Farage gets a poll boost as Ukippers meet in Margate

To coincide with their spring conference starting today, Ukip have come out with a new poll which suggests Nigel Farage is on course to win South Thanet. The Survation poll gives him an 11 per cent lead over his nearest rival.

It follows a series of disappinting polls - from Ukip's perscpective - that questioned whether Farage had chosen the right constituency to fight in order to win a seat at Westminster: Ashcroft polls have shown Ukip behind in South Thanet, while the Election Forecast website suggested recently that the Tories had a 95 per cent chance of stopping Farage taking the Kent seat.

Now the Survation constituency poll – paid for by Ukip donor Alan Bown, but no less valuable for that – suggests Farage will be vindicated. It shows the Ukip leader on 39 per cent, Labour’s Will Scobie on 28 per cent and Tory Craig Mackinlay just behind on 27 per cent.

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No one else really figures: the Green candidate Ian Driver gets three per cent, the Lib Dems’ Russ Timpson two per cent and the comedian Al Murray, standing as The Pub Landlord for his one-man FUKP party, a miserable one per cent. Politics at this level isn’t funny.

Some commentators believe a victory for Farage on 7 May is vital if he is to continue as Ukip leader and prevent the party from imploding. His desire – or desperation - to win the seat is underlined by the fact that the two-day party conference is being held at the Winter Gardens in Margate, just inside the South Thanet constituency boundary.

There’s speculation that Farage’s key policy announcement will be to line his party up alongside the Tories on cutting the deficit by 2017.

He arrives at Margate hotfoot from Washington DC where he was a guest speaker yesterday at the CPAC conference of Republican activists. The BBC says the audience gave a warm welcome to the man introduced as "a living, drinking, smoking protest to political correctness" - though the Daily Telegraph reports that the conference hall was nearly empty.

Either way, in a 20-minute speech, Farage impressed those who were there with his remarks about immigration and the growth of corporatism, but then lost them when it came to Obama’s Middle East policy.

Why? Because he argued that interventionism had “inflamed and stoked the fire of militant Islam”. The audience clearly preferred Sarah Palin’s approach: "Aside from God almighty,” she told them, “what is the only force strong enough to keep this barbaric tide at bay? It's the red, white and blue; it's the United States military."

PS: Survation's South Thanet poll was unusual in that the pollster used actual candidates' names when it asked respondents for their voting intention. Normally, only the party name is offered. Did this affect the response - or can the better result for Ukip be put down to heavier campaigning in the constituency as election day gets closer? Poll-watchers will be waiting to see whether further constituency polls show a pro-Ukip trend, or whether Survation's unusual technique produced a 'blip'.