After Nigel Farage’s press conference would you say he’s gone from his job or has he stayed?

The margin was two votes, which is really no margin at all — but the shape beneath it tells the sharper story. Voters did not divide neatly by generation or gender so much as by instinct about political theatre: some saw a man stepping back, most saw a man staging a comeback.

Age produced the oddest fault line. The 55-64s and 25-34s were the closest thing to convinced he'd gone, both leaning yes by roughly two to one, while the 45-54s dug in against that reading and the over-65s were almost unanimous that he hasn't gone anywhere at all. Men and women, by contrast, barely disagreed — both split a shade over half in the same direction, yes, suggesting this was a generational read rather than a gendered one.

The pattern echoes the wider scepticism about Farage's career of exits that never quite are — UKIP, the Brexit Party, "retirement" from the Coalition of five years' vintage. A resignation timed to a funding scandal, framed as an accountability exercise and contested by the man resigning, was never going to read as a clean departure to a self-selecting online electorate already primed to doubt him.

If Farage wanted this to look like judgment day, the judgment was a coin toss that fell his way — against him.