Ukip, relaxing at the bar in a prolonged morning-after from the intoxicating days of the European campaign where it won 27.5% of the vote, is stirring again. Its poll standing has slumped to a third of that, still ahead of the Liberal Democrats but a long way behind Labour and the Conservatives, and it is time for the angry party to stoke up the engine of betrayal, blame and disappointment. The moment has come to rehearse policies that might feature in a Ukip manifesto at the next election.

Ukip is not the party it was in 2010, when it slightly ruffled the waters of some Tory heartland seats whose activists were still struggling to come to terms with David Cameron’s modernising agenda. Then, it won 3% of the vote, which translates as a bit less than 1m votes. In May, four times as many people supported it, and that was 300,000 more than voted Labour.

That is why its pre-election thoughts are considered important enough to be featured in Prospect, the political monthly. Truly, Ukip has become a player. Yet, like all the outsider parties across Europe, its mindset continues to be both incomprehensible and so bleedin’ obvious it is astonishing it gets away with it.

The last manifesto was full of the kind of policies that Margaret Rutherford and Alistair Sim would have voted for in the 1950 film Happiest Days of Your Life – things such as uniformed taxi drivers, ending discrimination against white people at the BBC and, of course, leaving the EU. Lord Pearson, who led the party at the time, admitted he hadn’t read it. Nigel Farage disowned it (“drivel”) and the man who wrote it has long since rejoined the Tory party. All that remains from Ukip 2010 is the name – and Farage.

The politics of now are so different from the politics of then that it feels almost like another country. The last election came in the midst of a global economic crisis, after 13 years of Labour governments. Voters wanted revenge. But there was at least a belief that the only way was up.

Now there is a recovery that leaves most people no better off, the EU is struggling and divided, and events in the wider world brutally illustrate the UK’s impotence. The promise to cut immigration to tens of thousands has been abandoned and the severity of spending cuts leaves hospital waiting lists longer and the public space bleaker. This is a world that suits Ukip the way warm wet weather encourages mildew.

Tim Aker is the Ukip MEP for the Eastern Counties and head of the party’s policy unit – that is, he is drafting the manifesto. He has told Prospect that his party is beyond the politics of left and right. On one level, it is an observation now so widely accepted, and so entirely supported by the distribution of its vote in May, as to sound meaningless. On the other, it disrupts the political scene as brutally as the digital revolution is disrupting everything else.

Akers says he is writing “a blue collar platform, but for people that want to aspire to achieve absolutely anything”. That means stealing popular ideas from everyone else. That includes ending the bedroom tax and raising tax thresholds from Labour (the party’s get-Labour strategy is blatant: its annual conference overlaps and is being held in Doncaster, almost in Ed Miliband’s seat). But there is also, for the right, cutting the top rate of tax and axing the department for energy and climate change.

But what is important is its Poujadism, only it is a party not just for shopkeepers but for everyone who thinks the world would be a better place if government didn’t get in the way and benefits were based on the contributory principle.

Ukip won’t storm to electoral victory but it doesn’t need to. The party that won the largest share of the vote in every region south of the Humber, including London if the black and minority ethnic vote is excluded, is already shaping the manifestos of both the Conservatives and Labour. One way or another, all of us will be voting Ukip at the next election.