I never thought I would see the day that I, a Remainer, agreed with Nigel Farage on Brexit

Having worked in the media for nearly 25 years it takes a lot to bring me up short. Nigel Farage did that this morning.

The dark lord of Brexit has said that “maybe” there should be a second referendum on Britain’s EU membership.

For those who haven’t seen the clip from Channel 5’s The Wright Stuff his exact words were: “My mind is actually changing on this… So maybe, just maybe, I’m reaching the point of thinking that we should have a second referendum on EU membership… because we’d kill it off for a generation.”

Now, I am among those like Lord Adonis, Nick Clegg and Tony Blair, who Farage referenced during that interview, in that I’m one of those people who will never stop campaigning for Britain’s place in the EU.

Many hardcore Leavers forget that part of living in a democracy confers upon us the absolute right to do that.

But here’s where Farage was on the button: were they to win such a poll, none of us would be able to deny that the terms of the debate would be irrevocably changed.

It would just about be game over for a generation or more. Hardcore Remainers would become something like Ukip in reverse: a pressure group or a minority party.

The appetite for my current Brexit-bashing columns would rapidly decline because I imagine that many Remainers in the general public would say enough already. We’ve lost. Move on.

Contrast that with the situation we have today in which we live in a nation so starkly divided that the situation is almost untenable, with our two sides reduced to bawling at each other using rhetoric that gets progressively more incendiary.

That would need to end were Leave to win a second outing.

However, there are equally good grounds for questioning whether Farage’s belief that the result would be overwhelming in his favour is correct.

There are people who voted Leave who feel deceived by the claims of the two “out” campaigns, with the misleading pledge of £350m a week extra for the NHS made by the official one a particularly sore point. By the way, with patients dying in hospital corridors, we should make sure it gets that money regardless.

Claims were also made that the exit process would be a piece of cake, notably by Liam Stumbledore Fox, with his talk of magically securing an EU trade deal being “the easiest thing in the world”. Unsurprisingly his wand has proven to be wonky.

As such there are real questions of legitimacy about the last poll, which was close, and which saw the Leave result delivered by an ageing minority of the British population as a whole. Don’t even get me started on the dodgy campaign spending.

Lots of people have complained that they weren’t properly informed, and justifiably. There would be none of that were we to get a second bite at the cherry. The outline of a deal should be on the table. People would have a decent idea about where we stand.

Farage thinks that there are enough people out there who would, in that situation, still rate the economic harm as worth it for the blue passport and the chance to cry “Britain, über alles!” when they’re queuing up at immigration desks. Maybe he’s right. We ought to be given the chance to find out. On that, he and I would be in agreement, at least if he drops that “maybe”, for the first time ever.

The odds against it happening, however, remain long.

The Tory Brexiteers running the show aren’t as sanguine as he is. They know they’d face a toss-up. A few of them might secretly quite like the idea. One reason that the Brexiteers are so shouty and cross right now is that they are being held to account for the lies that they have told and the decisions they have made and are making. They’re at the tiller and that doesn’t seem to sit well with a body of people that has spent most of the last two decades chucking bricks from the sidelines.

One or two of the more intelligent Brexiteer Tories might also recognise the dangerous path down which they are walking. If I’m right, if my view comes to pass and the economic difficulties we are experiencing today are just the start of it, they face getting caught by a brutal electoral blowback led by angry millennials. The last election was just the beginning. It’s interesting to note that Iain Duncan Smith is now in a marginal. Chingford, the seat he inherited from the arch Thatcherite Eurosceptic Norman Tebbit, came within a couple of thousand votes of turning red.

A Tory nightmare of Jeremy Corbyn standing on the Downing Street steps – in spite of his own equivocation on the European question – could be just the start of it.

A double referendum win could, in a strange way, reduce the likelihood of that happening.

But only a minority of Brexiteer Tories see that, if they even exist.

Farage said that there would be “unfinished business” were Remain to have won last time around. So far only a minority see that the reverse is also true.

Still, the importance of what he said is undeniable.

Could this lead to him and his UKIP fanboys joining forces with the Liberal Democrats in campaigning for round two?

Remain’s greatest supporters getting into bed with a group that thinks the current proposals are no good because they don’t take us far enough out into the Atlantic.

That would be a truly bizarre occurrence and they’d be very strange bedfellows. But we live in strange times.