Has Nigel Farage killed Ukip with his Brexit Party?

With several more defections to Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, Ukip has been left with just five MEPs ahead of the European parliament elections at the end of May, in which the new party will also stand. Here’s everything you need to know about it.

It is two-and-a-half years since Farage quit as Ukip leader, though he remained by far the most prominent member of the party. However, he chose not to rejoin in his fight for Brexit at these elections.

Farage says Ukip’s current leader, Gerard Batten, has taken the party in the wrong direction. Batten has explicitly cosied up to former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) and adopted an anti-Islam perspective on politics.

That’s what he says, anyway. Another reason Farage might have left is because the party had clearly descended into dysfunctionality: since he stepped down as leader it raced through four replacements in the space of two years, and the majority of its MEPs have actually quit the party.

Farage’s decision may be more practical than principled. As far back as 2010 he was prompting anti-Islam policies like the Burqa ban, which was a Ukip policy under his leadership.

We won’t really know until the elections. One thing we can probably be sure of is that it won’t do as well as last time. All polls currently suggest its vote share is well down on the 2014 European elections, when it came top.

But the Brexit Party has yet to obliterate Ukip as an electoral force: most polls show the two on roughly the same share of the vote.

The latest YouGov poll had Ukip on 14 per cent and the Brexit Party on 15 per cent, while the latest Opinium survey had Ukip on 13 per cent and Farage’s outfit on 12. It’s worth noting that these polls are for European parliament elections only and neither party is doing anywhere near as well in Westminster elections.

In 2014, the last European elections, Ukip won 26.6 per cent. Farage may have taken Ukip to mainstream success, but the party’s own brand is very strong too. Many people may not actually know that Farage has left.

It’s looking likely at the moment: under the proportional representation system used for the European parliament, both parties would win seats with those shares. However, if their supporters were both voting for a single party they would probably get more seats, as the D’Hondt system (the technical name for the voting system the UK uses for these elections) tends to penalise split votes.

Alternatively, as the campaign goes on, one party might get the upper hand upon the other and wipe it off the electoral map. If Ukip’s supporters really are residual Farage fans who didn’t realise he had set up a new party, you could expect Brexit to gain and Ukip to fall back.

Farage says the party will be about making sure Brexit, which he says is in danger of being betrayed, is seen through. He says there will be “no difference between the Brexit Party and Ukip in terms of policy” but that “in terms of personnel, there’s a vast difference”.

Ukip’s non-EU policies were never really its focus and they will probably end up being relatively low-key.

But Farage’s claim is odd in itself given he left the party because of its policy direction. It is also debatable: there is not yet a policy or manifesto section on the party’s website, and lots of former Ukip people are involved in the party – but from the faction around Nigel Farage.

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