Vote Leave was right to be cross Farage (not a member) was under the spotlight – his paranoia did little for their cause

DAVID CAMERON was doing that thing with his legs again. During his interrogation by the studio audience on Sky News last week, you may have noticed that the Prime Minister kept standing with his legs bizarrely far apart.

Last night, he was at it once more. Possibly it’s meant to make him look powerful, manly and authoritative. In reality, it makes him look as if he’s straddling an invisible St Bernard.

This was the latest of the televised referendum events. Again, it wasn’t a debate – Mr Cameron wouldn’t sign up to any – but at least on this occasion he deigned to appear on the same programme as his opponent.

This time he was up against Nigel Farage – a choice that angered the official Vote Leave campaign, of which Mr Farage is not a member. Vote Leave believed that Mr Cameron himself had insisted on facing the Ukip leader, rather than Vote Leave’s Boris Johnson, because he thought Mr Farage would be less popular with viewers.

In the event, Vote Leave’s fears looked to be justified. Mr Farage wasn’t being aggressive, and he was as eloquent as ever – but he was also prickly with paranoia.

“Independent” experts who advised against Brexit, he told the audience questioning him, were only “masquerading as independent”; really they were in the pay of the Government, or the EU.

A woman told him he was “anti-immigration”; denying this, he complained about a plot to “demonise” him.

In response to a question about his claim that EU immigration could increase the threat of sexual assault, he first suggested the press had misrepresented him, and then grumbled that it was only “a tiddly little issue” but “I knew the Remainers would come for me and blow something I said out of all proportion”.

The moment that must have anguished Vote Leave most, though, came when the Ukip leader clashed with a man in the audience who worked for a pharmaceutical firm. Scowling darkly, Mr Farage expressed his displeasure at the pharmaceutical industry for “putting out of business people who make alternative medicines”.

Attacking people who make real medicines for being unhelpful to people who make quack medicines. How Vote Leave must have groaned.

Then again, maybe not. After all, Michael Gove did say that “people in this country have had enough of experts”. Maybe he meant medical experts, too.

Next it was Mr Cameron’s turn to face the audience. At least, unlike on Sky News, he didn’t get heckled or insulted, but the questioning was still tough, especially on immigration. Mr Cameron preferred to talk about another subject: Nigel Farage. “He’s so keen to take us out of Europe,” he cried, “that he’s prepared to sacrifice jobs!” He also deplored “the Nigel Farage Little England option”. It’s funny, isn’t it. At the last election, Mr Cameron was desperate not to face Mr Farage on TV. Now, it seems, he’s all too happy.