UKIP rebels could destroy Tory dreams

TONIGHT, the Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats expect to be served a second large portion of the humblest sort of pie in the Euro Elections.

A similarly deep dish will be set before the BBC and many in the media who thought that the repeated cry of ‘racist!’ would be a sort of magic incantation guaranteed to ward off Nigel Farage.

Their only achievement was to make large numbers of decent people angry that their reasonable discontents were being loftily dismissed as bigotry by an insulated and snobbish political class.

Now what happens? This dramatic and fascinating voters’ revolt has no actual power. A few local council seats and a few Euro-MPs cannot change the destiny of the nation or alter the unchanging purpose of the European Union.

The question is how much influence it should and will have. Nigel Farage himself says he hopes to destroy the Tory Party, a near-impossible task in a country where politics has for centuries been based on tight tribal loyalty.

And as it happens he has done nearly as much damage to Labour, whose hopes of an overall majority in 2015 must now be virtually nil.

It is, in fact, hard for him to advance any further without getting into grave difficulties. Labour voters may toy with UKIP for now, but will surely grow cooler as they learn more of its Thatcherite origins.

Tory rebels are in many cases so disgusted with their party that they actively do not care if it wins or loses in 2015. But others will return to Mr Cameron, even if they have to hold their noses, because they rightly fear a Labour government.

Unless he can somehow navigate past these two jagged reefs, Mr Farage is never going to get any significant number of Westminster seats, and without those he is condemned to be no more than a negative nuisance, dividing his own side and helping his enemies.

But that could still be enough to wreck Tory hopes for years to come.

David Cameron and his Tories have to work out, very quickly, what to do about this. Any miscalculation, and the Conservatives will go into opposition, so making them more vulnerable to UKIP than they are now – when they can at least promise an EU referendum in 2017.

Mr Cameron is the only party leader who can realistically make this pledge. He needs to drive this decisive fact home far more effectively than he has done so far.

He must also stress above all that it is under his stewardship that the economy has begun at last to recuperate, and that this recovery would be gravely endangered by another dose of Labour government.

In the world of hard reality, rather than in UKIP’s world of wishful thinking, the Prime Minister still has far more to offer.