It is not often that one has the pleasure of giving both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition hum-dinging headaches on a single memorable night.

But that is what Ukip did this week with our by-election results in Clacton and in Heywood and Middleton. Following my campaign visits to the latter I had dared to hope that we might break our record vote share for a by-election – the 28 per cent recorded when we narrowly failed to take Eastleigh in Hampshire off the Liberal Democrats last year.

In the event our superb candidate in Heywood, John Bickley, smashed it to pieces, chalking up a massive 39 per cent vote share in Labour’s strongest northern citadel of all.

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Nigel Farage said his party gave both the Prime Minister and Ed Miliband a 'hum-dinging headache'

John’s record stood for only a couple of hours – Douglas Carswell weighed in with an incredible 60 per cent in Clacton.

So what does it all mean? Labour reckoned it showed the Tories were in free-fall, while the Tories reckoned Labour had been humiliated in a home fixture. For once, both were right.

But the Conservative message soon changed to the familiar yet increasingly bizarre claim that Ukip’s success means Ed Miliband is likely to win the next election. The claim was propagated by Tory chairman Grant Shapps, a man so devoid of genuine political ideas that he makes a blank canvas look like a Jackson Pollock.

In Clacton, the electorate voted Ukip and got Ukip. In Heywood and Middleton, it was the rump of 3,000 or so Conservative voters who could have avoided ‘getting Miliband’ had they switched to us – because Labour’s majority was only 617. Once again, the Tories had split our vote and in doing so saved a left-wing party, just as they did in Eastleigh.

In the great urban areas of the North and the Midlands, the Conservatives have become a minor legacy party with a toxic brand and no apparent prospect of recovery. I could take you on a tour of towns and cities that were represented by Tory MPs a generation ago, but are now devoid of them. Perhaps we could call it the Matthew Parris Heritage Trail, after the Tory Times columnist whose vicious and outrageous attack describing Clacton as ‘Britain on crutches’ was a gift to our campaign.

In Labour's northern citadel of Heywood and Middleton John Bickley managed 39 per cent of the vote

THE Cameron Conservatives are not the new politics; they are getting in the way of the new politics. The British public are crying out for change and increasingly they see Ukip as offering the best prospect of that change.

In recent years the three older parties have together turned politics into a ghetto for the liberal metropolitan elite – a space from which most of the British public is ruthlessly excluded.

All back Britain’s prohibitively expensive and anti-democratic subservience to the European Union, all are signed up to an energy policy that drives bills ever higher and all back continued enormous increases in spending on foreign aid. In short, all have fallen prey to the conceit of being generous with other people’s money. All too are happy to render Britain effectively borderless in respect of more than two dozen neighbouring countries.

None has an answer to the social mobility crisis that has grown since the option of academically selective education within the state sector was throttled in the 1970s. All are happy to see Britain entangled in dodgy and often counterproductive foreign wars. All would keep us locked inside the European human rights regime. And perhaps worst of all, they are all run by cliques of college kids who know little of the real world.

No wonder those who have to earn a proper living and strive to pay their own bills and are not prisoners to political correctness find that Ukip is a party they can connect with and be proud to support.

David Cameron's Conservative party are not the new politics 'they are getting in the way of the new politics'

Most of all, Ukip is being identified as the one party that is prepared to get to grips with the immigration crisis. Only by leaving the EU can we escape the obligation to maintain open borders. Only then can we set our own immigration policy according to our needs. We need an Australian-style points system that would bring volume control and quality control.

That way we can welcome those migrants with major contributions to make – jobs to create, investments to bring and British values to adopt – while keeping out those without the skills, aptitudes or attitudes that can improve our society.

And once we get immigration under control we can then have half a chance of sensibly planning the provision of key public services such as schools and hospitals, having sufficient social housing available and giving working people a fair shake at finding decent and decently rewarded employment.

The public are demanding a change to the immigration system that only Ukip is prepared to provide. The other parties just offer spin and people hate being played for fools.

There is a great whoosh of energy around Ukip these days. The metropolitan media, which has hitherto been desperately slow on the uptake, turned out in enormous numbers in Clacton on Friday morning. They had just discovered what millions of voters have known for ages: the People’s Army is on the march.

Now we have won under First Past The Post and have every chance of winning enough seats at the General Election next year to hold the balance of power. The British people want us in the next Parliament and it is our job to convince them to send us there in real numbers.

Now we have won under First Past the Post - we have every chance of holding the balance of power

I am aware of the hopes invested in our party by millions of patriotic, decent and hardworking men and women. It is a huge responsibility. It is not only our right to seek election into the House of Commons in May, it has also become our duty to succeed. Too many people have been too badly let down by the political establishment for far too long for failure to be an option.

All roads now lead to Rochester & Strood for the by-election that Mark Reckless triggered when he joined us. Team Dave will throw their kitchen sink at us – and lots of unpleasant items they keep in it. But if Mr Cameron continues to tolerate the smear campaign being waged against Mark by his lieutenants, he risks setting off an even bigger wave of support for Ukip.

We are not the finished article yet. We must and will continue to work on our weaknesses as well as build on our strengths. But what a long way we have come in the past couple of years. We are fighting to win your country back from political elites at home and abroad.

We want to make politicians once again the servants of the people and not their masters. We want to make them accountable to you. We know that you never stopped believing in Britain – neither did we.

Unlike Nick Clegg – whatever happened to him, by the way? – we know Britain is good enough to be a proud, independent nation, trading its way to prosperity across the globe. Getting on with its neighbours but not run by them. Engaged on the world stage, but nobody’s poodle.