Unrestrained by colleagues, he increasingly warned of the threat to Dutch identity, and in particular to the country’s liberal identity. He warned that multiculturalism was not working and was instead seeing the growth of parallel societies, especially in the growth of Muslim ghettos. He warned that it was ‘five minutes to midnight’ and that Holland had only this brief window to turn itself around. Combined with an innate showmanship and a refusal to play the media’s games on its own terms, in the run-up to the 2002 election it looked as though the population was willing to trust Fortuyn with their country. His political opponents threw everything they had at him. They said that he was a racist. They said that he was Hitler. The more moderate opponents compared him to Mussolini. In a television interview shortly before he died Fortuyn talked of the threats to his life that were coming in and said that if anything were to happen to him his political opponents, who had so demonised him, should take some of the responsibility for lining up the assassin.

They didn’t, of course. Just over a week before the election, as Fortuyn was leaving a radio interview in Hilversum a man in his thirties shot him in the head repeatedly at close range. The nation took a deep breath for fear that the killer might turn out to be a Muslim. But the culprit turned out to be a far-left vegan activist who at his subsequent trial explained that he had killed his victim because he felt Fortuyn was targeting Muslims. In the aftermath of the murder the Netherlands went into mourning, and in the ensuing election voters gave Fortuyn’s party the largest number of seats, a gift it repaid by petty infighting and a total inability (perhaps inevitable given the swiftness of their rise) to deliver on its mandate.

The Dutch public’s desire to deal with their challenges at the ballot box were thwarted. And although those who picked up his political mantle included Geert Wilders (who left the main VVD ‘liberal’ party also to form a party of his own), none of Fortuyn’s successors were able to pick up the working-class and young entrepreneurial vote that Fortuyn had been able to appeal to. Although the murder of the man who would later be voted the greatest Dutchman of all time shuttered one part of electoral politics, it did, however, allow the debate to widen in the society as a whole. It was not sustainable to believe that Fortuyn was a fascist and that a large proportion of the Dutch public supported a fascist.