This was an election won by the right, but not in the way the media suggested. It was not a case of a resurgent Conservative Party, but of changing alignments. The share of the vote for both Labour and the Conservatives barely altered between 2010 (29 per cent and 36.1 per cent, respectively) and 2015 (30.4 per cent and 36.9 per cent). Ukip, however, increased its vote from 3.1 per cent to 12.6 per cent. Deploying a political strategy which I will call ‘counter-transformism’, Ukip consolidated the right wing, energized it, hardened its positions, polarized the debate to the right, and kept a weak Labour leadership on the defensive. With the petty bourgeoisie as its bedrock, Ukip assembled an impressive, cross-class coalition, with moderate advances into the Liberal and Labour vote. It has extended beyond its typical conservative southern England strongholds to the Labour-voting northeast, northwest and South Wales. Only in Scotland, where Labour is the main party of British nationalism, and Northern Ireland, where British nationalism has more locally rooted variants, are Ukip absent.

Ukip achieved this in part by modifying its rightist ideology with more populist interpellations; yet the Ukip vote was overwhelmingly a right-wing vote. Farage used his national television coverage in the final run of the campaign to campaign from the hard right. By vituperating against ‘foreigners with HIV’, he consolidated his core rather than appealing to moderates. Ukip was the most dynamic force in this election, increasing its vote more than any other party: quite an accomplishment for a party derided by Cameron as ‘fruitcakes’ a decade ago. Even so, within a week of this triumph, the leadership of Ukip was in turmoil. Disgruntled leadership elements attacked Farage and demanded his resignation. That success so quickly led to the brink of ruin points to the fragility of the Ukip project, straining with contradictions only barely managed through fortune, influential support, and Farage’s considerable skill.

Ukip has its origins in an attempt by the Thatcherite historian Alan Sked to lobby the Tories from a hard Eurosceptic position. Sked’s basic orientation was to defend a highly Atlanticist, ‘free market’ British capitalism against European integration. Mrs Thatcher’s famous Bruges speech in September 1988 expressed this credo well: ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level’.² In anticipation of the Maastricht Treaty, Sked founded the Anti-Federalist League to stand against pro-European Tories. The early campaign was a shambles, with the League relying on support from the old racist Enoch Powell, and falling back on traditional nationalist exhortations that Britain faced its worst threat ‘since Adolf Hitler’.³

The League’s poor performance led Sked’s allies to push for a relaunch and, by September 1993, Ukip was founded. It remained a single-issue anti-European party in its early years, despite competition from other Eurosceptic parties such as millionaire James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party. But as divisions and paralysis struck the Conservative Party, Ukip found opportunities to expand its purview. In previous years, Conservative divisions over Europe had been suppressed by the need for unity in the face of a host of common enemies: the militant left, the IRA, the ANC and the USSR. But with the left defeated, the USSR gone, the Irish struggle abating and apartheid on its way out, the pressure to remain unified dissipated. Ukip, hoping to peel off Tories disaffected with a centrist leadership, broadened its agenda to appeal to the hard right – tighter immigration controls and nationalist education policies – and gradually accumulated members and votes across southern England.⁴

Ukip’s activist core was often right wing in a sense that anticipated the more rabid wing of the Tea Party, but its voters were not exclusively right wing.⁵ Most voters for Eurosceptic parties were Conservative defectors, but once Ukip’s vote in a particular constituency or ward reached a certain level, it included a significant minority of votes from the Liberal Democrats and Labour. Even right-wing Ukip voters were not necessarily pro-free market, but traditionalist conservatives favouring economic controls. Further, Euroscepticism as a political attitude had, by the 1990s, transcended left-right divisions in the electorate, even if its relationship to voting choice did not.⁶ This would partially explain Ukip’s later efforts to disavow its right-wing identity, and adopt a populist, ‘anti-political’ idiom.

