I have the voice to persuade the ‘undecideds’, boasts Farage
Ukip leader challenges Cameron to a live TV debate over EU membership – and tells Johnson to ‘man-up’ and support Out campaign – as he hits the road to convince voters that the UK will be safer and better off outside the union
‘HAVE you had your glass of wine?” asks Nigel Farage, clutching his own goblet of Italian red. The campaign-hardened Ukip leader is addressing a fresh-faced young man, seated to his right, in the manner of a protective uncle. “I’m training him,” Mr Farage confides.
The young man in question happens to be a Conservative MP. The pair are about to take the stage together at Manchester Central convention centre to rouse an audience of several hundred anti-EU campaigners for the referendum battle ahead.
“I’ve had half a glass,” Tom Pursglove, the 27-year-old Tory, replies. “It worked very well last time.”
Mr Farage and Mr Pursglove are becoming regulars on stage together at events organised by their crossparty Grassroots Out campaign.
Their first rally, in Kettering, Northants, attracted an audience of 2,500 on a Saturday afternoon last month. This evening’s event, on a wet Friday night in Manchester, is less well attended, although the list of speakers is still impressive: Graham Brady, the grandee who chairs the 1922 Committee; David Davis, who was David Cameron’s rival for the Tory leadership; and Kate Hoey, the senior Labour MP.
Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Farage challenges Mr Cameron to a live debate with the Leave campaign leader – a role he says he would gladly take on.
He reveals his anger at the war between rival Leave groups. And he tells Boris Johnson to “man up” and campaign for Brexit. What does Mr Farage believe will be the defining issue in the referendum, pencilled in for June?
“This cause is very emotive. It always has been,” he says.
“The evidence is, if you look at the polling of undecided voters, by far the top issue that could swing them to ‘Out’ is, not just immigration, but security,” Mr Farage says.
The Prime Minister has already made it clear that he will press the case for Britain’s continuing EU membership on economic and national security grounds.
The argument has already been made – and is set to be repeated endlessly in a strategy known as “Project Fear” until polling day – that quitting Europe would leave Britons economically vulnerable, and fundamentally weakened in the fight against terrorists, for which we rely on our EU partners.
But for Mr Farage and his allies the question is whether Britain would be safer from migrants – and terrorists – outside the EU.
“It is about border control,” Mr Farage says. “It is about an Australianstyle points system [for migrants], it is about perhaps being a bit fairer to British working people.”
He suggests Ukip MEPs could vote against Mr Cameron’s “pathetic, paltry” new deal for Britain in the European Parliament because it fails to address any of the major problems with the EU, such as open borders.
Mr Farage’s critics in the rival Vote Leave group, fear that focusing on immigration will put off swing voters.
Yet any of the arguments that Mr Farage and his fellow Eurosceptics seek to make will fail if they are drowned out in the noise of rival Leave campaigns fighting with each other.
“We have got to get our act together,” the Ukip leader says.
He is critical of two individuals, in particular – Dominic Cummings and Matthew Elliott, who run Vote Leave.
He blames them for rejecting offers to collaborate with Leave.EU, the rival campaign set up by Arron Banks, a businessman who has donated to the Tories and latterly to Ukip.
He suggests that Mr Cummings – a former aide to Michael Gove – does not want to leave the EU but only to get Britain to vote for Brexit in order to extract a better deal from Brussels.
Vote Leave, which is backed by Tory MPs and chaired by Lord Lawson, is “frankly just too Tory – and that’s no good”, Mr Farage says, arguing for an alliance that crosses party lines.
SURELY what the Eurosceptic “Outers” need above all is one united grouping through which to promote their message to voters? “Of course, which is why since October I have tried to broker a deal between these two groups.
“I was there last Friday with John Mills and Arron Banks again urging, pleading for them to come together and once again they refused. It’s about the fifth time that a very generous merger offer was refused.
“Elliott and Cummings refuse. They want it to be their show – so two paid apparatchiks should dictate what happens in the British referendum? I don’t think so. I am done with it.”
Once the Electoral Commission finally decides which of the two rival Leave groups to designate as the official campaign (Grassroots Out is not seeking designation), the question will soon turn to who should lead it.
Mr Farage rejects the suggestion from some commentators that he is too much of a divisive “Marmite” politician to play the part of figurehead.
“They’re wrong. If you poll it, the more exposure I get, those that would never vote for me anyway get angrier and angrier. But amongst the undecideds, no. I can persuade them. I am a voice that can sway some of those undecideds.”
He accepts that the Leave movement needs “a variety of voices” in order to win and has a pithy message for one potential contributor, Mr Johnson: “If you believe in what we are doing, man-up and come and join us,” he tells the Mayor of London.
Mr Farage says it is vital to hold a live on-camera debate during the campaign, arguing that the major obstacle will be whether Mr Cameron himself agrees to take part.
“I think it’s really important that there is a TV debate. The Leave campaign should find the three or four people who are best placed to take on the Prime Minister and poll it.
“Let’s find out from an independent poll who the best person is.”
Could it be him? “If somebody comes along who is obviously headand-shoulders the best person to do it, then fine. If not, then I would put my name in the ring.”
OF course he would. For Mr Farage, this referendum is the culmination of a political career that has taken Ukip from a fringe movement of mavericks to a mainstream party with a substantial number of councillors, more MEPs than any other British political party, and almost four million votes at last year’s general election (albeit for the return of just one MP).
He admits it means “a hell of a lot” to him, personally, to be preparing for the battle to get Britain out of the EU in the four months until June 23, the expected date of the vote.
“There were times when I wondered if I would become the patron saint of lost causes,” he says. “It’s fantastic. The idea that you can put country before party, conscience before career – I love it.”
But come June 24, when the result is expected to be known, the mission that has driven Mr Farage’s career will, in theory at least, have run its course.
What will he do when it is finally over?
“I will have to have a very good think. I can’t see beyond this referendum at the moment,” he says. “There are all sorts of possibilities. If I or Ukip are seen to have played a very big role in this, then there are other things that will come by. I just don’t know.
“Will you excuse me?” he says. “I’ve got to go and say hello to a few people.”
‘There were times when I wondered if I would become the patron saint of lost causes’