Falling Farage

It has only taken a month for UKIP to lose one third of its support, down from 18 per cent (which in itself was not very good), to 12, on par with the Lib Dems. There is another poll out today, but even that puts UKIP on a mere 15 per cent. That means about 10, possibly eight, once the General Election is upon us.

UKIP will be hit very badly indeed when it does not after all top the poll at the European Elections next year, which are in any case largely meaningless. It is statistically tied with the Tories for a fairly distant second place, meaning that it might very well come third. And once UKIP had failed to win any Commons seats in 2015, as is universally expected and which the party is already trying to spin as some kind of moral victory, then it will have no candidates in 2020.

Even the SDP won somewhere. In 1992, David Owen retired, but the other two MPs who had been elected for the SDP and remained unreconciled to the Lib Dems both came close to retaining their seats as Independent Social Democrats. No last two irreconcilable UKIP MPs will come close to retaining their seats as Independents in 2025 or 2030. Since there is never going to be so much as one UKIP MP. Nor, well before 2025, will there be any UKIP. 12 per cent? I ask you!

But the biggest tragedy of all is that there would still have been a three-figure Labour majority in 2015, plus a comfortable one in 2020 and probably also in 2025, if UKIP had never been founded. It is not even "splitting the Tory vote and letting Labour in". It is irrelevant. Completely and utterly irrelevant.