Ukip’s vote, which reached 4 million in 2015, collapsed in the early hours of Friday morning, with Labour and the Conservatives slicing deep into its support and putting Paul Nuttall’s future as party leader in jeopardy.
The party’s vote share was down to about 2%, compared with 12.6% under the then leader Nigel Farage in 2015, when Ukip gained one MP.
Ukip had been on about 4% in opinion polls and was virtually wiped out in local elections a month ago. The general election result looked set to further increase the pressure on Nuttall, who stood in Boston and Skegness, the constituency that voted most enthusiastically for Brexit in June 2016.
By about 3am the party had racked up more than £30,000 in lost deposits.
Farage admitted that even Ukip supporters had considered it “irrelevant” during the campaign, after Brexit became less of an issue than many people expected. He also attacked the party’s “campaigning machine and central messaging”.
Nuttall was humiliated in Boston and Skegness, even though nearly three-quarters of the constituency voted to leave in the EU referendum. He received 3,308 votes, a fall of 26 percentage points on the party’s 2015 result, as the Conservatives hoovered up Ukip votes to hold the seat convincingly.
In Ukip’s only Commons seat, Clacton in Essex, the party slumped from a vote of 19,642 in 2015 for Douglas Carswell to 3,347 for Paul Oakley, the candidate who replaced him after he quit the party. The Conservative candidate, Giles Watling, won the seat easily.
Nuttall sought to cast the early events of election night as a failure by the prime minister.
If the exit poll is true then Theresa May has put Brexit in jeopardy. I said at the start this election was wrong. Hubris.
— Paul Nuttall (@paulnuttallukip) June 8, 2017
He was defeated earlier this year in the Stoke-on-Trent Central byelection and, following Farage’s seven failed attempts to win a seat in parliament, the slump in the polls appeared to cement fears among Ukip supporters that it may never transform support for its Euroscepticism into representation in the House of Commons.
Farage said: “When Corbyn said they [Labour] would end free movement, when he said that under Labour we would leave, I think he kind of boxed off Brexit as an issue for Ukip voters, many of whom did not see the party as being relevant in this campaign. Ultimately the shock we are seeing here tonight is all about personality. Ukip voters want somebody they think is speaking for them. They want somebody who is for change.”
But asked if Ukip was finished, he said: “It may just be beginning, because if tomorrow we finished up with Jeremy Corbyn forming a coalition with the Liberal Democrats and the SNP, I would assume the price would be a second referendum two years down the road and I think in that case there would be a lot of space for Ukip.”
The night started badly for Ukip with the first results from the north-east of England. In Houghton and Sunderland South, Ukip’s vote was down 15.8 percentage points, in Sunderland Central it fell by 14.3, and in Washington and Sunderland West it was cut by 12.9. In this constituency in 2015, Ukip came second with almost 20% of the vote.
In Hartlepool, a Ukip and Conservative target seat, Labour won with 52% of the vote, up 17 percentage points on 2015, while Ukip only received 11.5% of the vote, down 16.5.
Ukip’s vote appeared to be splitting between Labour and the Tories.
Nuttall always knew it would be a difficult election after the EU referendum result and with May taking on the role of chief proponent of a tough Brexit. Ukip ended up standing candidates in fewer than 400 seats, with the party openly saying it had stood aside for many pro-Brexit MPs.
But one senior Ukip member, speaking just before the election, noted that Nuttall’s only serious challenger in last year’s leadership election was Suzanne Evans, the deputy chair of the party, who had sufficient enemies within Ukip to be suspended for a period last year for alleged disloyalty.
“If we’d had anyone but Paul, would the party still exist now?” he said. “If Suzanne had won, we’d have had lots of MEPs resign within 24 hours and the party would have gone into a death spiral. Paul is not the perfect leader, but he’s the leader we’ve got.”
