It is time that Ukip faced its final curtain

Is the party finally over for Ukip? The soap opera travails of Henry Bolton, the fifth leader in 18 months, would appear to presage its demise amid falling membership, collapsing support and, above all, Brexit. In an act of what looks like forlorn defiance, Mr Bolton yesterday declined to succumb to the controversy over his private life, which has triggered a wave of resignations by members of his top team. He has decided to face down his critics and appeal to the party membership for support, though there is little evidence that they want him to stay, either.

Many have voiced their dismay over his affair with a colleague nearly 30 years his junior and the peremptory treatment of his wife and mother of his children. While these are private matters they are seen to reflect poor judgment from a leader who has made little impact since taking over last September.

Ukip has never really been a conventional political party, more a single-issue movement. Like the Corn Law reformers and Imperial preference campaigners of yore, it was formed to represent a strand of political opinion that the mainstream parties tolerated as a fringe, albeit occasionally influential, grouping within their ranks.

Ukip was started by a Eurosceptic academic, Alan Sked, who wanted a referendum on EU membership but doubted the Conservatives, and certainly Labour, would ever offer one. That the Conservatives eventually did was down to a fear that Ukip had become the repository for the protest vote and would attract disgruntled Tory MPS. Two did, indeed, defect, but any potential haemorrhage was stemmed by David Cameron’s offer of a referendum. Arguably, he would not have won the 2015 election without that.

While the EU referendum result owed much to Nigel Farage and Ukip delivering voters who no longer trusted the two major parties, the idea that it could morph into a national party offering a range of domestic and foreign policies was always fanciful. Paul Nuttall, a previous leader, tried to challenge Labour in its working-class heartlands but resigned after a disastrous showing in the general election last year.

Its best hopes of becoming something bigger always lay in losing the referendum, not winning it. In digging in, Mr Bolton said the time had come to end the “factional infighting” inside Ukip. Perhaps the time has actually come to call it a day.