Why didn’t Ukip win the South Yorkshire police and crime commissioner byelection? The bookies thought Nigel Farage’s party would win the race. They were wrong and here’s why.

1. Ukip chose the wrong candidate. Selecting a former copper who served in the South Yorkshire force for 30 years gave Labour easy ammunition. Never mind that Jack Clarkson says he was nowhere near the picket lines during the miners’ strike, nor on duty at Sheffield Wednesday’s ground on the day of the Hillsborough disaster in 1989. You can’t put yourself forward as the candidate to hold a rotten police force to account when you worked for that force yourself until 2006 and never complained about it publicly at the time. Anyone who had the misfortune to attend one of the risible hustings held during the campaign will also have noticed that Clarkson often talks more like a Police Federation union rep than an independent arbiter. I heard him tell an audience of women at Victim Support that it wasn’t fair for senior officers to drive around in a BMW 5 Series when ordinary coppers like him made do with an Astra.

2. Labour’s candidate was easily the most experienced. The party wisely bypassed anyone who had served recently on any South Yorkshire council, particularly Rotherham. Yes, Alan Billings is close to David Blunkett after serving as his deputy on Sheffield council during the 1980s. But enough time has passed since then, which the good clergyman has filled with entirely relevant work experience – sitting on the youth justice panel, for example, as well as serving as a vicar in inner-city Sheffield and a mining community (Beighton and Brookhouse colliery).

3. Ukip ran a cynical, scaremongering campaign which turned many people off. “There are 1,400 reasons why you should not trust Labour again,” ran their billboard – a reference to the number of children sexually exploited in Rotherham over a 16-year period according to the Alexis Jay report. One of those 1,400, a 25-year-old who was groomed, raped and passed between a group of older men from the age of 12, criticised Ukip’s campaign. The role of candidates should be to “put Rotherham back together”, she told the Independent: “People shouldn’t be making such comments and using it to get themselves into high positions. That’s very disrespectful to us victims.”

4. Most people don’t believe in police and crime commissioners as a concept – a feeling that has only strengthened since Shaun Wright, South Yorkshire’s first, disastrous PCC, refused for so long to resign after the Jay report was published. People I spoke to in the county said they did not agree with the politicisation of the role – all four candidates on the ballot paper this time were backed by a political party – Labour, Ukip, Conservatives and the English Democrats, who came second in 2012.

5. Nigel Farage may have boasted of parking his tanks on Labour’s lawn, but the fact is that Labour’s electioneering artillery is still way mightier than Ukip’s. Miliband’s party might not be very good at coming up with policies that capture the public imagination, but it is still adept at getting its vote out. They are particularly good at winning on postal votes – something that infuriates the smaller parties, who are always playing catch-up during a short election campaign. According to some reports at Friday’s count, 80% of those who voted in the byelection did so via post. Yes, a turnout of 14.65% is nothing to celebrate. But that’s more or less the same as 2012, when Shaun Wright became the county’s first PCC, and many people predicted much lower participation. So this latest win is testament to Labour’s army of rosette-wearing foot soldiers who spent the last four weeks knocking on doors and trying to persuade South Yorkshire’s million voters to take part in an election very few knew about – or believed in.