Ukip may win anywhere between 12 and 25 parliamentary seats come next May, say the polls.
They also say that the Tories and Ukip will win about 50 per cent of the vote between them, with Labour getting just over a third.
One would think that the two centre-right parties would form a pre-election coalition and stand as a bloc. That would prevent the calamity of Miliband (assuming, and this is an unsafe assumption, that he’s still around then) at Number 10, at the head of a minority government, possibly also including what will be left of the LibDems.
Yet both Nigel Farage and other senior figures in Ukip are saying that such a marriage of convenience isn’t on the cards.
One such senior figure, a man who has made me reassess my hitherto firmly held view that politicians can’t be human by definition, told me over dinner last night why Ukip will stick to the ‘I’ in its nomenclature.
If such a coalition government does well, he said, the Tories, as the senior partner, will claim all the credit. If the government does less than well, then it will be Ukip to take all the blame. That may eventually lead to the party being crushed out of existence.
In other words, even if the Tories do offer several portfolios to Ukip, with possibly Nigel Farage as Deputy PM, or else the Secretary for Europe, the offer will be declined.
Instead the party will act as king maker, or slayer as the case may be, exerting a meaningful influence on policy – this regardless of whether the minority government is tinted blue or red.
I don’t know enough about the mechanics of politics to have a firm view on the matter. But somehow I can’t imagine Ukip steering even a minority Labour government in the right direction, and it takes only a marginally lower flight of fancy to see them do that under the Tories.
Ukip has a whole raft of policies, but all of them are derivative from their umbrella commitment to getting Britain out of the European Union.
While this aspiration is shared by many among the Tory rank and file, and by some of Labour’s, we know that the top hierarchy of both parties is deadset against this, for all the vague noises Dave is extruding from his mouth out of political expedience.
If either party forms a coalition with the LibDems, who are as committed to the EU as the communists were to the USSR, then they’ll definitely throw their combined weight behind staying in that wicked organisation.
In case of a Dave-led Tory government in coalition with the LibDems the weight would be slightly lower but not enough to make a difference.
It’s useful to remember that every significant step in the direction of the UK becoming a gau in a Europe dominated by Germany has been taken under Tory governments, those of Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher and John Major (which is not to suggest that any other party would have acted differently).
This time around the Tories would be likely, for once, to keep their promise of holding an In/Out referendum, but I’m almost certain its result will go the wrong way. The combined resources of the Tories, Labour, LibDems and – above all – the EU itself will create a propaganda tsunami in favour of the In vote.
The British public proved its susceptibility to pro-EU (or the EEC as it then was) scare mongering in 1975 when for the first time in the history of the United Kingdom this constitutional issue was put to a referendum.
Yet at that time the technical means of disseminating propaganda were peashooters to today’s heavy guns. Some time during the life of the next parliament, these guns will start spewing flatulent pro-EU salvos and will continue to do so until the public surrenders.
A political innocent like me would think that the only way for Ukip to get what it wants, what all decent people want, would be from the inside of a Tory-led majority government.
There it could join forces with the numerous anti-EU backbenchers, both Tory and Labour, to commit the government to regaining British sovereignty, with or without a referendum. The risk pointed out by my dinner guest is of course real, but then so is the possibility of success.
Staying outside looking in just may turn Ukip into a pariah having to fight against the tripartite majority expertly whipped together by the Tories, Labour and LibDems. I doubt such a fight would be winnable.
The upshot of it all is that I have no idea what the immediate electoral future will bring, and my only excuse for this ignorance is that not many people are any the wiser.
Meanwhile one has to take a purely aesthetic pleasure in watching our governing spivs scampering about like cockroaches in a tightly shut jar. They can sense power slipping out of their fingers, and power is all they want, even if they only get it courtesy of Brussels.
This delight is by itself sufficient to extend our heartiest congratulations to Ukip, while keeping reins on hopes that may or may not come true.
My forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick can be pre-ordered, at what the publisher promises to be a spectacular discount, from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html or, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752