The tragic death of Labour MP Jo Cox has taken some of the momentum out of the campaign to get Britain out of the European Union, Ukip leader Nigel Farage says.
His comment came as he was accused by George Osborne of "whipping up division" with a poster showing a column of migrants walking through the European countryside under the slogan Breaking Point, which the chancellor said was reminiscent of extremist literature produced in the 1930s.
But Mr Farage denied that he was attempting to stoke up hatred, insisting that in fact he had been the "victim" of such a campaign.
Speaking on broadcaster ITV, Farage said he believed that voters who had made up their minds to vote Leave would still turn out on June 23 to do so, but appeared to accept that the drive to win over waverers may have been hit by Cox's death after a violent attack outside her constituency surgery on Thursday, which led to a three-day suspension in campaigning.
"I think we have momentum," said the leading advocate of Brexit. "We did have momentum until this terrible tragedy. It has had an impact on the whole campaign for everybody."
Speaking earlier, Osborne said he hoped Mrs Cox's death would lead to "a less divisive political debate in our country" with "less baseless assertion and inflammatory rhetoric and more reasoned argument and facts".
He denounced Farage's poster - released just hours before the attack on Cox, and already the subject of complaints to the police over alleged racism - as "disgusting and vile".
"There are perfectly legitimate concerns about migration, concerns that are felt in every Western democracy in the world," said the chancellor.
"But I think there is a difference between addressing those concerns in a reasonable way and whipping up concerns, whipping up division, making baseless assertions that millions of people are going to come into the country in the next couple of years from Turkey, saying that dead bodies are going to wash up on the beaches of Kent, or indeed putting up that disgusting and vile poster that Nigel Farage did, which had echoes of literature used in the 1930s."
But Farage rejected the charge of stoking up hatred and said he was right to raise issues like the New Year sex attacks on women in the German city of Cologne and the arrests of four people "plotting to blow up Dusseldorf, who came in posing as refugees last year".
At current rates of net migration, Britain would have an additional 10 million inhabitants within 20 years - more than the number of people in Greater London - he said.
