Ukip aren’t going away – and David Cameron has no idea what to do

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[/audioplayer]It must have come so easily back then. In April 2006, the young David Cameron had already assumed the mantle of leader of the Conservative party as arranged by his predecessor, Michael Howard. And as he prepared to assume the next highest office, the insult fell from his mouth with extraordinary ease. ‘Ukip is sort of a bunch of fruit cakes and loonies and closet racists,’ he told his radio interviewer. Deadly. Though not, as it finally turned out, for the party he was attacking.

Last week that same Ukip topped the British polls at the European elections. It knocked the Conservative party into third place and helped cause Britain’s most Europhile party, the Liberal Democrats, to come fifth with a single seat. Ukip also made extraordinary council gains across the country and is now our largest political party not only in Brussels but in significant portions of Britain. It averaged an astonishing 51 per cent of the vote in Boston, Lincolnshire — an area which has suffered unprecedented levels of recent immigration. Ordinarily, lessons would be taken from this. But these are not politically ordinary times.

In the days following the results the Conservative party and its increasingly loyal media chorus focused on everything other than the main story. The parochialism of Westminster politics and the Westminster media lobby — among the forces to have fuelled Ukip’s rise — has rarely seemed greater.

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Julie Burchill

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First of all, the proposed lesson of the election was that Ed Miliband, while significantly increasing Labour’s share of council seats, had not increased that share by a vast enough number. This, combined with an alleged inability to eat a bacon sandwich in a properly prime ministerial fashion, persuaded the Westminster media bubble that the story was that Ed is a big loser.