What on earth has happened to Ukip?

Just a few months ago, Nigel Farage was anticipating his party winning 40 seats

Matthew Norman
Sunday 26 April 2015 15:27 BST
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Ukip leader Nigel Farage in Tiny Tim’s tea shop while canvassing in Rochester this week
Ukip leader Nigel Farage in Tiny Tim’s tea shop while canvassing in Rochester this week

As this Manuel election hobbles on with the polls swinging this way and that in super slo-mo, still we know nothing. Naaaaathing. And of the countless things we know we do not know, switching cultural references to the philosopher-poet Donald Rumsfeld, the most crucial is this: what will befall Ukip and its leader on 7 May?

Is it time to prepare the obituary for Nigel Farage’s career, or will the self-styled St George of the snug confound the mounting suspicion that the scaly reptile about to be lanced is the lounge lizard holding the pint mug and grinning like a mad person?

One thing we do know is that the oddest sub-plot of the campaign is the curious case of the bulldog that didn’t bark. One political certainty in all the confusion, so we thought, is that Ukip is reliably barking. Yet the party has kept the lid on the crazy, with not one candidate suspended for expenses-fiddling or expressing a visceral unease with “negroid features” for, oh, weeks.

Farage himself has abandoned the diatribes about HIV-ridden migrants to whine about being ignored or misrepresented by the media. If there is some truth in the former, it’s harder to sympathise about the latter. The Faragean party trick of blurting outrageous nonsense to grab the attention, and a few days later denying having said it, quickly lost its initial charm.


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Farage made a weak start to the campaign, he confessed this week, because he felt “wonky” due to poor time management, but now insists he is restored. “I’m feeling pretty bouncy, back to being more like Tigger.” And so all eyes turn to South Thanet, the seat the Tories are flooding with ministers in the drive to catch this Tigger by the toe and decapitate Ukip. Farage has been typically blunt about resigning the leadership if he fails to win the seat, and what would Ukip be without the Dulwich College-educated, one-time City commodities broker lacerating the Establishment from the helm?

For Thanet, this attention must be a boon. Until now, many knew nothing of the town beyond its cameo in a fruity Ian Dury verse. “I’d rendezvous with Janet quite near the Isle of Thanet, she looked more like a gannet, she wasn’t half a prannet,” as Dury sang in the guise of Billericay Dickie. “Her mother tried to ban it, her father helped me plan it. And when I captured Janet, she bruised her pomegranate.”

Today, Thanet is known to all as the arbiter of Farage’s fate. Will it send him down to defeat with a petulant whinge, or will he “go up, fizz, like a rocket”, to borrow from his beloved Enoch Powell’s prescient forecast of the impact made by his Rivers of Blood speech, with a thrilling victory?

The latest poll puts him well ahead, though earlier ones showed him struggling. How reliable any of them are is anyone’s guess, but Betfair makes him a 2/1-on favourite.

Yet even if he does land the odds, something else we know is that, just a few months ago, he was anticipating Ukip winning 40 seats. With other polls showing it trailing in many key targets, and unlikely to win more than four seats, he has downgraded that appraisal. He now speaks of the party coming second to Labour in a clutch of Northern seats, positioning it for the big breakthrough in 2020.

It is in this springboard strategy that one poignantly senses the sands slipping inexorably through the Faragiste egg-timer. Whether events over the next five years will conspire in or against Ukip’s interests, we know we do not know. But in Britain, the reflex xenophobia that has powered Ukip far more than Europhobia can thrive only in an economic swamp. If the economy continues to improve and living standards rise, what happened to the National Front, which soared in the economic turmoil of the mid-1970s but went into a corkscrew spin when stability was restored, will happen to Ukip.

This may not be the end of the party, to borrow from an earlier British bulldog, or even the beginning of the end. Ukip is still averaging about 15 per cent in the polls. Its vote, though it may be squeezed in the coming days, seems resilient. But that explosive surge to dozens of seats about which he fantasised before Christmas cannot happen, and in the chasm between December’s grandiose ambition and the brutal reality of 7 May surely lies the end of the beginning.

In 1983, the SDP took a huge share of the popular vote but very few seats. Soon enough it was so diminished that it became subsumed into another party. Farage may, like Billericay Dickie, score in Thanet. But as he faces his Waterloo, he is gently reminded of Abba’s timeless dictum – the history book on the shelf is always repeating itself.

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