Ukip wiped off map as it holds on to just one seat
UKIP’s former chief backer last night declared the party ‘finished as an electoral force’ after it suffered humiliation in the local elections.
Millionaire Arron Banks accused Ukip leader Paul Nuttall of ‘crashing the car at the first bend’ following a near total wipeout at the ballot box.
The party won just one of the 141 council seats it was defending, as voters defected to the Conservatives.
Mr Nuttall claimed a Tory surge at the expense of Ukip was a price he was willing to pay for Britain’s exit from the EU.
He also said Ukip was a ‘ victim of its own success’.
Former Ukip MP Douglas Carswell said ‘it’s over’ and urged previous backers to vote Tory in the general election.
Ukip won a single seat – in Padiham and Burnley West, Lancashire, a gain from Labour – putting it on a par with the Rubbish Party, which took a seat in Irvine Valley, East Ayrshire, after campaigning solely on the issues of waste and littering.
Elsewhere, supporters of the Eurosceptic party appeared to switch to the Conservatives in droves.
Mr Nuttall said in a statement: ‘In the local elections yesterday many excellent Ukip representatives lost their seats on county councils despite campaigning hard for re-election. It’s been a difficult night. Frankly, there is nothing they could have done in the face of a big national swing to the Tories.’ He added: ‘If the price of Britain leaving the EU is a Tory advance after taking up this patriotic cause then it is a price Ukip is prepared to pay. We are the victims of our own success and now we pick ourselves up and go on to further success in the future.’
His party lost all its seats in Lincoln- shire, Hampshire and Essex – key general election battlegrounds for Ukip. Mr Carswell, who left Ukip in March to sit as an independent, leaving the party without any MPs, wrote on Twitter: ‘It’s over.’
‘It is a pretty disastrous result for Ukip, but we shouldn’t be despondent,’ he told sky News. He said it was ‘job done’ because the UK was leaving the EU and urged Ukip supporters to back Theresa May at the general election.
He added: ‘I reckon the footnote in history I will occupy is to be their first and their last MP and I’m delighted.’
Mr Banks suggested Ukip needs ‘a strategic bullet to the back of the head’.
The Leave.EU founder said: ‘If we use the analogy of Ukip as a racing car, Nigel [Farage] was a skilled driver who drove the car around the track faster and faster, knowing when to take risks, delighting the audience.
‘The current leadership has crashed the car at the first bend … Ukip under the current leadership, without positive radical policies, is finished as an electoral force.’
Elections expert Professor Michael Thrasher said: ‘Ukip received one in eight votes cast at the 2015 general election, and therefore those votes are absolutely critical in a month’s time at the general election.’
MEP steven Woolfe, who quit Ukip in the aftermath of an altercation with a party colleague, said he would back the Tories in the general election.