Farage is now attempting to deal with these various challenges by professionalising his party's operation, denouncing the more loopy pronouncements of his party's candidates and appointing a highly respected head of communications, Fleet Street journalist Patrick O'Flynn, to massage the message. Such modernisation could backfire. Wasn't part of UKIP's appeal to its new members and potential voters rooted in its homespun, amateurish approach? It is supposed to be the anti-politics party.

Simultaneously, the Conservative high command is much less gloomy about Tory prospects as the economic recovery strengthens. If that improvement continues it should start to mitigate the impact of the squeeze on living standards. And on Europe too, Cameron's commitment to a renegotiation and then a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU by 2017, offers the most realistic chance of a vote for those who desire it.

But the damage that UKIP can do to the Conservatives remains enormous, even if Farage is fading. A year from the start of the general election campaign, Tory high command is preparing a classic well-funded assault aimed at appealing belatedly to floating voters worried about the economic risks of Labour, to Tories keen to stop Miliband and to Eurosceptics desperate to get out of the EU.

In order for this to be successful the Tories have to assemble a broad coalition of the kind they haven't put together in a couple of decades. Yet even a UKIP past its peak could aid Labour by securing two million or more votes at the next general election, making it all but impossible for Cameron to win. If that happens it will represent a historic reverse and a catastrophe for the Right in this country. A split in the Tory tribe will have let in a high-tax socialist government, the opposite of what happened in the 1980s.