Ukip may celebrate its midterm success, but the climb to power gets stonier the nearer you reach the summit. Ask Alex Salmond
Ukip's leader, Nigel Farage MEP, prides himself on being a no-nonsense realist as well as a pint-in-hand cheeky chappie. So he can make no complaint in this moment of triumph if a different school of realism reminds him of the transient nature of his party's overnight triumph in this week's English elections or the fickle impulses which prompted so many of its votes. We have all been here before – and often.
Or is this time different, as Farage himself insists today? He dreams of Ukip staging a reverse takeover of the Conservative party – as the Reform party of Canada, populist and socially conservative, managed in the 90s. In that scenario he becomes the kingmaker for a post-Cameron right-leaning winner, a Boris or a Michael Gove?
It's a clever pitch, Farage is not daft, but the odds remain daunting even as the two-party electoral model atrophies. Its prospects depend on multiple failure, that Ed Miliband as well as David Cameron fails to meet the challenges of our times, that those tenacious local Lib Dems – a bad night for them too – get wiped out and the economy fails to recover, here or in wider Europe.
After all, the tactical fickleness evident in yesterday's votes is typical of midterm ballots. It covers the not-so-subtle game of footsie which large chunks of Fleet Street – and Ukip's most conspicuous Tory fellow-traveller, Lord Tebbit – have been playing with the Faragistas these past few weeks, confident that Cameron is currently too weak to call Tebbit's bluff and kick him out of the party for disloyalty.
Flattering, deeply nostalgic, pint-and-fag photos of Nige sitting outside pubs (looking for all the world like his nemesis, Ken Clarke) in the Tory papers, coupled with the Sun's refusal to endorse any of the major parties (the first such refusal in 44 years), Tebbit's crafty "vote tactically for Ukip if it keeps out Labour" message (hollow laughter), it all adds up to the press lords familiar urge to weaken an incumbent government it does not like. Remember the simmering Leveson controversy.
Yes, Ukip far exceeded its own and the pollsters' predictions, as John Curtice, the Prof Branestorm of psephology, is excitedly telling radio and TV audiences this morning. Second place behind Labour in the heartland, northern byelection in South Shields – the fourth such runner up's spot for Ukip this past year – plus 50-ish county council seats and likely to rise. It's a classic midterm protest vote by citizens enduring squeezed incomes and little prospect of an early economic recovery. Europe? Immigrants? Gay marriage or human rights? The tabloidesque search for scapegoats – and for panaceas – in an age of insecurity is inevitable.
In its time the old Liberal party would have benefitted from a third party protest vote. So did the breakaway Social Democrats (SDP) who later merged with the Libs to become the Lib Dems, now debarred from that role by virtue of sharing coalition power. Beyond the English heartland assorted nationalists, SNP, Plaid, rival Irish parties have thrived at the expense of the old duopoly. Within it the Greens (15% in the 1989 Euro elections), the BNP/National Front, Respect (who have I forgotten?) have all enjoyed their moment in the sun.
Put it another way, in 1951 Tories and Labour got 96.7% of the votes cast, the third parties just 9 MPs (six of them Liberals, five in electoral pact with the Tories). In 2010 the duo got 68% of votes cast, the third parties 32% and 91 seats. That pattern may fluctuate in response to a charismatic leader, a Thatcher or a Blair. But it won't go away, however discouraging the effect of Britain's first-past-the-post voting system. Coalitions are part of the new mix.
So it's easy for metropolitan commentators (part of the problem, so Farage reminded us at a recent Westminster lunch) to dismiss yesterday's vote as a "send in the clowns" result. I have just heard the BBC's Nick Robinson do so on air. In a lively but dismissive column in today's Times ex-Blair speechwriter, Phil Collins, calls the protest [£] "a dish of revenge on the cosmopolitan world", a good phrase with some resonant truth. The more that London looks richer, more separate from the rest of Britain – its rackety, over-mighty banks and house prices – the stronger that anti-elite feeling will be. It's true in France, in the US and other countries with over-dominant capitals.
Nick Robinson goes further than I would go. Ukip has changed from being a one-issue pressure group – " Let's get Out of Europe" – into a proper political party, he asserted, though he to assure Radio 4's solid Middle England audience that Ukip has no MPs and Farage no prospect of No 10.
All this sounds a bit mean, a bit dismissive, yes? I agree and it's neither wise nor decent to dismiss voter concerns over their jobs and homes, their living standards and public services, even if it's hard to see Ukip providing any serious answers.
Yet it's hard to respond honestly in any other way when faced with any "Stop the world, we want to get off" party of left or right, Green, breakaway nationalist or Little Englander. Farage thinks Scotland's first minister, Alex Salmond, is living in a "dreamland'' because independence inside the EU is a contradiction in terms. Salmond, who strikes me as a very similar cheeky chappie populist, could reply in kind.
There is a lot wrong with the way the EU functions, but its break-up under the pressure of the rolling eurozone crisis, or our own voluntary departure, would make a bad situation worse for all concerned. Cameron knows that as he manoeuvres to appease Ukip voters with a renegotiate/referendum strategy that will keep Britain in. He is playing with fire and should realise it.
Farage's strategy has been to broaden the party's appeal with a nostalgic political version of those golden-oldie radio stations beloved (I should know) of the middle-aged and elderly where Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, The Beatles and The Animals, Roy Orbison and Dusty Springfield play all day. In his UK Gold party they play the greatest hits of all time all the time. So there are grammar schools in every town, smoking rooms and busty barmaids in every pub but fewer immigrant fruit pickers from eastern Europe (Ukip did well in agricultural Lincolnshire this week). There are better public services and lower taxes on the lower paid (at least in theory, though he's a flat-tax man), no gay marriage.
Lovely, lovely, if you like that sort of thing, but largely an illusion. Who will staff our hospitals and care homes (let alone our pubs) without immigrants? What happens to Ukip supporters kids who don't get into grammar school? And so on.
Anti-elite populists are entitled to be cynical about the mainstream parties whose leaders look and sound rather similar. But the elites are entitled to be cynical about them in return. It is one thing to run the town council in Ramsay (population 6,000) efficiently, quite another to run a county, let alone a country. What exactly has Nigel Farage done as distinct from said?
Sounds mean? Yes, again. But people who lack historic perspective and think they are voting for something "new" that does away with the "old" politics of the metropolitan elites are being just as much conned. In politics as in war, few battle plans survive contact with the enemy – as the coalition is discovering, but at least it has a battle plan. As for petty political feuds, read the ex-Ukip rebels website – it's called Junius – and voters may find Ukip backstabbing to be as petty as its rivals.
So enjoy your triumph, Nigel Farage. As Alex Salmond has been discovering the road to power gets stonier the nearer you reach the summit. Few have the stomach or stamina to make it to the top.
As for the non-Ukip majority, it might take comfort from looking around recession-battered Europe, at the Greeks Golden Dawn, the True Finns and Dutch Freedom party, at the French National Front (whose leader got into the French presidential finals or even Italian clown, Beppe Grillo's stalled Five Star movement, and conclude that as populist challenges go we could do nastier than Ukip.
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