Ukip isn’t a national party. It’s a Tory sickness

It can happen that something ought to feel wrong yet somehow doesn’t; and you wonder whether this means that in some deep way it could be right. Take for example a discussion on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday last week. The subject was the rise of the ‘Teflon’ United Kingdom Independence Party. I ought to have found the programme’s handling of this to be inappropriate; yet it felt both appropriate and natural. In this column I shall discuss why.

Radio presenters do not give explanatory headlines to political interviews. At about 8.20 a.m. Evan Davis simply said ‘Let’s talk about Ukip’ and off they went, ‘they’ being himself and his two guests, Isabel Hardman of this magazine and Dr Robert Ford, a politics don from Manchester University. There was no indication that Ukip itself had been invited to join the discussion; the party was being discussed almost clinically, as a phenomenon. Mr Davis’s key questions were essentially as follows: (1) ‘Why does Ukip so easily survive scandals [about expenses, etc]?’ (2) How should parties like the Conservative party respond to the threat? Should they ‘tack to the right’, as Davis put it, or ‘take Ukip on’? (3) How would one advise the main parties as to ‘the real vulnerability of Ukip’?

I found the discussion fascinating and wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. But when the programme moved to the next item and I thought about what we’d just heard, it struck me there had been something very odd about focus and format. Ukip were being discussed not as players in the political game, but as spoilers to the political game: a kind of viral infection which it was proving devilishly difficult to shake off. Viewed like this, there was no more cause to involve the party itself in the discussion than there would have been cause — were we discussing an outbreak of meningitis — to invite someone to put the virus’s side of the story.