Ed West Ed West

I’ve been right about Ukip predictions before, so here’s my latest one

Ukip’s conference last week featured some characteristically colourful characters, including a lady with a Nigel Farage tattoo on her arm (and, strangely, one of Robert Smith of The Cure on the other). Significantly, though, attendance was down on last year. Sebastian Payne asked what the point of the party is, now that the Brexit referendum is coming and will answer their existential question either way. Iain Martin at Cap X then predicted that the party had run its course.

It’s been a strange few months for the Kippers; a strong poll showing in May combined with a disappointing result, followed by Nigel Farage’s resignation and then un-resignation. Media attention has since focussed on the left’s own version of the ‘new politics’: Jeremy Corbyn’s new old Labour. Having grown from a libertarian single-issue protest party, Ukip has also become a victim of its own contradictions, with obvious ideological divisions between Red Ukip types like Patrick O’Flynn – who represent most of their voters – and the party’s only MP, the neo-Gladstonian liberal Douglas Carswell. Just on Friday the party’s biggest donor criticised Carswell, a pro-immigration optimist who doesn’t really fit in with a lot of what Ukip stands for.

So while lots of people think the party will implode, the polls show that they’re still on 16 per cent, which is about as high as they’ve ever been. The total lack of publicity over the past few months hasn’t done them any harm, it seems.

Back in 2011 I suggested that Ukip would top the 2014 euro poll and was given odds of 66/1 by Paddy Power, but I chickened out of putting money on it; I also ducked out of a bet offered by a leading political pollster that the Kippers would overtake the Lib Dems.

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