Nigel Farage might be gone, but don’t assume Ukip is a spent force

The list of Nigel Farage’s wayward moments is chunky – like when he said migrants with HIV should be kept out of the UK, or referred to a Chinese person as a “ch**ky”, or said the gender pay-gap is down to women being “worth less”.

So to hear him say he is quitting Ukip because its brand has been “so tarnished” gives us cause to stop and look at what is happening with Britain’s erstwhile third party.

Farage once pitted himself against Ukip moderates like ex-Lobby journalist Patrick O’Flynn and former Conservative councillor Suzanne Evans.

But they too have quit the party recently. As have ex-leader Paul Nuttall and their only elected member in Scotland, MEP David Coburn.

The common thread running through all the departures is disquiet at the new direction of current leader Gerard Batten, which features a preoccupation with Islam and which has heralded the arrival of Tommy Robinson.

Not one to hide his light under a bushel, Batten said when Farage quit: “Under my leadership, the party has been saved financially, recruited thousands of more members, and we have risen in the polls. We are going from strength to strength.”

It’s a confidence trick with a Trumpy ring to it, as is Batten’s cliched tendency to decry the “MSM” – listed in the populist’s handbook under, “how to cover one’s distasteful tendencies under a veneer of victimhood”.

Under Batten, Ukip has moved from Farage’s dog-whistle politics into something culturally darker.

The attacks are not on Islamism, but on Islam – a religion with which 3.4 million people peacefully affiliate in Britain, but which Batten branded a “death cult” – was a disturbing sign. His suggestion of Muslim-only prisons looks to fascism.

Then there is the arrival of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, or Tommy Robinson as he is known, a far-right campaigner whose followers have a gift for social media propaganda and who called British Muslims “enemy combatants who want to kill you, maim you and destroy you”. He talked about the refugee crisis as “an invasion of Europe by military age Muslim men”.

All this is evidently beyond the pale for many of the party’s senior elected representatives. But that does not mean Ukip is a spent force.

Robinson has a large following; people in some northern towns turned out in their thousands to support him at demos even before Batten became interested in him.

It is undoubtedly this following – a movement that has grown organically around Robinson and sees him as its champion – that Batten wishes to harness.

Perhaps more worryingly, on an anecdotal level, I’m finding more and more MPs from white working-class seats are starting to say that the views Batten and Robinson espouse are taking hold in the areas they represent.

Not just with thuggish skinheads, not only with older generations, but with young people, new mums, groups you would not expect to hold extreme views.

The other factor is, as ever, Brexit. If there is a no-deal Brexit, it is these white working-class people who will be hit hardest financially and who may end up looking for someone to blame. On the other hand, if May’s deal or some version of it goes through, they will be looking for someone to blame for it not being the right Brexit. And if we remain … Well, you get the picture.

A “betrayal of the 52 per cent by Westminster” is going to be an electoral slogan for someone at some point whatever happens.

At the same time, the British political class is indeed in its worst place since Chamberlain resigned in 1940. Desperate, uninspired, forlorn, scrambling and crying out for someone to take hold.

It would be comforting to say Ukip is a spent force, but it is also an organisation with an established machinery, a party for which some people are used to voting. And it is joining an established extremist movement, at a highly fertile moment for extremism.

The incubator is there, we disregard this new Ukip at our peril.