There aren't many politicians who can walk through a town centre and be greeted warmly as if they were some kind of folk hero.

The public are generally pretty wary or disinterested - which is why most parties who organise political walkabouts make sure they have plenty of activists around to make sure they look popular.

Nigel Farage doesn't have to bother with this tactic.

He returned to the place of his general election defeat this week to launch the party's "Say No To The EU" campaign and managed to pack out Margate's Winter Gardens with a 1,000-plus audience, which the party said was its largest ever public meeting.

Admittedly, the bulk of those who cheered him to the rafters were Ukip supporters or members, but I doubt that any other party leader could have done the same.

As he walked through Ramsgate ahead of the first of what the party says will be 300 such rallies, a steady stream of people came up to chat with "Nige" as if he was an old friend.

After his bruising defeat in his quest to become the MP for South Thanet, he was back to his irrepressibly cheerful best and certainly looked a lot healthier than he had after the gruelling campaign in May.

The Farage bonhomie that had deserted him in the fractious aftermath of the election was back.

Of course, he was on strong ground. Ukip has made the running on the call for an EU referendum and banging the drum for a "no" vote was hardly going to be his toughest gig.

Nevertheless, he showed again that the public respond to and are engaged by politicians who are straight-talking.

Whether Ukip can reach out beyond its core supporters in the referendum is another matter - the audience for the Margate rally did not seem to be made up of many undecided voters.

Which brings us to the Labour leadership favourite Jeremy Corbyn, who is poles apart politically from the Ukip leader but has also been packing out halls as he winds up his campaign ahead of Saturday's vote.

Like Farage, he tells it how he sees it in a manner that is about as far removed from the focus group driven soundbites uttered by most politicians as you can get.

The popularity of his distinctive "anti-austerity" prospectus is a prescription that has had his rivals scratching their heads in puzzlement

One of Corbyn's biggest cheers when he addressed the rally in Margate was when he said "we can't have a party run by focus groups."

It is his version of Farage's "we are not part of the political elite."

What both have, regardless of whether you agree with them, is political authenticity.

And that is a commodity that you can't buy, no matter how many spin doctors you have in your camp.