In "Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain" Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin take a comprehensive look at the origins and rise of UKIP.
Writing about the party in 2013, the authors talk of how much UKIP activists had to celebrate at its 20th birthday bash.
"A large audience of motivated activists: a growing membership that … stood at over 30,000: rows of interested journalists: and their leader, Nigel Farage, who had just been voted the second most influential right-winger in Britain, behind Prime Minister David Cameron."
Just five years later, and it’s all so different. There only remains one section in that above quote that would resonate now, and that is the rows of interested journalists. The party has been causing lots of headlines lately, but for all the wrong reasons.
UKIP’s ruling National Executive Committee has voted (almost unanimously) to support a motion of no confidence in the party leader Henry Bolton. The only dissenting voice in that vote came from Henry Bolton himself.
It says a lot that had Henry Bolton voted to oust himself from the leadership, it might not even be the strangest thing to happen within the party in recent times.
In 2016, an altercation between two UKIP MEPs left one hospitalised, but not before he was photographed sprawled out on a corridor in the European Parliament. The same year, the newly elected party leader stood down after just 18 days in the role.
The current leader, Mr Bolton, hit the headlines after leaving his wife at Christmas. A few weeks later, comments from the 25-year-old model with whom he had become romantically involved were leaked to the tabloid press.
Crass and disparaging racial comments she made about the soon to be wife of Britain's Prince Harry were plastered all over the Sunday papers. Mr Bolton then said he had ended the relationship as a result, until he was photographed with the same woman the following day.
Brexit was UKIP’s raison d’être. Fears of what a surging UKIP could do to the Conservative Party were key in David Cameron’s decision to promise an In/Out referendum on the EU.
Of course, the issue of Europe had divided and incensed his own party in the decades before, but the rise of UKIP as a coherent political force suggested that the issue could cut into Tory votes.
Few people were as interchangeable with their political party as Nigel Farage was with his. If UKIP was a one-issue party, then it was also a one-man band. It would have been difficult for anyone to follow Mr Farage’s leadership, but once the Brexit referendum result meant the UK was leaving the EU, that job became even harder.
Once that happened, many of those voters who had left the Conservatives and Labour found their way back to the more mainstream parties, resulting in UKIP’s share of the national vote falling from 12.6% in 2015 to 1.8% in 2017.
Mr Bolton has told the National Executive Committee he is going nowhere. On that, Mr Bolton and the Committee are in disagreement, and the NEC wants him to stand down. So now party members must decide. If members do not support him, then the party must call a leadership election.
UKIP has plenty of practice in running leadership elections, as it has had four leaders in 18 months. But already there is speculation that another leadership vote could bankrupt a party that has seen its vote, and membership figures, collapse.
As for Mr Farage, when asked about whether he would return to frontline politics, he has said he doubts it. Watch this space.
