It’s over. Ukip, only a few months ago seen as an insurgent party riding high in the polls on over 20%, is finished. Today my former party lost all but one of the local council seats it was contesting. As Ukip’s first – and last – MP, I am far from despondent. In fact, I am elated. Why? Because we have won.

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Without the surge in support for Ukip in 2013 – not to mention byelection victories in Clacton and Rochester in 2014 – there would not have been a referendum last summer – a referendum that we won. Britain is going to leave the European Union. Job done.

It’s not just me who thinks this way, either, but many of the 3.8 million folk who voted Ukip last time. Right across the country yesterday we saw straight switches from Ukip to Theresa May. In fact, ever since the prime minister triggered article 50, beginning the formal process of getting Britain out of the European Union, support for Ukip has been on the slide.

It would be a mistake to see in the local election results a straightforward case of former Tories “coming home”. Many of the Kippers who this week switched to May seem to have voted Conservative for the first time. Ukip has, it appears, weaned them away from Labour. Having voted to leave in the EU referendum, many former Labour voters have heard only insults from their old party. Implying that there is something bigoted or suspect about those who voted leave has pushed such switchers away from Labour as effectively as May’s new-found Euroscepticism has drawn them towards her.

But it’s not just Brexit. Kippers are moving to May not only because they want her to get on with getting us out of the EU. In a weird way she is seen by many as the anti-establishment option in the coming election.

For as long as anyone can remember, politics in this country seems to have been dominated by a certain type of political insider. Think Tony Blair or David Cameron, Peter Mandelson or George Osborne. They spoke the same sort of bland language, talking a lot without saying much at all. May is soaring in the polls because in her quiet, understated way she seems to be the antithesis of all that. Instead of highfalutin, lofty rhetoric, she says what she wants, in rather dull terms – and then gets on with it. Unlike Cameron, she does not exchange high fives with EU leaders, but firmly tells them when they overstep the mark. There is an earnestness about May that folk beyond the Westminster bubble rather like.

The mood of populist insurgency sweeping the western world was supposed to produce a wave of rabble-rousers. But instead of producing a British version of Geert Wilders or Donald Trump, it has instead seen runaway levels of support for a vicar’s daughter from Maidenhead. Perhaps it is the good sense of the British electorate, more than anything our political leaders have done deliberately, that explains the demise of Ukip.

If Ukip achieved its aim of getting us out of the EU, it failed to break the political cartel in Westminster. In fact, far from being a duopoly, politics in Britain seems to be heading towards a May monopoly.

After May’s coming landslide, we will need a new movement or party to provide an alternative to Tory rule

For a few brief weeks towards the end of 2014, Ukip could have been the party that would break open the cosy little cartel in Westminster. After byelection successes in Clacton and Rochester it seemed to be standing in front of an open goal. But we blew it. Instead of raising our game, my former party reverted to type. The leadership made rude remarks about Romanians. We resorted to an angry nativism that not only cost us support as a party, but almost lost us the referendum.

After May’s coming landslide, we will need a new movement or party to provide an alternative to Tory rule. The need to break the grip of the political and economic cartel that increasingly runs our country will be urgent. But change won’t look anything like Ukip. And that should make us all cheerful.

Douglas Carswell, the independent MP for Clacton, is the author of Rebel: How to Overthrow the Emerging Oligarchy