It seemed to have the same effect as those dreaded occasions when rock bands break a run of crowd-pleasers and tell a festival audience they’re about to play a new song. Still, the moment at which Donald Trump introduced 15,000 people in Jackson, Mississippi to that renowned Deep Southern hero Nigel Farage at least crystallised two things: the fact that Brexit and Trumpism are two sides of the same populist coin; and the awful, brazen cynicism that Farage and The Donald have in common. There they stood, with matching suntans, the Manhattan plutocrat and the former City commodities trader, as the latter announced that what he had achieved was “for the little people, for the real people”.

Meanwhile, 4,000 or so miles away, Ukip is tanking in some opinion polls, and facing a leadership election that does not exactly suggest a force in the best political health. As often seems to happen when the party gets a sniff of influence, factional strife has reached boiling point, and the handful of people who might have made a reasonable fist of succeeding Farage are nowhere to be seen.

The party’s two best-known figureheads besides Farage are its Liverpudlian outgoing deputy leader Paul Nuttall and its one-man libertarian, cosmopolitan wing, the Clacton MP Douglas Carswell – but they both decided not to stand. The polished former Tory Suzanne Evans was prevented from being a candidate by the fact that her membership was suspended in March this year. The rated MEP Steven Woolfe, an ally of the outgoing leader and his presumed heir apparent, was ruled out when despite having vowed to boost his party’s professionalism, he handed in his leadership application 17 minutes after the official deadline.

So who will the party’s 39,000 members pick? The party’s supposed frontrunner is MEP Diane James, a somewhat taciturn operator last seen leading Ukip’s failed campaign in the 2013 Eastleigh bylection, who has apparently refused to take part in official party hustings. There is also Lisa Duffy, a councillor and capable Ukip organiser who has promised to somehow rush headlong towards the party’s remaining taboos – if indeed it actually has any – and begin setting out “a positive vision of modern British Islam” from the Cambridgeshire Fens.

Liz Jones is not the out-there Mail on Sunday columnist, but Ukip’s deputy chair in Lambeth, south London. Bill Etheridge was once a Conservative activist in the West Midlands, but left the party after he and his wife posed with golliwogs as part of something called the Campaign Against Political Correctness. By way of a punchline, the candidate list ends with Phillip Broughton, Ukip’s 2015 candidate in Hartlepool, and a former semi-professional wrestler – who traded, for some reason, as “the one and only Phillip Alexander”.

It is all a rum do, and in some of the commentary about the party’s travails one can detect a view of its prospects that has perennially bubbled up since it decisively began moving on to the political map around 12 years ago.

In this reading, Ukip was only ever a personality cult built to serve Farage – in which case, to quote one of an endless sea of tweets, “Ukip are finished – [because] Farage was Ukip”. And in any case, its entire reason for existing has been fulfilled. By overseeing Brexit and pushing the Tories away from Notting Hill and back to a petit-bourgeois populism, Theresa May could re-establish their complete dominance of the political right – while even if Labour fails to get its act together, the former Labour voters who supported Farage will either go back to abstaining, or vote Ukip in much smaller numbers.

At which point, a few corrective thoughts. First, whatever the state of Ukip’s internal affairs, the state of politics in both Europe and the US suggests that as economies and societies continue to fragment, and the mainstream seems to have no clear answers, the new rightwing populism is going be with us for some time to come.

Second, given that the referendum happened only two months ago, it is worth at least briefly reflecting on the part Ukip played in the outcome. With a solitary MP and a flimsy activist base, it still played a huge role in embedding the connection between most of Britain’s ills and the EU, and thereby carrying its cause from the margins of politics to its very centre. Here is an example of postmodern politics from which people on the left would do well to learn. Moreover, the people responsible are hardly likely to simply disappear.

Ukip’s whole schtick has always been to insist that some things matter more than economics

And then there is the associated question of Brexit, and what it might actually entail (“Brexit means Brexit” says the prime minister, but that hardly clarifies anything). Just as it is hard to know at this early stage what exactly will be the terms of any British departure, it’s unclear where the vote for leave now sits in the minds of the people responsible. We are talking about England here, so the questions are valid: will it turn out to have been some Diana-esque spasm, after which everybody once again switches off? Or a matter of keenly felt conviction and expectations that people will demand are met?

On this score, though it’s painful to make the point, do not underestimate the centrality of immigration to the Brexit vote, and how irate a lot of people may get if the status quo persists – a point underlined by this week’s net migration figures (in the year to March 2016, 633,000 people arrived in the UK, while 306,000 moved overseas).

More generally, there is still a sense of far too many of the political class thinking the vote can soon be nullified – witness the hapless Owen Smith claiming that “we didn’t actually know what we were voting on” and holding out the prospect of another referendum. If the Brexit vote was motivated by people’s sense that Westminster either ignored them or failed to take them seriously, what does he think will happen if their one briefly successful protest is treated the same way?

Political journalism too often overlooks the social nitty-gritty, and the way it pushes people in this or that direction far more than dramas at the top. Self-evidently, in the old Labour heartlands that still represent Ukip’s biggest political opportunity – and to which Jeremy Corbyn and his followers still show few signs of convincingly speaking – the rise of Farage’s party was fed by deep problems, which are unlikely to change. These barely need outlining: the fact that there is an ongoing housing crisis; that employment is ever-more insecure; that the cultural distance between a confident middle class at ease with globalisation and millions of others suffering its malign effects is growing ever larger. In addition, if one of the big sparks for Ukip’s rise over the past 10 years was the impact of the economic crash of 2008, the turbulence that could yet result from Britain leaving the EU may have exactly the same results.

Obviously, that would be an outrageous irony: the party that so enthusiastically pushed Britain out of the EU making hay with the adverse consequences. But to that, there are two answers: that politics has little time for paradox; and that in any case, Ukip’s whole schtick has always been to insist that economics isn’t everything, not least for people with precious little to lose. Farage restated the basic point this week: “There are some things in life that matter more than just money: your community, your street, your town, your neighbours.”

In the midst of all these possibilities lurks Arron Banks, the insurance tycoon who spent £5.6m of his own money on the Brexit campaign, and who was recently heard speculating about either reforming Ukip “root and branch”, or funding a new populist party that may succeed it: a force that may have a chance of “taking over from Labour as the opposition, because Labour are imploding and Labour voters for the first time ever have defied their party, voting for leave”. He is with Farage in the States.

Which brings us to the recently retired leader himself. After working flat-out for upwards of a decade, to the point that he began to complain about his health, Farage might have been expected to disappear for a while. And yet here he is again, evidently loving every minute, and saying he is minded to “see where we are in two and a half years’ time”. To paraphrase that other suntanned populist, Arnold Schwarzenegger, he’ll be back.