IF NIGEL FARAGE detected a little bafflement in the crowd at the Coliseum on the matter of his identity and relevance to American politics, he did not let on. Donald Trump had invited the outgoing leader of the right-populist UK Independence Party (UKIP) to stump for him in Jackson, Mississippi. “I’ll keep it short,” Mr Farage assured his host, not quite off-mic, as he bounded onto the stage. “I come to you from the United Kingdom with a message of hope,” he gushed as his audience cheered (whoever this guy was, he sure seemed upbeat). Then they went wild for: “We made June 23rd our independence day when we smashed the establishment!” Mr Farage, without whom Britain’s vote for Brexit probably would not have happened, could not have been happier.

Back home, his party is in a bad way. Which is odd: UKIP has just altered the course of British history, has soared ahead in recent local government elections, is ideally placed to hassle Theresa May’s government to move harder and faster towards Brexit and stands on the brink of toppling the Labour Party, divided and incompetent, in its doughty northern English strongholds where working-class voters backed Brexit. Yet UKIP’s poll numbers are down: to 12%, their lowest since last year’s election, according to YouGov. Meanwhile the race to replace Mr Farage has been dismal. None of the party’s most impressive figures is a candidate and Diane James, the unremarkable front-runner, has refused to propose any new policies or attend hustings.

All of which exposes the underside of Mr Farage’s six years as leader, his second spell in the role. A talented rabble-rouser who has achieved more in the past few years than most cabinet ministers, UKIP’s former chief does not do computers (his wife sends e-mails on his behalf), people management or details. Raheem Kassam, a former aide, has described the party’s headquarters as “a fucking playground” where “we’d have to lock certain doors because the people behind those doors were too embarrassing to be seen”. As Mr Farage conceded to Bagehot when, last year, the two were barricaded inside UKIP’s Rotherham office by anti-racism protesters, the party has struggled to develop clear positions on subjects other than Europe and immigration.

Then there are the psychodramas. Mr Farage fell out spectacularly with his party’s only three other political talents fit for national prominence: Suzanne Evans (whose membership was suspended after she called him “divisive”), Patrick O’Flynn (a former political editor of the Daily Express) and Douglas Carswell (a libertarian who defected from the Tories in 2014 to become UKIP’s only MP). He also managed to alienate his party’s executives, who barred one of his preferred successors, Steven Woolfe, from standing because he submitted his application 17 minutes late. Mr Farage’s unhappy parting shot was to call them “among the lowest grade of people I have ever met” and “total amateurs”. Ms James, who has ended up as the candidate least hated by the Farageists, wants to call an extraordinary general meeting of the party to disband the executive committee if she wins.

She seems a capable manager—more so than Lisa Duffy, her main rival and formerly the hands-on UKIP mayor of Ramsey, a small town in Cambridgeshire—but would still struggle to improve things. For the party’s problems are deeper than they look. Populist political forces succeed by saying what their audiences want to hear and, as David Art, a political scientist at Tufts University, argued in his book, “Inside the Radical Right”, are thus fundamentally inimical to professional structures and processes.

This is more true of UKIP, whose sole unifying cause has been Brexit, than broader-based counterparts like France’s National Front, Austria’s Freedom Party and Mr Farage’s carrot-hued new buddy in America. Beyond leaving the EU, virtually nothing unites UKIP. The party is at once libertarian and authoritarian. It preaches individual freedom but contains admirers of Vladimir Putin. It wants to privatise the National Health Service, apart from when it does not. It has flirted with both a tax on luxury goods and deep tax cuts for the richest. It hems and haws on gay marriage, halal food and the burkini. It is vague about what sort of immigrants Britain should let in, and in what numbers. Even on the EU it is utterly divided: some (like Mr Carswell) want Britain outside the union to become a European Singapore, while others (like Aaron Banks, the forthright businessman who bankrolled the party’s pro-Brexit efforts) want something more like a return to the 1950s.

All parties, and especially populist ones, contain a range of views. Yet they tend to congregate around certain stretches of the political spectrum. Founded in pursuit of Brexit alone, UKIP has no such common ground. On sprawling, defining themes like the vocation of the state, the meaning of nationhood, the interaction of public and private spheres, and the roles of pluralism, globalisation and citizenship in modern societies it has no continuity and is irredeemably at odds with itself. That inhibits it from establishing and sticking to the sort of long-term strategy it needs to become and remain more professional.

Making plans for Nigel

This points to a grim cycle. The last time Mr Farage resigned, UKIP tumbled. For 11 ignominious months Lord Pearson, a languidly aristocratic former Tory, trashed his party’s prospects: in a television interview shortly before the 2010 election he appeared not even to have read its 14-page manifesto. All of which may now repeat itself. “One quite plausible possibility is we end up with a re-run of the Lord Pearson experience: a year or two of messy and incoherent leadership under a figure not cut out for the big leagues, then Farage comes back,” suggests Robert Ford, a UKIP expert at Manchester University. The fact is that UKIP’s weaknesses point to Mr Farage’s weird genius. Besides the quest for Brexit, his unique schtick was all the party had. Now, again, it may be its only salvation.