Every dog has its day, as the saying goes. And Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) is certainly making the most of his. From being considered as something of a laughing stock, he now stands on the threshold of overturning the political status quo – if he can hold his nerve.
How far UKIP’s star has ascended can be judged by how Mr Farage was viewed just a few years ago. During the 2010 general election, Mr Farage nearly lost his life when a light aircraft he was travelling in crashed soon after take-off.
There he was, captured by a bystander’s camera, sitting in a muddied field, surrounded by mangled rotor blades and shattered glass, bloodied, disorientated and crying for help.
Many politicians would have been fatally wounded (politically if not physically) by such demeaning images. Yet Mr Farage has bounced back to the point where he could hold the balance of power in Westminster at the next election.
Although neither would thank me for saying so, Mr Farage shares a political trait with another larger-than-life British political figure: Boris Johnson, London mayor.
Both have deliberately moulded their images into caricatures. In Mr Johnson’s case, his carefully cultivated persona is that of bumbling buffoon – someone who spends most of his time with his foot in his mouth, and who takes great delight in making himself look foolish.
Mr Farage’s persona is less extreme but equally wily. He is the man on the street. With a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other, he is neither smooth nor suave. On the contrary he revels in being cocky, opinionated and full of blokeish bonhomie.
UKIP has prospered in the polls, attracting disaffected voters from the mainstream parties. Earlier this month it achieved a stunning victory in the once safe Conservative seat of Clacton-on-Sea, overturning a huge majority and gaining its first seat at Westminster in the process. No matter that the UKIP candidate who triumphed was the former Conservative MP for the town, Douglas Carswell, whose defection triggered the election.
Nobody in Clacton seemed to mind that by voting UKIP they were merely voting for the same man with a different rosette in his lapel. As one voter put it, without any noticeable irony, “Of course I voted for UKIP – why not? After all, the Conservative MP here has done nothing for the town in years.”
Now another Tory MP has defected to UKIP, causing a by-election in Rochester and Strood, and promising another UKIP landslide. And suddenly nowhere is safe. Mr Farage knows it. The mainstream political parties know it and so do the MPs sweating anxiously in their constituencies. And thus the UKIP bandwagon rolls on.
But the trouble with jumping on a bandwagon is that you can realise, only too late, that it’s a hearse. Last week a crude attempt to gain yet more free publicity for UKIP backfired when a campaign song written by the former radio presenter Mike Read had to be withdrawn from sale after it was branded racist. Titled UKIP Calypso, the song satirised the political status quo and highlighted the fear of the effects of unbridled immigration on the British way of life.
Mr Farage did his best to fob the song off as “a bit of fun”. Yet in championing it in the first place, his sure touch had momentarily deserted him. And yet even this embarrassment doesn’t seem to have done him or his party any lasting damage. And who knows? If David Cameron, the British prime minister, fails to deliver a healthy majority come the general election next year, we could still see a minority Conservative administration, led by Mr Johnson and dependent on Mr Farage and his small group of newly-elected UKIP MPs.
Johnson and Farage. They may sound like a comedy double act – but they could be the ones laughing loudest next May.
Michael Simkins is an actor and writer based in London
Twitter: @michael_simkins