At the start of the year, some of the air seemed to have gone out of the Ukip balloon. The party’s warnings about the scale of Romanian and Bulgarian immigration to Britain hadn’t been borne out by events. But the debates with Nick Clegg enabled Nigel Farage to get his momentum back. In those debates, Clegg was too passive in the first one and then over-compensated in the second with the result that he ended up losing both of them.
Clegg’s decision to not engage with Farage in the first debate meant that he missed his best chance to get under the Ukip leader’s skin. Strikingly, Farage admits to Decca Aitkenhead that if he had done that, he might well have lost his temper:
“”He really, really tried to dig me in the ribs in that second one, but I knew I was calm, I knew I was in control. I think if he’d gone down that line in the first debate, I might well have snapped.
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