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"There's a strange, angry and uncertain mood out there," said veteran Tory Ken Clarke.
They were prophetic words. Two days later the Brexit war came to a terrible halt.
Murdered Labour MP Jo Cox. Photo: AP
Labour MP Jo Cox, a campaigner for Remain and a passionate believer in the rights of migrants and refugees, lay dying on a West Yorkshire pavement.
With reports the alleged murderer had shouted "Britain First" during the attack, the UK political world responded with shock and horror.
The campaign leading up to the UK's referendum on the European Union had already ranged from utopian promises to dystopian fears, but this was a whole new dimension. Now the fear was palpable: that the rancorous, accusatory atmosphere generated by the Brexit contenders' skirmishes on immigration and nationalism may have spilled into, or contributed to a political killing.
A vigil for Jo Cox in London's Parliament Square. Photo: Getty Images
The impact of Thursday's murder on the campaign is immeasurable, now and perhaps always.
But even before Cox's death, no-one could confidently predict the result. With just days to go before the UK votes on its membership of the European Union, polls suggested a slim majority of the British (or at least, of those intending to vote) were of a mind to walk through the exit door.
"A door has magically opened in our lives and we can now see the sunlit meadows beyond," had promised Brexit's golden-haired prophet Boris Johnson.
British Prime Minister David Cameron. Photo: Getty Images
Responded Europhile Ken Clarke: "I just find the whole thing extremely annoying."
If you believe the Brexiters, after a small phase of adjustment, it will be time to bask in those sunlit meadows: as an independent, dynamic, democratic nation free to trade with whomever it chooses, employ (or not) whomever it wants, fortify the borders and stick its fingers up to meddling Brussels bureaucrats once and for all.
If you believe the glum Remain camp, a storm is on the way: recession, job losses, capital flight, a plunging pound, higher prices in the shops and longer queues at the airports. Oh, and Scotland might leave the UK.
Fishermen and campaigners for the Leave campaign outside Parliament in London. Photo: Bloomberg
It wasn't intended to be this way. In 2013 David Cameron said it was "time for the British people to have their say … time to settle this European question in British politics". At the time, more than half the country was for "Remain" and barely a quarter for "Leave".
His promised referendum was meant, basically, to shut up a niggling minority of Tory MPs.
Instead, a harried-looking, tired Cameron may have answered his last Prime Minister's Questions at Westminster this week.
Boris Johnson described his case for Brexit as "liberal cosmopolitan". Photo: Bloomberg
The Prime Minister "wouldn't last 30 seconds if he lost the referendum", Ken Clarke told the BBC.
Gruff-faced Clarke, former chancellor and home secretary and now a "minister without portfolio" complains that the "30 seconds" quote is just about the only comment of his on Brexit that has surfaced in the media. But that hasn't stopped him touring the country pushing the Remain message.
"Towards the end of my career I'm engaged in just the same arguments and the same neurotic debate as I was when I started," he says, referring to the 1975 referendum on the UK's then-young European Economic Community membership.
Illustration: Richard Giliberto
"If you told me when I started in politics that I would be engaging in the same arguments 50 years later I would have told you that you had no understanding of the pace of change in 20th and 21st century life, but there you are."
He believes EU membership gives Britain a greater political voice and a greater ability to defend its interests. And the economic case is self-evident, he says.
"If we weren't in the EU we would give our eye teeth to have a deal which enabled us to have full access to the European single market, and [be] able to play a leading and influential role in setting the rules of that market."
Britain and the rest of Europe have benefited ever since, he says – and it's the basis on which the country attracts substantial investment.
Clarke believes the referendum was a "reckless, irresponsible" mistake from the start. In fact, he is against referendums full stop, and doubts they lead to good policy except by accident.
"The public are getting very bored and they are getting quite angry and irritated by the public debate," he says. "Almost all sane, sensible, intelligent, pleasant members of the public agree they don't know enough about the subject and would like to know more.
"But the reported campaigning is not going to add to anybody's knowledge of the subject."
He blames the "anti-European" media for ignoring "perfectly sensible" speeches and concentrating on "the Dave and Boris show" – but also senses deeper currents.
In his travels around the country making pro-Remain speeches, he has detected a mood of exasperation and uncertainty.
"The thing that's hit it is the thing that's hit every Western democracy on both sides of the Atlantic … that sense of angry protest that runs so strongly through the electorate of every country in Europe and certainly the United States.
"Anti-establishment, anti-political class feeling. Add to that a sense of resentment about the length of change. A majority of my age group are going to vote to leave … The discontented older generation of every social background and class are angry about what's happened in their lives, the changes.
"And they're easily roused to dislike the number of foreigners. To think there are too many foreigners coming here. To be annoyed by hearing foreign languages when they travel on the bus. To think the economy has changed, the whole basis of their jobs has gone, it's all very confusing.
