish the Brexit banquet, Farage is the Remainer’s current BF.

The first days of campaigning produced two lines from unnatural allies which Labour would be bananas not to quote ad nauseam.

One came from John Major, who sounds close to joining Matthew Parris and possibly Ken Clarke by coming out for the Lib Dems. “The NHS is about as safe with them,” said Sir John of Johnson, Michael Gove and Iain Duncan-Smith, “as a pet hamster would be with a hungry python.”

If that’s one for a Labour poster campaign, another is Farage’s analysis, as confided to Marr, that the Johnson deal is “virtually worse than staying where we are”.

We could argue the toss about the need for that “virtually”, but this is not the moment to fixate on adverbs.

For now, the odds remain prohibitively on a Johnson government. Aggregate the betting market expectation of a Tory majority and having most seats in a hung parliament, and it adds up to about 95 per cent.

But now tends not last very long at the minute. Thanks to the human-frog hybrid with the death rictus grin, what was murky enough before is more opaque.

Looking to Farage for a saviour isn’t dignified. If the thought puts you in need of a scalding hot shower, take your place in the queue because I’ve got dibs on first crack at the soap.

But if he plays a part in getting us our country back, he’ll want rewarding with more than the peerage with which he says Johnson has twice tried to buy him off. The Dukedom of Mar-a-Lago itself wouldn’t cut it. After managing a second miracle to cancel out the first, he would deserve a sainthood.