Ukip

As Lord Ashcroft turned 69 this week, the international businessman celebrated with a polling event on his birthday to announce the impending Labour bloodbath north of the border: ‘Good evening and welcome. If you have ever wondered what a pollster does to celebrate his birthday, now you know. Somebody kindly asked me this morning if this was the big “four-O”, and I was compelled to admit this estimate was outside the margin of error.’ Curiously, Mr S hears that the only party leader to wish the former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party a happy birthday was Ukip’s Nigel Farage. With Ashcroft’s polls currently putting Ukip slightly behind the Tories in South

Ukip is fighting its most important and difficult election campaign to date. If the party is victorious in May, there is a chance it will become an established Westminster force — around for many years to come. But if Ukip fails, its chance to crack the Commons will have passed and the party’s peak will be judged as being the Rochester & Strood and Clacton by-elections last year. In the magazine this week, I go behind the scenes with Ukip to find out how the election campaign is going, and what victory looks like for the party. Here are five things I learnt from my time with the People’s Army in London, Essex

It was a bit rich of George Osborne to tease Nigel Farage for ‘a novel approach to policymaking’ for dumping Ukip’s previous commitment to a 50,000 cap on the number of migrants arriving in the UK each year live on the Today programme. George Osborne found this rather funny, even though he and his colleagues have spent the past year doing something reasonably similar. It was on the same programme that Theresa May downgraded the net migration target to a ‘comment’, while Osborne gave newspaper interviews in which he made it clear that it would be rather difficult to meet the target under Britain’s current arrangements with the EU. listen

Has Ukip found a set of credible economic policies? In the latest Mini Election video, I discuss the party’s spring conference with Patrick O’Flynn, MEP for the East of England and Ukip’s economic spokesman. As the man responsible for producing a plan of spending and cuts for the party, how does he intend to ‘hold the Tories’ feet to the fire’ and how important is the economy to Ukip’s overall message? We also chatted about the rapturous response to Nigel Farage’s keynote speech, and whether the party relies too much on just one man. And if Ukip is also splintering into different tribes with different agendas, does O’Flynn find himself on the left of

Was Nigel Farage ‘absent on the job’ this week, addressing a conference in America instead of focusing on the immigration figures and Ukip’s spring conference? He defended the trip on the Sunday Politics today, arguing that he recorded plenty of radio and TV interviews from Washington. ‘I did quite honestly as much media from Washington as I would have done had I been in Westminster,’ he said. When pushed again by Andrew Neil on whether he’d have better served Ukip by staying at home, Farage responded ‘with all due respect, I can’t see the difference’ between doing the interviews in Washington and Westminster. Although Farage has a point — a TV camera is a TV camera both sides of

Day two of the Ukip conference, and the placid mood continues. Delegates seem very content with the speeches that they’ve heard from Douglas Carswell, Patricia Culligan, Janice Atkinson and Diane James. They wee particularly entertained by Atkinson, who spent a great deal of her speech talking about Harriet Harman, and criticising the other parties’ policies for women. They were very happy when Culligan described reforms to Ofsted that will mean children will be allowed to celebrate nativity plays (something that might have come as a surprise to a number of parents). And Diane James delivered a speech better than the sort of stuff you’d expect from many a junior minister.