Ukip's success in the local elections surprised many – but not its leader. Nigel Farage is the UK's newest political celebrity
When Nigel Farage needs a break he heads out to sea. Yesterday after 24 hours of wall-to-wall media appearances he drove to the south coast and went fishing in the Channel with friends. It was the only place he could be sure of being out of mobile phone contact.
"I turn the bugger off," he told the Observer. "It clears the head. When I am out there I don't think about anything except what bait to use, what lure to use and why some other bloke is catching more than me. It makes me get very competitive again."
Farage was briefly cutting himself adrift from politics after his party, Ukip, had stirred up the waters as never before by securing a stunning 23% of the vote in Thursday's local elections. Farage had predicted that Ukip would take at least 14% a couple of weeks ago, which many had thought was wildly optimistic.
But it exceeded his wildest dreams, increasing its number of council seats from eight to 147 overnight, eating into the Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat support across the country and redrawing the local government map. For the first time ever, none of the mainstream parties took more than the 30% of the vote. Labour secured 29%, the Tories 25% and the Lib Dems 14%. Nothing like it had happened before.
Up until this weekend experts had doubted Ukip's ability to establish itself as more than a protest party, and believed that it would fade at the 2015 general election, as it had in 2010. But those experts are changing their tune.
Tony Travers, of the London School of Economics, said: "I am normally cautious but I do think the tectonic plates are shifting. There is definitely a change going on. The share of the vote of the main two parties has been declining since the 1950s. But it is now even lower than it was at the height of the scandal over MPs expenses in 2009. You can half imagine David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg having to have a meeting to think what to do as Ukip is hurting them all."
On Thursday afternoon, when voting was still underway, a Ukip official rang Radio 4's Today programme asking if it wanted Farage on the show the next morning and was given a non-committal response. At 5.55am on Friday, as it was clear Ukip was making big inroads, Today rang back to book Farage in for a prime slot.
"They had woken up to the fact that we really were the story," said Gawain Towler, Farage's spokesman.
So what, for the man at the centre of it all who seems to appeal more to voters whatever is thrown at him, had been the biggest lesson? "Simple. It is that the rest of them don't speak the same language as normal people," he said. "They can't connect with people out there. The change that has happened to people's lives from immigration is extraordinary, but the other parties have nothing to say about it. They make vague promises and don't deliver."
The Ukip leader may have been a member of the European parliament since 1999 but he loves to present himself as cut off from the "political class", or what he often refers to as "the establishment elite". In one of his BBC TV appearances on Friday afternoon Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat energy secretary, - evidently non-plussed by the excitable man sitting opposite and lapping up his success - asked how many seats Farage thought Ukip would win at the next general election. "I have no idea," Farage barked back with something between a grin and a scowl. "I am not a professional politician like you."
This is the nightmare facing the Tories, Labour, and the Lib Dems. Farage is breaking the mould not just by speaking about the need to withdraw from the EU but by not being one of them. He is the bloke talking common sense on the street, the fellow who goes fishing on his day off.
Towler noted the terror written on the faces of his Tory, Labour and Lib Dem opponents throughout Friday: "What you saw was a recognition from the other parties that we have to deal with these buggers, but they have not the faintest idea how to do it. Nigel does not fit with their game, their way of doing things. He is different. He doesn't do focus groups."
Yesterday on the streets of Huntingdon, where Ukip's surge had deprived the Tories of control of Cambridgeshire council, people spoke well of Farage, who visited the town two weeks ago. "You don't see many people wearing yellow corduroy trousers and tweed jackets around here," said Graham Tibbitt, 60. "He's a breath of fresh air. I voted Ukip. He's better than the usual stodgy men in suits."
This weekend, whatever Farage's desire to position himself as an outsider, Ukip has landed at the heart of British politics. His party may still have no seats at Westminster seats but it is a big step nearer getting one. It is confident of emerging with the largest share of the votes at next year's European elections, a result that would cause even deeper trauma inside the Tory party than it is experiencing now. Farage will then stand at the 2015 election.
