‘There’s an earthquake coming on Thursday and none of us knows which bits of the edifice may come down.” Classic “Project Fear”! Unscrupulous fear-mongering! Scare the living daylights out of voters, and they will see sense.
The much-discussed “status quo effect” will then kick in, or so the reasoning goes, as the electorate comes to realise that the devil they know is perhaps the safest bet.
Except, of course, that the quotation above is a, perhaps inadvertent, admission of the cataclysmic potential of this vote by a leading Leave campaigner, former Tory Party chairman Liam Fox.
The problem is that you can't, at one and the same time, logically argue that the Remain campaign is both wrong and "scaremongering" to predict substantial consequences for a Brexit, while making the case that a UK departure would be momentous for UK Inc.
It seems that the sense of what is being engaged in is sinking in at last – on both sides, politicians have been speaking about Thursday’s vote as the most important they will cast in a generation.
It is dawning too, at this late stage, on the proponents of Remain that they may actually lose, and on the UK’s bewildered friends across the EU – yes, their fellow member states are for the most part well-meaning friends as well as partners – that the British people are really in serious danger of committing this act of national self -sabotage.
Markets have become jittery, the pound already declining. Because Brexit is now not just a threat to the British economy but – as the Financial Times puts it – “has emerged as the biggest short-term risk, bar none, to the global economy”.
The OECD predicts losses to the EU economy of 1 per cent of GDP by 2020 if Leave wins. Not to mention the well-rehearsed likely effects on this neighbour’s vulnerable open economy.
The death of MP Jo Cox has changed the debate subtly. Not least in the fire that prime minister David Cameron manifested on Sunday night in front of a large and mostly hostile TV studio audience.
In invoking the MP's spirit , he framed the debate effectively as a clear choice between the sort of tolerant Britain she had fought for and an intolerant Britain of the Ukip leader Nigel Farage which "divides rather than unites".
While the Leave campaign focuses its fire on the case that migrants are swamping an overstretched NHS, Remain has gambled its last cards on identifying the Leave cause with the Trump-like excesses of Farage and Boris Johnson.
By its friends shall the cause be known . . . The not-forlorn hope is that that strong, silent place of One-Britain conservative decency that is Middle England, that constituency which, to the surprise of all, re-elected Cameron and which he knows better than anyone will reject the strident siren calls of insurgent English nationalism.
And surprise the pollsters.