Everyone Was a Loser in the Nigel Farage Vs. David Cameron EU TV Debate

Apparently Nigel Farage didn't drink for a week coming into this debate. To put that in perspective, that's like you or I refraining from drinking for the rest of our natural lives, then getting pig organ transplants so we could live on as sad half-pig half-human chimeras and continuing not to drink for a further 30 or 40 years.

Point being: Farage feels he was put on this planet to live out the next two weeks. If he loses, he will be a footnote to history, no more remembered than Henry Campbell-Bannerman. If he wins, he reckons he's Charlemagne in pinstripes. That's got to be worth laying off the sauce for a few more sleeps.

Which is probably why he turned up in the ITV studios looking like he'd had a vitamin and Solero enema, for the first time in his life advertising the fact that he's actually only three years older than Nick Clegg. He was crisp and extremely well drilled.

Farage didn't want to talk about immigration. Of course not. No, he wanted people to ask him about immigration, so he could respond at extreme length to their questions. And so it proved. Leave have sprung back into the hunt in the past ten days – polls are now tied – entirely because, after a detour into taking the moral high road, they've belatedly realised that if you're MGMT, you've got to play "Kids" even if you're sick of that cockamamie shitstick ditty. If you're the Rolling Stones, you can't leave the stage without "Satisfaction".

So "Immigration (Australian Points Based System)" was soon the sweet lil' love song Nige was cooing to the people of Britain. He knows only too well how it's moving the needle for Leave.

Inevitably, it wasn't long before things took on shades of Question Time audience-angst. The debate began to circle the sort of all-heat no-light level that always ends with phrases like "Well I would if you'd just let me finish madam".

Then, just when you thought it would never move on from idiots bellowing "racist" or "build more houses" or "they don't want to work", the next questioner began interrogating the post-Brexit efficacy of SEPA – the Single European Payment Agency, which covers intra-continental money transfers. Then, a man from the pharmaceutical industry who'd snuck past security got to ask about how being a member of the EEA but not the EU precludes acting as a European supply base for certain drugs. Facts were loose in the room. How had this happened?

To say "Win or lose, we've learned a lot" would be like saying "Alive or dead, Dad really enjoyed playing Russian roulette", but a by-product of all of this intense scrutiny has been a big involuntary jolt of education to the British people. We may still lose the EU, but at least we'll have finally worked out what it was.

Who, six weeks ago, could have told you that £350 million is a gross contribution, and accounting for what comes back, we send only £150 million to the EU each week? Now, there are eight-year-olds up in Dunstable who will sigh and roll their eyes as they walk you through the returned breakdown of Somerset's CAP farm subsidies and how the Regional Development Fund pays for Welsh social grants in Merthyr Tydfil.

Earlier, Farage had been castigated for demonising black people with scaremongering language. He responded that he wanted to close the EU's open border precisely to open things up to the Commonwealth, which would mean more black people. Now confusingly there was an Asian guy who was angry at David Cameron – he wanted less migration because he couldn't get a doctor's appointment. "Well, you're Asian – I'm sure there must be someone in your family with a medical degree," Cameron clearly wanted to say, but stuck to his line about how there were "good and bad ways" to control migration, reiterating the useless hood ornaments he'd won in his February re-negotiations, leaving the guy to think that a "good way" was probably to leave.eu, and a "bad way" was whatever Cameron had just said.

Again and again, the PM was forced back onto the ropes of Farage's trump card, and his own trumping economic case became a distant hum. And however much PR man pizzazz he threw at it, he couldn't sound like a man who'd just had a vitamin enema. In fact, he sounded tired of banging his own drum. In fact, he sounded increasingly anxious.

"Whether we leave or whether we don't, are you finished as PM?" one questioner grinned back at him. And in that moment, it felt a bit like Cameron had offered us all a periscope into his personal going-to-school-with-no-pants nightmare – the glare of the spotlights on him and sixty five million people pointing and laughing. How a promise he never expected to keep and an election he shouldn't have won lead to a referendum he never wanted and a fall that now seems unavoidable is a decent definition of Shakespearean tragedy.

But even if Dave couldn't get his numbers across last night, that's not what it's going to come down in the end: the jumble of statistics, the confusing Powerballs of IFS, BoE, IEA, OECD or IMF will be forgotten, and it'll revert to how people feel in their boots about their country. "Don't be Farage's little England" was the soundbyte Cameron kept hammering that cut through. "A nation in control of its destiny" was Farage's.

If Britain sleepwalks to the exit on the basis of The Free Movement Of Peoples, it will be tragic because once you take that out of the equation, no one bar half a dozen desiccated Tory grandees has ever cared enough about the day-to-day mitherings of CAP or SEPA or the European Arrest Warrant to bother rolling the dice on a Brexit.

Yet I can't help but feel a mounting sense that momentum is moving one way: the country is getting ready to stab itself in the back. That the appearance of virtue – of being a terribly sporting fellow who thinks it jolly decent that 28 disparate countries should all have rights of citizenship here – is what we're still telling each other. But then, in the holy silence of the ballot box, the dagger will be drawn against the foreign man. Either that, or in the same booth we'll smother ourselves with our fear – hand hovering, we'll realise that the unknowns of leaving are simply terrifying, and all turn to quivery custard.

Fear or anger, neither is a pretty way to forge a national destiny.

@gavhaynes

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