He is demanding the right to appear alongside Cameron, Miliband and Clegg in pre-election TV debates – something that could persuade Cameron to ditch them altogether, leaving himself open to charges of cowardice. Like the Lib Dems have done since the 1980s, Ukip is putting down roots in local government and it is the first stage on a journey.
"What I have always said is that if we establish a bridgehead in the county councils we can have a serious tilt at winning a Westminster seat," explained Farage. "We have done that."
Ukip's rise under Farage is not a lone phenomenon in the EU, though that will be of little comfort to the mainstream parties. Populist politicians are on the rise all over Europe as people have seen leaders and institutions, domestic and European, unable to deal with the economic crisis.
Disillusion has mixed lethally with a sense of dislocation from power. Faith in remote institutions has been eroded as insecurity has grown. New parties unconnected with the establishment have cashed in. In Italy this year, Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement scored more than 25% in the national election and is the country's single largest party.
In Greece, Alexis Tsipras, leader of the Greek leftwing movement, is polling at 20%. In France last year, Marine Le Pen scored 18% in the presidential election and is now powering ahead against François Hollande, while in the Netherlands Geert Wilders' Freedom Party is polling at 15%.
Jamie Bartlett, of the thinktank Demos, who has studied populist movements in the EU, talks of "declining trust in the way politics is done, and a feeling that the institutions that govern our lives don't represent us any more. People want someone who seems authentic, ordinary, like them."
Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, said the combination of economic crisis and bad governance by EU leaders had created the ideal climate in which populism could grow. He said: "We have a weak economy, weak leadership and a very badly run EU. It would be very surprising if there were not these populist movements growing up."
So how to stop Farage? Do the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems react or just sit back and hope that a party with few developed policies beyond getting out of the EU and barring more Romanians and Bulgarians coming to this country will implode under greater scrutiny?
Next year's European elections are now a terrifying prospect for the Tories. Already this weekend, Tory Eurosceptics are demanding that Cameron brings forward a referendum on Europe to May 2014 to show he is serious about change, and to spike Farage's guns. David Ruffley, the Tory MP for Bury St Edmunds, said action from Cameron was needed now because voters had not noticed the prime minister's previous commitment to an in-out referendum in 2017.
"The Ukip insurgency is real and it is serious," he said. "In 12 months' time, at the European elections, we will have another dose of this. We must act now."
Ruffley, like other Tories, including former leadership candidate David Davis and former cabinet minister John Redwood, wants Cameron to push a bill through parliament for a "mandate" referendum, to be held on the same day as the European poll, which will ask people whether they want to empower Cameron to go to Brussels and demand powers back from the EU over everything from policing, to employment, the EU budget and immigration. It would show he means it, they say.
Already the Tories, under the management of their new Australian strategist Lynton Crosby, are moving right and ditching policies unpopular with the party. In a major U-turn they have decided not to legislate to bind future governments to commit at least 0.7% of GNP to international aid despite repeated pledges to do so. The dilemma for Cameron is how far he can go to the right without being seen to abandon the centre ground and with it the modernisation of the party which was supposed to define his leadership.
For Labour and the Lib Dems too, Ukip poses profound questions. If the Tories commit to a referendum sooner than currently envisaged, can Miliband, or Clegg risk going into the next election without shifting to a much more euro-sceptic position well before then? This weekend both parties insist that they will not be swayed by Ukip and will stand firm with existing policies.
"I think what we need is not to obsess about Europe for the next year, but to focus on what people really care about, which is living standards," said a Lib Dem official.
Farage, meanwhile, is enjoying looking on at the panic and havoc he is causing. "They're all trying to protect their seats but that is not what bothers me," he said in another jibe at the political class he pretends not to be a part of. "I just came into politics to make a change."
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