Dear old badger watching Ron Davis had his moment of madness at Gobblers Gulch on Clapham Common. And Gerald Rattner’s witty speech at an Institute of Directors conference that his jewellery company’s products were ‘absolute crap’ went flatter than a trainer bra, destroyed his business, and his reputation. Nigel Farage is following closely in his footsteps. Gerald Rattner’s Mr. libel lawyer, not Ron Davis’s.

By confessing that the 2010 UKIP manifesto ‘was 486 pages of absolute drivel’ which neither he nor his party leader read was an act not of candid bravery but of political suicide. I suppose it is a delicious irony that what will ultimately destroy him was that his remarks were the copper bottomed truth. His problem is how he squares this with the thousands who flocked to his party, who are threatening Tory Marginals and are sending many backbenchers into a blind funk. People don’t like to be told that their hard earned money has been spent on tasteless crap and they will feel angry and humiliated that they have been stupid enough to support a party whose very foundations are laid on a mixture of bile, drivel and mindless prejudice.

It can’t be long before we have the first calls for Farage to go. Let’s wait for a serious hatchet job in the Sundays. And I can hear the whir of YOU GOV’s electoral calculator assessing the impact of it all. UKIP have been hovering around the 12 to 14% mark for over a year. I suspect that there will be a steady flattening over time.

I understand Farage’s strategy. The 2010 manifesto was dangerous and ludicrous nonsense and in the run up to the Euro and general elections the press will have a field day reminding us all of every dopey policy. It had to be jettisoned. The trouble is he wrote the forward to it. ‘Time for straight talking’ and hilariously, ‘Britain will not be fooled’. Sadly, droves of them were.

But not any more.

How can he retain a shred of credibility when he claims that he never read it? It is as if the Pope had denounced the bible and then claimed that he had never even bothered to dip in. It is an insult to our intelligence. I am not sure how long it will take to filter through to the public; but it will.

One of the many insoluble problems is that the KIPPERS are very much a one man band. He is the the ringmaster of their whole ghastly circus, trying to hold it together while the clowns are falling off ladders, throwing custard pies and the performing seals are honking out a discordant national anthem on bicycle horns. And who will take over when he is ousted? Imelda Marcos, General Pinochet or Roger Helmer?

And as for David Campbell Bannerman the author of the manifesto? I knew his was an MEP who re ratted to the Tories, but I discovered yesterday to my mild amusement that he is my MEP. I will not be voting in May.

Gerald Kaufman once said that labour’s 1983 manifesto was the ‘longest suicide note ever written’. It has now been eclipsed.

Come on UKIP voters, wake up and smell the fuckoffee. And those Tories who want to have an alliance with them might just have begun to realise that it would be a death clinch. I wonder how many of them read the manifesto. That strange whiff in the air is of YFronts beginning to fill.