The other day the BBC’s Norman Smith, when talking about Nigel Farage’s ‘personality cult’, mispronounced the second word in a rather unfortunate way.
Apparently though, the resulting inadvertent epithet is being bandied about quite a lot at Ukip’s headquarters, with no slip of the tongue involved.
This looks like a most ungainly squabble, accompanied by the bump-bump sound of heads rolling. Two of Farage’s closest staffers have been sacked, he himself first announced his resignation, then came back because the ‘overwhelming support’ within the party ranks just couldn’t be ignored, then again faced eminently ignorable calls for his resignation.
Now, even though I know quite a few Ukippers, including some senior ones, I have neither much knowledge of the rough-and-tumble of party in-fighting nor any interest in it.
I do have an interest in Ukip survival though, because I see it as the only political force in the country that has a fighting chance of developing into a real conservative opposition to our mainstream spivocrats. And it’s that very survival that seems to be in jeopardy.
Mainstream parties, those with vast staffs, generous funding, and millions of supporters cultivated over decades if not centuries, can accommodate a bit of factional disunity without collapsing. Outsiders fighting guerrilla action can’t.
Only by acting – or at least presenting the image of acting – as a monolith can such parties survive temporary setbacks or capitalise on (just as temporary) successes.
This general election delivered to Ukip both failure and success, although in my view considerably more of the latter. The failure is obvious: the party not only didn’t build on the number of the two parliamentary seats it had, but in fact lost one of them.
This presented a shocking contrast to some of the optimistic predictions, ranging from a cloud-cuckoo-land 100 seats some six months ago to a dozen a month before the election to half a dozen on its eve.
But looking on the bright side, this was the first time Ukip secured a seat in a general election. It also enjoyed the support of almost four million voters, making it in that respect our third party by some distance.
The vagaries of our FPTP electoral system are such that this massive support wasn’t translated into a commensurate parliamentary representation, but such is life. I won’t repeat what I said about the FPTP a few days ago, which in broad strokes was that, for all its unavoidable unfairness, it’s still the best possible system.
One way or the other, this is the way politics is played in Britain, and it’s no good crying foul and complaining about the rules just because one lost the game.
It is undeniable, however, that, even though Ukip’s parliamentary presence doesn’t reflect the party’s popularity, its influence comes closer to being such a prism.
The threat of Ukip clearly pushed the Tories further to the right than they are naturally inclined to go, as Dave’s jolly men tried to prevent a split in the right vote. This term is inaccurate, wrongly presupposing as it does that the Tories are a party of the right. In fact, Ukip couldn’t split the right vote. It was the right vote, and it made its voice heard.
As party leader, Nigel Farage can both claim the credit for Ukip’s success and take the blame for its failures. I realise that opinions may differ on which outcome was more skewed by his personality, and I have none of my own to offer.
However, it wouldn’t be illogical to suggest that perhaps more could have been done to parlay Ukip’s popular support, greater than that of the LibDems and the SNP combined, into a comparable number of MPs.
We now know – and some of us knew all along – that Ukip’s support mostly came from those fundamentally conservative voters who wouldn’t vote Labour on pain of death and yet didn’t feel their views would be represented by the Tories.
Many of such disaffected individuals included intuitive Tories like me who felt betrayed by Dave’s take on conservatism. The only difference between him and Blair is that Dave fights against ‘the forces of conservatism’ surreptitiously rather than explicitly.
Such intuitive conservatives didn’t get their way in some Labour constituencies because, unlike me, many of them just couldn’t vote against the Tory party they had supported all their lives. Hence in such constituencies it wasn’t so much the Tory vote that was split by Ukip, but vice versa.
The way to prevent such an outcome would have been to form an electoral pact with the Tories. As a result, the Tories wouldn’t have contested the election wherever they trailed Ukip and a serious threat of a Labour victory existed – with Ukip repaying the favour.
It’s a safe bet that, if allowed to fight Labour one on one in, say, a hundred constituencies, Ukip would have gained more than one parliamentary seat at Labour’s, not the Tories’, expense.
Yet, as I predicted in the 29 September, 2014, article Conservatism in Crisis, such a pact didn’t materialise. Messrs Cameron and Farage just couldn’t overcome the palpable contempt they felt for each other.
This was the kind of political naivety that Dave could afford, as it happened, but Nigel couldn’t. Whether one should commend him for his principled stance or rebuke him for letting ideological concerns trump political ones is a matter of taste.
In any case, I hope Ukippers, with or without Farage at the helm, will resolve their internal problems. They should remember the words of that famous proto-conservative: “And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”