Ukip looks hilarious. But soon we won’t be laughing

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/15/ukip-party-labour-heartlands-left

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There are times when you have to remind yourself that Ukip is not a branch of the light entertainment industry. The delights the UK Independence party served up on Thursday would have qualified for a Bafta in the comedy category, at the very least.

Dawn brought a newspaper interview, in which the party’s campaign director denounced his own leader as a “snarling, thin-skinned, aggressive” man. Come the late evening, Nigel Farage was in his regular seat on Question Time fending off that charge, defending his unresignation that week, and insisting that a leadership contest was pointless because it would obviously result in victory for him.

The intervening hours were filled with internal feuding and bloodletting, played out in public and in real time, like a cross between The Thick of It and 24. Party staffers resigned, demanding the resignations of those who had called for their resignations. One donor called for Farage to be replaced by “something quieter”. Farage, that scourge of the metropolitan elite, could not be reached because he was lunching at the Ivy – and was said to be “only on his first bottle”.

This was a worthy sequel to the previous day, when, as one wit remarked, a party with just one MP had managed a backbench rebellion – as Ukip’s solitary presence in Westminster, Douglas Carswell resisted party pressure to take the parliamentary subsidy known as Short money. Carswell was said to be throwing his “toys out of the pram” because he wanted to be the leader – though by the time Farage had reached the Question Time studio he had made Carswell’s principled stance against taking taxpayers’ cash his own.

The tone for all this high comedy had been set by the leader himself. You’ll recall that last Friday, once Thanet’s rejection of him was clear, Farage stepped forward to honour his pledge to quit if he didn’t win a seat in parliament. Three days later, Farage had risen again. He announced that – to his heavy regret, naturally – his party had refused his resignation, and he was back.

In an instant, Farage had trashed his brand as the straight-talking plain dealer of British politics. When he first promised to step down, he stressed that he was not like all those other politicians. He was a man of his word. And yet there he still is. The reaction of the Question Time audience was telling. No longer chuckling at his politically incorrect jokes, they turned on him for being a hypocrite, for saying one thing and doing another – for breaking his promise. What tuition fees did to Nick Clegg, this leadership U-turn is already doing to Farage, turning him into a human punchline who will never be believed again.

For the jaundiced outsider, it’s all very amusing. But laughter is not quite the right reaction. Because Ukip matters, for two rather big reasons.

The first is Europe, the issue that was meant to be the party’s raison d’être but which has been obscured in recent years by immigration. An in/out referendum is coming, perhaps as soon as May 2016, to coincide with elections in Scotland, in Wales and across England. This will be the moment Ukip was created for; the party will be the leading force for “out”. So its state of health will be crucial in determining the outcome of that vote.

At present, plenty of people in the out camp reckon that if Farage is their leading voice, they will lose. They point to the Farage paradox: that as Ukip’s poll rating has risen in recent years, support for a British exit from the EU has diminished. (Of course I, along with everyone else, now eye opinion polls very warily: after 7 May, anecdote and gut instinct look like a rather more reliable guide to politics than data.) Back in 2012, when Ukip commanded just 3% of public support, more people wanted to leave the EU than to stay in. Today, in a year when Ukip has won 13% of the votes in a general election, “in” can lead “out” by as much as 20 points. It seems Farage does well galvanising the convinced, but repels everyone else.

This is what worries outers, especially those in the Conservative party. With David Cameron now lionised by his party as an election-winning hero, he probably won’t have to extract too much from EU negotiations to win support for an “in” vote from all but the most diehard Tory Eurosceptics. So long as Cameron can point to a couple of token victories over Brussels, the likes of Michael Gove and Philip Hammond – who once threatened to vote for out – are likely to campaign to stay in. That would leave a dearth of big beasts on the “out” side – with Farage as the most visible face. And that could sink the anti-EU cause.

Some in Ukip might not even mind that too much. They’ve been watching the SNP’s phenomenal surge since the Scottish referendum defeat last September. Perhaps, the Kippers wonder, something similar could happen to them: lose in May 2016, only to advance as the party of English nationalism thereafter. But for those who do not see Ukip as an end in itself, merely a means to leaving the EU, this is madness. And it’s Farage, and his apparent addiction to media attention, that they blame.

This brings us to the second reason Ukip matters: Labour. In winning its nearly 4m votes, Ukip came second to Labour in 44 seats; that’s 44 seats they could plausibly win in 2020. As Rob Ford, who has studied this phenomenon close up, has written: “Ukip’s advance was strongest in seats with the largest concentrations of white voters, working-class voters, voters with no educational qualifications, and where opposition to immigration and the EU was highest.”

Ukip did especially well, says Ford, in “declining northern towns”, places that Labour would once have called its own but where the party often resembles a hollowed-out, ghostly presence from the past. While many former Tories ended their flirtation with Ukip and went back home, ex-Labour Ukip defectors stayed with their new party.

This should jolt those on the left who once welcomed Ukip as splitting the vote on the right. It is, in fact, a serious threat to Labour, wooing those who have long grown distant from the party but who, for reasons of family tradition and class loyalty, could never bring themselves to vote Conservative.

The threat would become sharper still if Ukip evolved, forging a message that looked left on economics and right on culture – with, say, the party’s deputy leader, Paul Nuttall, taking over at the top. In continental Europe, similar movements have thrived, even supplanting the traditional parties of the working class. That could happen here. It could happen to Labour.

The events of the last week may look like a joke – the hapless antics of a fringe party. But given what’s at stake, pretty soon few of us will be laughing.