Drowning Ukip with silence works for Tories - up to a point

When did you last hear a top Tory trash Ukip or a leading Labour figure take lumps out of the Greens? Not in a long while.

And it’s not just because David Cameron and Ed Miliband are too busy trading blows – and dominating media coverage - over the economy and the NHS. Neither is it because the Tories are unworried about Ukip nor that Labour are unconcerned about the Greens and Ukip.

It’s a deliberate campaign strategy based on research that shows partisan attacks are likely to backfire.

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It’s Ukip who are now more likely to recall David Cameron’s dismissal of them as a bunch of “fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists” even though the remark is nearly a decade old.

Back in the autumn, Cameron was happy to say he would stop the “fat arse” of turncoat Mark Reckless returning to Westminster as a Ukip MP. (He failed.) Today there’s no way he would say such a thing: the Conservative tactic since has been for party leaders to stay quiet and for Tory HQ to feed journalists and commentators with juicy titbits about the wacky tendencies of Ukip MEPs and councillors. The hope is that the Faragistes will self-destruct.

Tory HQ will have been cheered by Nigel Farage’s tetchy reaction to Channel 4’s spoof documentary on the first 100 days of a Ukip government and the suggestion from former tabloid editor Roy Greenslade that Farage has lost his sense of humour.

Perhaps the worst news for Farage was that fewer than a million viewers tuned into the progamme: only one in 20 of those with their TV switched on during that time slot took any interest in the idea of a Ukip-run Britain.

Tory HQ will now be digesting the latest polling from Lord Ashcroft in four Tory-Ukip marginals, released this morning. It suggests Tory tactics are working - up to a point - in that Ukip isn't polling as well as many had feared they might.

In North East Cambridgeshire, Ukip are 21 points behind the Tories, posing little threat. In three other seats they are closer - only six points behind in South Basildon & East Thurrock, three points behind in Boston & Skegness, and just one point behind in Castle Point.

Labour are taking the Ukip threat seriously, too – but very much on the quiet. They’re not interested in conducting an “air war” of confrontation in the national media, but are concentrating on the “ground war”, tackling Ukip street by street.

As the Daily Mirror reports, Labour has instituted a so-called “Ribena test” – after Ukip’s purple colours – which uses demographic data to spot those areas where voters might be tempted by Ukip policies in large enough numbers to cause a threat.

They can then be targeted by party campaigners outlining Labour’s new tougher immigration stance, and highlighting Farage’s Tory past.

The Mirror report is clearly designed to reassure party activists that the Ukip threat is being taken seriously. A Labour “insider” told the paper that the party was “wide awake” to Ukip and that the Ribena test was “the most sophisticated election tool we’ve developed”.

Is any of this working? In every national poll so far in 2015 Ukip have been stuck in the mid-teens, way below the 20 per cent target that would give them more than a handful of seats under the first-past-the-post system. They are on 14 per cent in this morning’s YouGov poll (Con 32, Lab 34, Lib Dems 8, Ukip 14, Greens 6).

Another sign that Ukip’s potential is limited to a small number of marginal seats comes from an analysis by Political Betting which shows that Ukip/Farage is the “most unpopular brand” in British politics as measured by a question in this week’s Ashcroft poll.

It asked voters to rate each party and their leader - on a scale of minus-100 to plus-100 - as to how positive/negative they felt about them.

Among swing voters Ukip had a negative rating of 26 and Farage 29 – between two and three times as bad as those of other parties and leaders.

Nigel Farage could have his sense of humour tested again on 8 May if, as looks likely, he ends up with millions of votes and only a handful of MPs.