Is this the death of Ukip? – The Week UK

When Ukip's vote tallies were read out at electoral counts up and down the country, the muted applause said it all.

Just weeks after losing all but one of their councillors in the local elections, the party that pushed Britain to Brexit drew less than two per cent of the vote on election night.

Ukip failed to gain a single MP. Even in uber-eurosceptic Boston and Skegness, party leader Paul Nuttall ended up in third place with 7.7 per cent of the vote. Hours later, he resigned.

It's easy to forget that two years ago Ukip were the third-largest party in the country they pulled in almost 13 per cent of the vote in 2015.

In the weeks and months following the Brexit vote, the party has been beset with both internal strife and an existential crisis that no one has been able to solve.

The EU referendum result a year ago was the culmination of a 20-year fight that saw Ukip rise from a fringe group to a game-changing political force.

But before the celebration champagne had gone flat, Ukip had an urgent challenge to solve finding a leader.

Having achieved his Brexit goal, Nigel Farage, the face of the Leave campaign, announced he was stepping down.

With their only household name out of the picture, Ukip needed a new leader who could help the party capitalise on the eurosceptic zeitgeist before it was too late.

First there was Diane James, who won the party's leadership contest on 16 September. Eighteen days later she handed in her notice, saying she did not have the "full support" of the party.

Another leadership campaign then got underway, but the contest was overshadowed by a bizarre incident in which one of the frontrunners was hospitalised after an altercation with a fellow Ukip MEP in the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

The exact circumstances surrounding the clash between Steven Woolfe, who later resigned from the party, and defence spokesman Mike Hookem are still a matter of dispute, but either way it was an excruciating moment for a party desperately trying to display a united front.

In November 2016, the party finally settled on a leader in the shape of Merseyside MEP Paul Nuttall, but his short tenure in the job has been far from smooth.

Among other things, Nuttall has been accused of incorrectly claiming to have a PhD and lying about being present at the Hillsborough disaster in 1989.

On 8 June 2017, as the extent of Ukip's dire performance at the polls became clear, Nuttall tendered his resignation, leaving the party leaderless once again.

When the initial elation over the referendum result died down, Ukip were left contemplating a hard truth. The Brexit vote "has turned Ukip into a single-issue party without an issue," says the New Statesman.

Without their anti-EU rallying cry, the party leadership has been searching for another issue which can band the fractured movement together without much success.

Under Nuttall, Ukip has attempted to rebrand as the party that is unafraid to stand up to radical Islam. However, policies like a burka ban and mandatory medical inspections of girls thought to be at risk of FGM have not proven the vote winners Nuttall had hoped. They even sit uneasily with some of the party.

In March, Ukip's only MP, Douglas Carswell resigned from the party after a public feud over its direction. He said Ukip was becoming increasingly anti-immigrant.

Even as the votes were being counted on Thursday night, there was another defection. Tim Matthews, the candidate for Devon Central, said that Ukip had originally been "a libertarian party campaigning for Brexit" but had since "veered into extremism and racism", the BBC reports.

Could there still be a second act in Ukip's political life? Nuttall certainly thinks so. "The new rebranded Ukip must be launched and a new era must begin with a new leader," he said as he announced his own resignation.

Enter Nigel Farage. As it became clear that Britain was heading for a hung parliament, the former leader told the BBC he had "absolutely no choice" but to end his self-imposed exile from Westminster to ensure that Brexit would not be thrown off course.

Farage did not say whether such a comeback would be at the head of a new political movement or a return to his old party, but he acknowledged that "Ukip voters want someone who speaks for them".

Even if Farage were back at the helm, there is the lingering question of who the party now speaks for.

Many analysts predicted that Ukip had acted as a "gateway drug", luring one-time Labour voters to the right, and that the Tories would therefore reap the benefits of Ukip's falling star but it didn't pan out that way on the night, says the Financial Times.

In fact, in many seats, former Ukip voters "seemed to divide fairly evenly between Labour and the Conservatives", suggesting that beyond a shared euroscepticism, their political views were more diverse than the party had hoped.

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Is this the death of Ukip? - The Week UK