Nigel Farage: The Ukip Nightmare Before Polling Day Keeping Leaders Awake

It is the nightmare before polling day, the visions that keep political leaders awake at night in a cold sweat wondering if their worst fears of what the voters might inflict on them are about to become reality.

They all have them and, with the current wave of anti-politics and anti-politicians fever apparently gripping the nation, the next election – which will be upon us before we know it – could be the most unpredictable for decades.

So, in the spirit of the season, IBTimes UK has invoked the Ghost of Parliaments Yet to Come and looked at the terrors that might be awaiting them.

For David Cameron there are two names that send fingers of dread scuttling down his spine and snap him upright in his bed gulping for air - Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson.

No matter how hard he tries, the prime minister cannot exorcise these spirits who delight in tormenting him at every opportunity and hold out visions of what may befall his party after the next general election.

Ukip is every serious politician's darkest fear made flesh. A virtually single-issue party onto a really good popular issue, with a charismatic leader who hates the lily-livered liberal establishment and its cosy consensus just as much as the voters do, and with a pint in his hand, an easy quip and a perma-grin on his face appears to be one of them (appearances are indeed deceptive).

Nigel Farage promised to sweep away all the old dross and march the country out of the European Union, the source of all its troubles, into a golden new era under a fluttering Union Flag...etc, etc. Britain would be great again and Europe should quiver. Remind you of anything?

And after a sensational victory in the European parliament elections in 2014 he pulled off a remarkable coup. British voters decided he made such a good job of infuriating and terrifying the tradition parties, to everyone's great amusement, they gave Ukip 50 MPs in the general election and left Cameron hanging from the nearest figurative gibbet.

Rebel Eurosceptic Tories and their fellow travellers immediately smelt the coffee and decided to throw in their lot with the new great leader whose face was then plastered over every front page and website in the country and whose New Independent United Kingdom Party marched into the Commons in a single phalanx chanting "We Are the Champions" and promising not to bother with a referendum on the EU because the voters had spoken: "Out, out, out". So out it was.

And then, with impeccable timing, the figure of Boris Johnson loomed into view. Johnson had sneaked into parliament in Richmond after Cameron U Turned on a Heathrow runway and Zak Goldsmith stood down and handed the seat to the Mayor, now known as two-jobs Johnson.

He had immediately embraced Farage, albeit in true classical Boris style, with a dagger under his toga, and offered a coalition with the few Tories who had not already scuttled back to their constituencies muttering about by-elections. And so, the UK Unity Government was born and the good old Conservative party was buried along with its tree logo.

This particular nightmare ends with a blood-and-guts dagger fight between Johnson and Farage after they fall out exactly two weeks into the coalition over who gets they key to the No 10 executive lavatory and the new Marxist Labour Party seizing its moment – and power.

Then there is Labour. A "Very Red Ed " Miliband went into the election promising to nationalise the power companies, the water companies, the transport companies, the banks and Waitrose.

His right hand man, Ed Balls, had already been sacked from his post as shadow Chancellor after a row over whether the nationalisation programme should be done with or without compensation and instead started creating an Ed Army of socialist workers in every constituency around the country, ready to answer the call to arms if and when it ever came. It came.

Labour's election campaign itself had been a disaster as the media decided to dig up all the old stories about Miliband once being a member of a Satanist Cult, which he denied but which only further proved his guilt, obviously. And anyway it's in cuts (Later investigations suggested they may have got it mixed up with a Stalinist Cult).

The BBC came under concerted attack from the Daily Mail and Tory HQ for running the denials, which proved the Corporation was in the conspiracy as well. So they stopped.

And then Miliband's worst dream came true. Len McClusky had a fatal heart attack without telling anyone the combination to the safe where all the union's election funds were kept. Labour was left virtually bankrupt and ended the election campaign using only Twitter to communicate to voters.

That didn't really help much either because electricity prices had gone so high at the prospect of a Labour government that no one turned on their computers any more preferring to heat rather than tweet.

Still, there was some good news. Because no one really knew what Labour stood for by the end of the campaign, other than the fact Ed Miliband was a Satanist, quite a lot of them ended up voting for the party anyway.

And thanks to the vote-splitting effect of Ukip and a raft of other smaller right wing, parties, Labour still did quite well. And Miliband struck an informal alliance with Russell Brand's The Unorthodox Paradigm Party for Youth (Yes, uiniversally known as UPP You), giving them enough numbers to seize power when Johnson and Farage assassinated each other and the Unity Party disunited.

This nightmare ends with Ed Miliband facing a revolt from the Ed Army and being forced to resort to the old ice pick strategy for neutralising Balls.

Oh, and Nick Clegg has a nightmare too. It is a short, recurring nightmare. One of the two big parties wins a majority.