The smears against Nigel Farage and Ukip have reached spectacular depths

Inevitably the lowest attacks have been saved until the week of the election. For months now the neat drip-feeding of anti-UKIP stories from Conservative Campaign Headquarters direct to the UK press has done everything possible to depict UKIP as a racist, xenophobic, bigoted party.

This has been significantly ratcheted up ahead of Thursday’s vote. Today’s pages include the Times repeating a story from last year in the hope of successful guilt-by-association. The story is that Geert Wilders (the ‘Dutch Xenophobe’ as the Times headlines him) would like Nigel Farage to join him and Marine Le Pen in an anti-EU Brussels voting bloc. What neither the Times nor any other newspaper wishes to give Farage any credit for is that he refuses to join that bloc precisely because of the presence in it of a party like the Front Nationale. And yet the press continues to attempt to portray Farage as leading a British National Front.

The depths to which this has sunk are pretty spectacular. For instance it now appears that the British media are perfectly content with vilifying and taunting Farage for having a German wife, because they believe they are doing so in a ‘liberal’ cause. At some point in recent days it seems to have become accepted wisdom that if you are married to a German then you should believe in an utterly unrestricted open door immigration policy. It also appears that to distinguish between different types of immigrant (as Canada and Australia do, to give just two examples) is to be deemed irredeemably ‘racist’.

But the lowest attack of all is now in, and it is of course the story that this was always building towards. And so it has come to pass that the papers are now repeating another story, and finally saying openly what they have wanted to say all these weeks: that Nigel Farage once used the ‘n’-word.