Matthew d'Ancona: Stop pandering to Nigel Farage and tell it how it is

A better question is: how has Farage got away with it? A large part of the answer lies in the cunning with which he has fed off the lack of trust in the political class. When Cameron said he would resign rather than “barter away” his referendum promise in future coalition negotiations, he was trying to dramatise his scale of priorities and the importance he attaches to the European question. Yet the caller’s response was the response to which all mainstream politicians have grown wearily accustomed: nobody believes you.

As Opposition leader, Cameron played his part in encouraging this culture. Time and again, he would goad Gordon Brown with the words: “You can’t believe a word he says.” As Robert Peston’s brilliant book on Brown revealed, he had said much the same to Tony Blair: “There is nothing that you could say to me now that I would ever believe.” Spin, sleaze, the Iraq dossiers, the expenses scandal, the Lib-Dems’ U-turn on student fees: all have fostered the modern orthodoxy that you can tell when a politician is lying because his lips move.

As far as his own natural supporters and many defectors to Ukip are concerned, Cameron’s fall from grace was marked by his conduct over the Lisbon Treaty — the re-packaged, spray-painted EU Constitutional Treaty. In September 2007, the Tory leader used an article in the Sun to offer a “cast-iron guarantee: If I become PM a Conservative government will hold a referendum on any EU treaty that emerges from these negotiations”. Yet in November 2009, when it became clear that all 27 member states were going to ratify the treaty and that it would enter EU law, Cameron declared the promise null and void. This was sound jurisprudence, but terrible politics — and looms over him still.

When the Tory leader was going through a rough patch in 2007, he took solace from the notion of “the Dip” as explained by the American marketing and cultural genius Seth Godin. He should return to the Wisdom of Godin to address his current predicament. In his classic guide, All Marketers are Liars, the great guru identifies “authenticity” as the heart of any winning strategy. The unprecedented scrutiny implicit in digital culture means not only that liars are found out, fast. So, too, are “tepid, compromised approaches to storytelling…. Compromise is the enemy of authenticity”.

This, I think, is the heart of the matter. Cameron is appalled by Ukip, its methods and what it stands for. He wants to stay in the EU on renegotiated terms, not pull up the drawbridge. He accepts that immigration is an administrative mess — hence Theresa May’s Immigration Bill — but is at ease in modern, multi-ethnic Britain, regards civility as the glue of our society and deplores bigotry in all its forms (as it happens, he sacked Patrick Mercer in 2007 from the Tory front bench for saying phrases such as “black bastard” were part-and-parcel of life in the armed forces). He believes Farage is playing with fire when he alleges that mass immigration has made parts of this country “unrecognisable” and that the Ukip leader’s perma-grin is the smile of recklessness.

This is not, however, what the PM says these days. Fearful of upsetting Ukip defectors, Cameron is more careful than he used to be (the compromise against which Godin warns), declaring only that a vote for Farage is a vote for Miliband (an argument that puzzles most outside Westminster) and that the best way to secure a referendum is to vote Tory.

I think the public can sense this reticence a mile off and it is massively to Cameron’s disadvantage. In 2006, he said that Ukip was a “bunch of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”, and did so with panache and conviction. He should say so again, as soon and as often as possible. It is what he thinks, which the voters would grasp. And it has the merit — always handy — of being true.