Rejoice, Munchkins! The wicked witch is gone. The nightmare for conventional politicians that was Ukip is crushed, squished beneath the weight of byelection defeat and its own squabbling ineptitude. Or so we keep being told, anyway.
Tories crow that it’s a busted flush, irrelevant, a victim of its own success in getting us out of Europe. What would be the point of voting for them now that Theresa May is giving Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells all the Brexit he or she can eat, plus slamming the door on immigration and bringing back grammar schools?
Labour, meanwhile, has fallen gratefully on the Stoke byelection as proof that Ukip may be able to pile up votes in its back yard but not enough to win. The result was, said Jeremy Corbyn, a “decisive rejection of Ukip’s policies of division and dishonesty”. Munchkinland is safe. Or is it?
For while the old Ukip does seem to be burning down, there is reason to beware what rises from its ashes. The quarrel now is over whether it remains a party in the conventional political sense or evolves into a new kind of social movement; an opportunistic scavenger specialising in saying the supposedly unsayable and channelling rage at popular targets, but with an almost sociopathic disregard for facts, consequences and all the other unwritten rules holding conventional policymakers back. The choice may, in short, be Ukip or Trumpkip.
Such a movement would very probably fail to get elected, given the high hurdles created by our first-past-the-post system and the fact that it’s harder to whip up a reactionary backlash against a stoutly Tory vicar’s daughter from Berkshire than against a black liberal president. But then it might not need to get elected. It might decide that winning actual votes is less important than winning arguments, shifting the prevailing culture and the conventional parties in its direction.
And if that sounds ridiculously far-fetched, think how much one Katie Hopkins or Milo Yiannopoulos – someone with no boundaries and no safety catch – can do to push the limits of decent public debate, given the right platform. Think of what Breitbart legitimised, the speed with which the hard left propaganda sheet The Canary has grown, the amplifying power of social media and the opportunities it creates to distort facts. Messages can still be commercially if not electorally viable. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.
Admittedly, it has been hard this week to see Kippers skinning anything but each other. Their former leader Nigel Farage increasingly resembles one of those elusive on-off boyfriends who won’t commit to the hassle of a formal relationship with the party but puts in the odd late night booty call, fishing for a peerage. (Nothing says “rage against the establishment” like strings being pulled behind the scenes to get you an ermine robe, a title and some unelected power, eh? Unless it’s turning round a few weeks later and declaring that the club that wouldn’t let you join should now be abolished.)
And Ukip’s reputation for being able to start a fight in an empty room is only enhanced by Farage’s determination to get rid of the only MP his party actually has, Douglas Carswell, apparently on the grounds that he could be a Tory sleeper plotting to destroy the party from within by being insufficiently anti-immigrant. The will of the people must not be denied, it seems, unless the people are from Clacton and willed Carswell to be their MP, in which case they presumably just didn’t understand what they were voting for.
But don’t laugh too hard. Donald Trump was risible once. The Brexit flotilla down the Thames was hilarious at the time. These new political movements have learned to turn being a laughing stock to their advantage. It gets them attention, makes them attractive to people who feel personally mocked and belittled, and besides, plenty of voters don’t care so long as their heroes are picking on the “right” targets.
So the real question for Farage and his good friend Arron Banks – the donor whose deep pockets have funded so many of his escapades – is whether to pursue these voters through what’s left of Ukip or go through the hassle of trying to build something new. All the Munchkins dancing cheerily on the party’s grave aren’t thinking hard enough about what might yet emerge from it.
Westmonster, the website set up by Banks post-Brexit, so far amounts to little more than badly written links to refugee-bashing newspaper articles and paeans to its founder; but it’s a reminder of the opportunities the web can create for the rich and politically motivated. Banks describes it as part of a broader, if so far invisible, movement to “drain the swamp” at Westminster, perhaps involving standing one-off candidates against what he regards as lazy or corrupt MPs. (Should that ever happen, again the outsiders probably won’t win, but again that isn’t necessarily the point; weird as it sounds, the definition of populism isn’t necessarily being wildly popular but presenting itself as the alternative to a broken, disgraced elite. Almost anything that portrays the establishment as corrupt is a bonus.)
Farage now hosts a radio phone-in on LBC, a station that overall reaches 1.6 million people a week. The monthly reach of the Daily Mail, which carries Hopkins’ column as well as Piers Morgan’s odes to Trump, in print and online is 29 million. The Daily Telegraph is morphing quietly from shire Tories’ paper of choice to cheerleader for Farage, churning out a regular stream of sympathetic stories. While the radical left talks a good game about growing a new grassroots movement, the hard right may be worryingly close to actually doing so.
The spat with Carswell, meanwhile, is part of a broader attempted purge of anyone with relatively moderate views or a profile big enough to cause trouble – like the former chair Suzanne Evans or MEP Patrick O’Flynn – with the implication that new leader Paul Nuttall could also be toast if he doesn’t do as he’s told. And the difficulty the moderates have is that they’re not articulating a clear rival vision for what Ukip could become.
Just like its voters, the party risks being left behind by a fast-moving world. It could play a temporary role as keeper of the Eurosceptic flame, pouncing on any sign of the government backsliding over Brexit, but that’s no reason for it to exist much beyond 2019.
It could plough on with targeting disgruntled Labour voters in the party’s former northern heartlands, which until Stoke was supposedly its new raison d’être, on the grounds that it took years of byelection flops to tunnel successfully into the Tory core vote and this could be an equally long haul.
But that’s an unglamorous undertaking for any donor impatient for a swift return on their money, and may not play to what remains of Ukip’s strengths. The old parties, hollowed out as they may be, are still quite good at wining elections. What they’re surprisingly bad at, the referendum showed, is winning arguments. Beware the movement capable of figuring that out.