In the late 1990s, two key developments allowed Ukip to move forward. First, in a 1997 putsch organized by the young former Conservative activist and City trader, Nigel Farage, Alan Sked was removed from the leadership. Sked’s dogmatic positions and control-freakery had made him unpopular. Second, as a result they could approach and woo Referendum Party leaders, thus establishing themselves as the sole significant force of Euroscepticism in British politics. With more members, more votes and a new touch of professionalism, they attracted big hitters from the Conservative Party’s ranks, including the multimillionaire former Conservative donor Paul Sykes, and the former Conservative minister Roger Knapman who would become the Ukip leader in 2002.⁷ That Ukip could pull this off while the dominant forces in the Conservative Party were still Eurosceptic is significant.

By 2004, Ukip claimed almost 20,000 members, came third in the European parliamentary elections, securing 2.6 million votes, and – with Islam and immigration moving up the political agenda – began to attract celebrity endorsements. The lure of celebrity led to a brief and disastrous entanglement with the former Labour MP, broadcaster and Muslim-baiting columnist Robert Kilroy-Silk. Ukip’s major competitor for votes in this period was the British National Party (BNP), then undergoing a decade-long surge in which it abandoned its explicitly neo-Nazi themes for a more media-friendly approach. The overlap in their support, and the political values of their voters – hostility to immigration and the ‘politically correct’ elite – was considerable.⁸ Because of this, Ukip was always in danger of being associated in the public mind with the far right – ‘the BNP in blazers’ as the journalist Camilla Long called them – thus limiting their potential support.⁹ Dealing with this was a challenge that would fall to Nigel Farage, who took over the leadership in 2006.

Farage was a relative unknown as far as the wider public was concerned, but he had demonstrated his gifts to the Ukip membership. As the only Ukip candidate to keep his deposit during the 1997 general election, and having helped oust Sked, he was the party chairman who implemented the strategy of annexing the Referendum Party. Having been elected to the European parliament as a member for South East England as early as 1999, he had come to lead the party’s group of MEPs (Members of European Parliament). Uniquely energetic and shrewd among Ukip leaders, he was well-placed to take over from Knapman.¹⁰

More important for Ukip’s further development, however, was the acceleration of the Conservative Party’s crisis, and the leadership’s attempt to get a grip on it. By 2005, after three unelectable Thatcherite leaders chosen by the rank and file, and three crushing electoral defeats, in which their vote barely rose above 30 per cent, they were determined to move to the centre. Thatcher’s legacy had gained bipartisan acceptance, but an explicitly Thatcherite stance could not win an election. The Tories needed to somehow articulate a post-Thatcherite centrist politics while distinguishing themselves from New Labour. Distinguishing themselves on Europe only divided the party and alienated the two key constituencies that they had lost since 1992 – skilled workers and middle-class professionals who were voting with their perceived economic interest rather than conservative values. In 2006, the Tory grassroots got the message. David Cameron won the leadership as a slick, media-friendly liberal. Triangulating New Labour, he accepted public spending and multiculturalism, while claiming that New Labour’s Britain was both bureaucratically statist and avariciously money-minded, producing a ‘broken Britain’ with no moral centre.¹¹

Cameron’s leadership victory represented a defeat for the hard right and the largely middle-class Conservative base by a pro-business centrist leadership. But many leading Conservative right-wingers were reluctant to accept the new status quo. Farage saw an opportunity and launched a charm offensive, with a traditional right-wing agenda focused on climate denial, tax cuts and support for grammar schools.¹² Although socially authoritarian in most respects, Ukip also pitched itself as a ‘libertarian’ party, opposed to obsessive government oversight and stifling political correctness. Today, several of its best known figures, such as Godfrey Bloom, MEP Jane Collins, and its only current MP, Douglas Carswell, consider themselves libertarians.

Cameron at first drew strength from Farage’s attacks, using Ukip as an example of the ‘fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists’ whom modern Conservatism was jettisoning. He was supported by Alan Sked, who claimed that Farage had once told him that Ukip would ‘never win the nigger vote. The nig-nogs will never vote for us’. Farage dismissed Sked’s tale and retorted to Cam...