“The Ukip fox is in the Westminster hen house,” exclaimed Nigel Farage when his party gained more than 150 council seats in local elections in May 2014 and triumphed in the European elections.
A projected national share of the vote suggested Ukip would have won 17 per cent of the vote in a general election, a level it has consistently scored in polling since and a far cry from the 3 per cent of votes it won in 2010.
Ukip members
Not for nothing did Nigel Farage once declare that Ukip was “the seaside party.” Almost every one of the Ukip’s top target seats is either on the east coast of England or a stone’s throw away from it.
South Thanet, Boston & Skegness, Great Yarmouth, Great Grimsby. Literally on the periphery of Britain, these places are older, whiter and poorer than the national average. Their inhabitants have been dubbed “the left behind” - people who feel anxious about how the country has changed in recent decades.
Picking up five or so MPs at the general election would be a major milestone for a party that spent most of the last 20 years on the political fringes. Until 2011, it had never even come second in a parliamentary election. But it is Ukip’s ability to eat into votes elsewhere that is really giving its rivals the jitters.
The party expects to bite large chunks out of both the Labour and Conservative support on polling day on May 7, wreaking havoc in marginal seats. As a result, both David Cameron and Ed Miliband have come under huge pressure from their own MPs to launch pre-emptive anti-Ukip strikes.