I don't really like talking about the strategy and tactics of the Conservative Party — why intrude on private grief? My preferred approach is to get on with spreading the positive Ukip message and picking up extra support.

But something the Tories have been saying in recent weeks really does need countering. It is the idea that Ukip voters belong at some deep level to the Conservative Party and that by luring them away, Ukip is in danger of putting a Left-wing Labour government into power by default. Vote Ukip, get Miliband, say people such as Grant Shapps (I think that is the name the Tory chairman is using these days).

Let’s set aside for a moment the appalling arrogance and complacency the Tories have shown towards those alienated former voters who do now back our party. They are not owned by the Conservative Party and have rumbled David Cameron for not being a Conservative anyway.

The point is that the idea of Ukip fishing for votes predominantly from the Tory pond is plain wrong. To listen to received wisdom inside the Westminster bubble you would think the typical Ukip voter is a retired half-colonel living on the edge of Salisbury Plain.

I know that if there ever was anything in that stereotype there certainly isn’t any longer. Anyone who attended the Evening Standard’s immigration debate last week will readily appreciate the point I am making.

There were lots of Labour-minded people in that audience who supported Ukip’s position on immigration. It is not that Labour politicians such as Tessa Jowell and David Lammy — who were on the panel that night — have taken a conscious decision to stop speaking for working-class people. It is that they are so out of touch that they just do not know how to speak for working-class people any more.

One Labour supporter in the audience that night made the point most passionately: the party had been blind to the impact of uncontrolled immigration on working people and he was now going to support Ukip.

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It was a shock to hear Lammy pick up and run with the idea, popular among the political class, that British youngsters are somehow lazy, feckless and are not prepared to take low-paid work in order to get on to the first rung of the jobs ladder.

I know that in the great majority of instances that is totally untrue. Most of our school-leavers are desperate to work but they have been blown out of the water by an endless stream of Eastern European migrants who are older, often better qualified and ready to share bedrooms in shifts while they are getting established.

My way of doing politics has focused on meeting and listening to people who live outside the Westminster bubble. I have gone around the country while at all times seeking to avoid doing what Willie Whitelaw once referred to as “stirring up apathy”. And I have found that people are desperate to talk about political issues.

The media gives the impression that my normal mode is transmit, and indeed I did a lot of talking on my common sense tour which took me the length and breadth of England in the run-up to the local elections last spring. But I was in “receive” mode for a lot of the time as well. Listening to people voice their concerns on the street, in public halls and, yes, the occasional public house as well. I talked to lorry drivers and building site workers, butchers and bakers, farm labourers and security guards, shop assistants and cleaners.

And everywhere I heard the same thing: wages falling ever further behind the cost of living for year after year; people being undercut by migrant workers; grown-up children unable to find any work at all let alone move out and afford a place of their own; energy bills and food bills out of control; hardworking people being dragged into hardship.

No wonder some of Ukip’s best by-election performances have come in neglected Labour heartlands — in Rotherham, South Shields and Wythenshawe & Sale East. Even as long ago as the 2009 European elections, most of our top-performing areas were in Labour parliamentary constituencies.

A giant poll by Populus published last week found that “Ukip’s support is drawn disproportionately from working-class and lower-middle-class voters”. As the academics Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford put it: “Ukip has raised as many questions for Labour as for the Tories.”

Goodwin and Ford are among the few to have noticed that: “A new electorate of ‘left behind’ voters has grown up. These voters are on the wrong side of social change, are struggling on stagnant incomes, feel threatened by the way their communities and country are changing, and are furious at an established politics that appears not to understand or even care about their concerns. And it is these left-behind voters who have finally found a voice in Farage’s revolt.” I couldn’t have put it much better myself.

The truth is that unless Ed Miliband promises at the very least an EU referendum — thereby giving people the prospect of being able to vote for Britain to take back control of its own borders — Labour will be extremely vulnerable to Ukip, not just in the European elections but in the general election next year too.

It may very well be Ukip that deprives Labour of an overall majority in the Commons. We are the only political force vigorous enough to perform that service for the nation because the Conservatives under Mr Cameron are a spent force, following their leader over the edge of a cliff.

As we showed in the local elections last year, the truth of the matter is that if you vote Ukip, then these days you get Ukip too. We will show it again in the European elections in May. And if anyone thinks we are going to fade away for the general election then I can assure them: they have another think coming.