Nigel Farage was banned from his local for allegedly crashing a car and walking away. Britain should do the same

Nigel Farage’s latest pre-election vehicular accident was less serious than his last.

Interviewed this week, he reflected sombrely on the light aircraft crash on the morning of the 2010 general election. “I’ve come out of it. It’s nine years on. I’ve come out of it. I’m physically a bit damaged by it, but not that badly.”

On Thursday, he walked away unscathed after his man of the people’s chauffeur-driven Range Rover allegedly collided with a Jaguar in a country road in Kent.

He strolled off, according to the driver of the totalled vintage Jag, without stopping to find out whether he or his screaming 13-month-old son was physically damaged.

Ah well, he had a Question Time appearance to prep for that night. He didn’t prep well, and got stumped when asked a simple question about trade agreements. But the signature bombastic ignorance has no more damaged him than reports of his indifference to the accident’s victims.

Farage could amble away from a car crash without asking after a crying baby’s health, to borrow the sentiment from his hero across the Atlantic, and not lose support. (Although, it should be noted that Farage himself denies fleeing the scene. Speaking to The Sun, he said: “Once I had ascertained that everyone was OK I made discreet withdrawal from the situation.”)

Nevertheless, fresh polls will cause panic among his political opponents, and ought to alarm us all. In one about the European elections, the Brexit Party leads on 34 per cent, 13 points ahead of Labour, with the Conservatives freefalling to 11 per cent.

But the real bowel-loosener, about general election voting intentions, has his Brexit Party on 20 per cent – one point ahead of the Tories, and seven behind Labour.

Replicated at the ballot box, those numbers would give Farage 49 MPs in a hung parliament in which Jeremy Corbyn would lead the largest party.

Obviously it would be foolish to assume the Brexit Party’s popularity over a single issue, Brextrayal, would survive close inspection of his policies across the range of domestic issues that decide general elections.

Don’t be very afraid. With the exposure of Farage’s immense limitations will presumably come the battalion of scandals that made following Ukip under his various commands such reliable pantomime fun.

Be quite afraid, though, because movement on the tectonic level is happening. It isn’t certain, or even likely, that it will cause a massive earthquake. But it isn’t certain, or even that unlikely, that it won’t.

It is entirely possible that within a year or two, Farage will be an MP at the helm of the third or fourth largest House of Commons presence – the launch pad from which he could realise his stated ambition to replace the Conservatives.

It is also possible that he will drive the Tories miles to the right as they try to prevent this. Either way, it’s conceivable that he is poised to make the simplistic brutalities of the far right as mainstream here as they are in swathes of central and eastern Europe.

He is richly blessed by his enemies. The Tories are basically a death cult, and Corbyn’s hopeless, craven second referendum meanderings find him blowing his chance to lead a decisive counter-attack against this distasteful insurgency.

But it is the Europhiliac parties who make you want to weep. If the Lib Dems, Change UK and the Greens, with their indistinguishable EU sensibilities, joined forces for the European elections, their aggregated support would (according to one poll) make their alliance competitive.

There are signs of a mini-revival for the Lib Dems, clearer signs that Change UK is already unravelling, and none of a dramatic surge for the Greens. Separately, they will at best struggle for any parliamentary impact, and vanish at worst. Together, they might have a significant role as refuge from the chaotic realignment that seems imminent either side of them.

Desperate times are coming, and the desperate measure of sublimating egos to work together is demanded. We can probably rely on Vince Cable and his successor, and certainly on Caroline Lucas and whoever technically leads the Greens, to have the sense to understand and decency to act on it.

Whether the same goes for Heidi Allen, Chuka Umunna and Anna Soubry, time will tell. But they should be in little doubt that, having screwed up the launch of Change UK, any political future they have as individuals must be as part of a centrist alliance in which there is no room for lack of humility.

For Farage, it is very different. His party’s future rests primarily on the man-of-destiny egomania. There was a time when exposure to that was reserved for the captive audience down the local in Westerham, Kent.

The good news for those drinkers is that the nightmare is over. The landlord of The George and Dragon, Patrick Tranter, is also the driver of the vintage Jag totalled on Thursday. After having his sore neck treated in hospital, he barred Farage from the boozer with this unoriginal but trenchant thought: “He’s a terrible, terrible human being.”

Perhaps he is. Perhaps he was too traumatised to hear the baby’s screams, or to recognise them as compelling cause to enquire after the child’s health.

But whatever the incident might reveal about him personally, it is easy to interpret it as a political metaphor. Farage crashed a country, and walked away without a backward glance, to try his luck in Washington.

That didn’t work out. Now he’s back, firing Brextrayal from his mouth like a beery dragon. So the question for the other parties, after they’ve been rammed and whiplashed on 23 May, is this: will they have the will and wit to work together to emulate Mr Tranter? Can they find a way to bar Farage?