Ukip isn’t a national party. It’s a Tory sickness

It can happen that something ought to feel wrong yet somehow doesn’t; and you wonder whether this means that in some deep way it could be right. Take for example a discussion on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday last week. The subject was the rise of the ‘Teflon’ United Kingdom Independence Party. I ought to have found the programme’s handling of this to be inappropriate; yet it felt both appropriate and natural. In this column I shall discuss why.

Radio presenters do not give explanatory headlines to political interviews. At about 8.20 a.m. Evan Davis simply said ‘Let’s talk about Ukip’ and off they went, ‘they’ being himself and his two guests, Isabel Hardman of this magazine and Dr Robert Ford, a politics don from Manchester University. There was no indication that Ukip itself had been invited to join the discussion; the party was being discussed almost clinically, as a phenomenon.