"And it's very easy to say it's all the fault of Brussels … of grey unknown men now deciding everything for us, which is a comic mis-description of how the European Union works."
Some Leave campaign lines have focused on, for example, the so-called "Toaster Unit" of regulators in Brussels writing new rules to hobble toasters and hair dryers in the name of cutting carbon emissions and energy bills.
However if Britain votes Leave, it won't be for want of a steaming crumpet. It will be a vote out of fear: of immigrants.
Polls, analysts and vox pops all agree. Immigration has been the hottest, most divisive and decisive item on the Brexit agenda. Every attempt by Leave to make it about jobs, or the economy, has fallen flat in the face of the migration juggernaut.
Pub conversations concentrate on migrants who work longer for less than their UK competitors – "taking our jobs" (though the UK's unemployment rate just hit its lowest figure since 2005). Brexiters took up the lead from UKIP by talking up the strain on health care and education (though studies have shown the generally younger, mostly working-age migrants are net contributors to the exchequer).
Clarke says the British public – and indeed Europe in general – has been "seized by panic" on the subject of immigration, after a surge of refugees from North Africa and the Middle East. They were stirred further by spurious claims of "child molesters and all these people who are going to take our women at Christmas" among the migrant numbers, he said.
UKIP leader Nigel Farage this week tweeted a campaign poster claiming "Breaking Point – the EU has failed us all" over a 2015 image of migrants crossing from Croatia into Slovenia – never mind that not only were they headed for Germany rather than Britain, they were refugees, who the UK already has the power to accept or reject.
Johnson has also campaigned hard on the immigration front – a little more honestly, focusing on immigration from the EU which cannot be controlled as unfettered movement is a keystone of the treaties.
He said the failure to control net migration has been "deeply corrosive of popular trust in democracy", and led the UK to "push away brilliant students from Commonwealth countries, who want to pay to come to our universities; we find ourselves hard pressed to recruit people who might work in our NHS, as opposed to make use of its services – because we have absolutely no power to control the numbers who are coming with no job offers and no qualifications from the 28 EU countries".
Johnson described his case for Brexit as "liberal cosmopolitan".
"It is Brexit that is now the great project of European liberalism, and I am afraid that it is the European Union – for all the high ideals with which it began, that now represents the ancient regime," he says. "It is we who are speaking up for the people, and it is they who are defending an obscurantist and universalist system of government that is now well past its sell by date and which is ever more remote from ordinary voters."
In the London Evening Standard this week, he said the openness and dynamism of world-leading London was being straightjacketed by the sclerotic EU.
"The Euro-ideology is to … build a United States of Europe," he said, saying EU Commissioners were taking the seats on global forums where "Britain's distinctive and humane voice" was being drowned out.
But Leave – including Johnson – have been criticised for their constant shaking of what Nick Cohen in the Spectator called a "magic money tree": the EU membership fee, a disputed amount, but one estimated at £6.5 billion ($12.5 billion) a year.
Leave already earmarked this money for fixing the NHS. They have also used it to rebuild schools and refund scientific research in the absence of European grants. They have spent it many times over, in promises on housing, roads and railways. And they had some more left over to cut the deficit.
Economists don't just dispute the financial fruit of Brexit. They dispute the entire tree. When jobs and investment leave Britain after Brexit, they say, the loss of tax revenue would savage the budget and consumers will pay new tariffs on imports such as cars, computers, food and clothing.
On the outside, Europe is certain: they don't want Britain to leave. Not only would it hurt the union's bottom line and its clout on the world stage, it may also pose an existential threat.
Germany's foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said this week a vote to leave would "shake the union" and "throw Europe into another crisis that would not be easy to resolve".
"It would not just carry on as 28 [members] minus one. It would require concerted efforts to ensure that the union holds together and that a decades-long, successful integration effort does not end in disintegration."
There would also be a domestic political crisis. Cameron would, as Clarke points out, almost certainly have to resign. But "great harm" has been done to the party by the campaign, which saw government ministers denouncing key government policies, he says.
And as Times and Spectator columnist Matthew Parris put it, after surveying the political talent on the Leave side: "These people do not make a government. There are too many there that you'd want for your lively dinner party but would hesitate to leave in charge of your goldfish."
The government is, surprisingly, entitled to completely ignore the referendum. It may decide to interpret it as a will to "renegotiate" Britain's relationship with the EU instead.
But Cameron has said "the British people would rightly expect [a full Brexit process] to start straight away".
In that case, a majority anti-Brexit government will activate EU protocols for a two-year exit process. Convention dictates the decision must be ratified (or rather, may be voted down) by the heavy-majority-Remain parliament.
So, in the farcical days, weeks and months that follow the referendum, a government that doesn't want Britain to leave Europe would propose to do so, and a parliament that wants it even less would ratify the decision.
In such an Alice-through-the-looking-glass political climate, just about anything could happen.