Ukip is embroiled in acrimony after disastrous local election results saw the party win just one council seat and former key supporters declaring it finished as a political force.

The party’s sole council win was a gain from Labour in Lancashire; otherwise, by 4pm on Friday it had lost 140 seats. Its vote share in England collapsed from 22% when the same seats were last contested to a projected total of less than 5%.

The leader, Paul Nuttall, suggestedUkip’s collapse was an inevitable result of Theresa May pushing for a hard Brexit.



“If the price of Britain leaving the EU is a Tory advance after taking up this patriotic cause then it is a price Ukip is prepared to pay,” Nuttall said in a statement.

The elections across England, Scotland and Wales were “a difficult night” for the party but Ukip would rise again, he insisted.

“Our members will know that politics is a long game and that as well as keeping up the pressure for Brexit, Ukip is now laying down its big agendas for the future.”

Arron Banks, formerly Ukip’s biggest funder who had considered standing for the party at next month’s general election, criticised Nuttall’s leadership in comparison with the former incumbent, Nigel Farage.

“If we use the analogy of Ukip as a racing car, Nigel was a skilled driver who drove the car around the track faster and faster, knowing when to take risks, delighting the audience,” Banks said. “The current leadership has crashed the car, at the first bend of the race, into the crowd, killing the driver and spectators.

“Ukip under the current leadership, without positive radical policies, is finished as an electoral force.”

The party lost 10 seats in Lincolnshire, where Nuttall has decided to run in the general election in the Boston and Skegness seat.

Douglas Carswell, the former MP for Clacton who defected from the Conservatives before leaving Ukip again in March, told BBC he was “Ukip’s first and last member of parliament”.

“There are a lot of good people in Ukip, and I would not want to say anything unkind, but we all know that it’s over,” he said. “Let’s be frank: I would be surprised if Ukip manages to field more than 100 candidates at the general election.”

Nuttall has dismissed the figure, saying Ukip will field many more than 100 candidates, without giving a specific number.

Nuttall has sought to reposition the party for the post-Brexit era, introducing policies aimed at Muslim people, including a ban on wearing a full-face veil in public, and compulsory medical checks for girls deemed at risk of female genital mutilation.

Steven Woolfe, the MEP and former Ukip leadership candidate who left the party last year, told the BBC such a shift would not work, saying the “darker forces within Ukip” were in the ascendant.

Ukip’s deputy chair, Suzanne Evans, said the party had been “victims of our own success”.

“We do have a duty now to reform, because what concerns me is that there is still a desperate need for a sensible third party in British politics,” she told Sky News.



“If there is a Tory landslide on 8 June, I think very quickly people in this country will begin to think they made a mistake in voting for them.

“I think they might backslide on Brexit and I think they will be pushing forward with very, very unpopular policies, raising taxes, penalising small businesses, taking an even bigger stick than they have already to the poorest people on benefits.”

Matthew Goodwin, a senior fellow at Chatham House, had predicted that less than half of those who backed Ukip under Farage in the 2015 general election would do so again, with a third moving to the Conservatives.



