Farage and the imminent apocalypse

The Observer has a piece by a bloke who has just written a book on Farage and British populism/published a video on Sky (which may have affected his objectivity? -- pass on). It is too late to affect the Euro elections but warns against future ambitions (and preserves a bogey to rally against):

Ukip was deeply and recognisably British. The half-colonels; the angry golf-playing uncles; the rankling over “elf and safety” and political correctness. Its pound-sign logo was almost quaint: It was a Britain Orwell would have recognised. Ideologically, too, its Euroscepticism mined a deep vein in British politics, tracing back to our entry in 1973, if not before...Politics has moved on – and so has Farage. Brexit now isn’t even his principal concern, its failure the mere embodiment of a wider malaise

There is naturally some dark artery at work:

People have spoken of the fear of the Americanisation (by which they really mean the Trumpification) of British politics. I followed Farage from his first rally to the last and I can assure them, it is already here. The tenor of the rallies, the rhetoric from the stage, the way the party’s messages are communicated. The bitterness, the anger, the contempt of the crowd, the boos for journalists. The crowd, young and old (often younger than you might imagine) united in believing the establishment is out to screw them and that feeling is viscerally raw.  

We need to wake up:

as hard as it might be for readers of this newspaper to believe, Farage, like Trump, for many people, represents salvation: that someone finally listens and understands. The bewilderment I suspect you feel upon reading those words betrays our Americanisation too, the importation of a culture war where the two sides have no conception of how the other conceives the world around them.

We might decide to blame all sorts of arrogant cosmo petit bourgeois persons in the media for that, but at last this article/book/video will remedy the deficit in understanding -- no it won't. Even if Farage comes a cropper, he might have won:

For Brexit party success will surely change the alchemy of the Tory makeup. Indeed, it already has, setting the seal on the end of Theresa May’s premiership and ensuring the all-but-certain election of a no-dealer in her stead. Far from a Conservative turn to the kind of broad, centrist Christian democracy to which Theresa May once aspired, her party may follow the Republicans in becoming a hard-edged populist movement. In an age where “one-nation” seems impossible and where we are at least two, Farage and his success will force them to choose. Out of fear, they will choose him.