Nigel Farage has signed off with his most sinister speech yet

The Ukip leader has stood down for a third time, but not before warning the government he will be keeping his eye out for 'appeasement'

Nigel Farage has stood down as Ukip leader (Reuters)

It was typically Faragian, in the moment of this, his hat-trick completing resignation as Ukip leader, for Nigel to cast himself as the Churchill of the hour.

“I want my life back,” he had said, cleverly quoting the exact words of ocean-blackening BP chairman Tony Hayward at the moment of the greatest public relations disaster in history, but Nigel Farage wasn’t done there.

“I mean, you know there will be a strong UKIP voice in the EU parliament during these re-negotiations,” he said, allaying fears that Nigel ‘soft power’ Farage’s Brussels charm offensive might have come to an end. “If we see significant backsliding or weakness, or frankly appeasement from the British government we will certainly say so.”

Even Boris Johnson realises that, having won the referendum (albeit by accident), the time for idly likening the European Union to the Third Reich might have been and gone. But thank goodness for Nigel, who won’t stand for, ‘frankly, appeasement’ as he continues to provide the cacophonous background music to his country’s self-inflicted implosion.

Churchillian Nigel. Eyes up for the gathering storm. In years from now, how we’ll laugh at the little toilet books, on the ‘Wicked Wit of Nigel Farage’, full of manly bonhomie about not wanting to live next door to a Romanian, people speaking foreign on public transport and going out for a chinky.

There is an old Mitchell & Webb comedy sketch in which a worried soldier on a wall looks at the iron skulls on his lapels and asks his friend: “Are we the baddies?”

You do have to wonder whether such a light bulb moment of self doubt has ever for a second crept upon Farage. Whether, while playing the Great Escape theme tune at the very same moment as you release a new publicity poster that is absolutely identical to Nazi propaganda, there might briefly flicker a thought that, hang on, maybe we’re not the ones trying to escape here.

As Philip Hammond and Theresa May both play the lilting mood music of mass deportation, that the status of EU migrants in the UK cannot be guaranteed, there is Nigel, letting everyone know there’ll be ‘no appeasement, no backsliding.’

If, come 2020, such backsliding has occurred, ‘watch this space’, he said. Ukip will look for a new leader, but like all cults, it knows it can’t have one. In Ukipland, ‘Watch this space,’ means look at me.