John Webster and Lance Parkin on UKIP.

Politics Not really, not Webster anyway.  But watching the BBC's glorious capture of the Globe's recent production of The Duchess of Malfi, I was drawn to these lines from very late in the day or rather play as Delio surveys the dead human wreckage around his ankles:

"These wretched eminent things
Leave no more fame behind 'em, than should one
Fall in a frost, and leave his print in snow ;
As soon as the sun shines, it ever melts,
Both form and matter."

That's UKIP isn't it? Or at least let's hope so. Lance Parkin seems to think so even if he doesn't reference Malfi.  But he says something similar in many more words:

"UKIP are on the march, seeing a surge in support in the local government elections and getting the most number of seats in the European elections.

"It would be easy to see this as representing a sea change in British politics. And because it’s the line of least resistance, that is what the political pundits have done. Labour won 44% of the council seats, the Tories 36%. They apparently need to ‘learn lessons’ from UKIP who didn’t quite win 4%, who have no chance of winning a single seat at the general election next year, and whose share of the vote actually fell.

"UKIP is an optical illusion, a mirage. Once you work out where those votes came from, the prevailing narrative on UKIP collapses."

Political parties have in their power to discover why people didn't vote for them. They can go into the country and ask the 65% who didn't vote on Thursday why they didn't, which will presumably be a mix of apathy and not having the time or not even knowing that it was polling day due to both apathy and time.

They could ask UKIP supporters why they voted UKIP which will also be due to apathy and also as Lance identifies protest votes.  We can imagine that the number of Kippers who voted for them because of their policies is probably pretty low, largely because it's almost impossible to articulate them.

These things are possible. But they won't. They'll instead spend the next year reconfiguring their policies on the assumption that they'll make themselves attractive to the 11% of the British population who did vote UKIP even though objectively it's madness to ignore the interests of the 89% who didn't vote for them.  Sigh.