James Forsyth James Forsyth

Ukip vs the world

How an anti-political party seeks to explode politics

Ukip hope that this week’s county council elections are just the fireworks display before the big bang. In 2014 they think they can blow open British politics by winning a nationwide election. If they can succeed in doing that, they would almost certainly force Labour into matching the Tories’ pledge to hold a referendum on the EU after the next general election. This would guarantee the public its first vote on Britain’s EU membership in 40 years.

The success of Ukip at making inroads during this campaign has caused some unease in Tory ranks. But a Ukip victory in the European elections a year before a general election would throw the Tories into a proper panic. Legions of backbenchers would demand that David Cameron brings forward the referendum on EU membership. Others would demand that he pledges to leave the union altogether unless he gets everything he wants in the renegotiation. There would also be plenty of voices claiming that the answer was a tougher line on immigration, one of the issues driving Ukip’s rise.

Then there would be those Tory MPs who would insist that some sort of accommodation or electoral pact must be made with Ukip. For his part, Nigel Farage emphasises that he’s still open to the idea — one he first floated in The Spectator last year — of joint Tory/Ukip candidates. ‘The bar to it’, he says, ‘is simple: David Cameron.’ He predicts that this idea is ‘going to resurface as an issue after Friday’ because of the local election results.

But the idea that Ukip will be victorious in the 2014 European elections is fast becoming the received wisdom in Westminster. More than a handful of Tory MPs, including one senior backbencher, privately admit that they’ll vote Ukip in 2014 to try to push their party in a more Eurosceptic direction.

When I recently remarked to one influential figure at No.

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