Oh dear. Abysmal UKIP local election results demonstrate need for wise choice on leader

At the end of August, this blog took great delight in trumpeting some stunning UKIP local election results in Sheffield and South Bucks.

So, it gives me no pleasure - as a member of the party and as someone that the UKIP hierarchy have been very generous to over the last fortnight - to have to present some utterly abysmal results of locals that are out today.

The Independent has all the details, but the headline figures for UKIP are:

Cambridgeshire County - East Chesterton: 18 votes, 1.8%, finishing last and - humiliatingly - beaten by the Cambridge Socialists. Down from 9.8% in June 2009.

Kensington and Chelsea London Borough - Cremorne: 46 votes, 3.1%, finishing last behind the Greens. We can at least find a positive here. When the seat was last contested in May 2009 and three seats were up for grabs, the sole UKIP candidate garnered just 1.8% of the vote. On the other hand, the physical number of votes on that occasion was at least in three digit territory - 155 votes.

So, two local by-elections. 18 votes and 46 votes respectively. Most people have extended families which could return a higher vote count than those figures.

I do not wish to pay any disrespect to the local candidates who are, without question, dedicated and enthusiastic, hard-working and committed party loyalists who should be thanked and praised.

However, while I accept that we currently have no party leader spelling out our vision, we have to accept these two results are dreadful. Awful.

Whoever takes on the victory garland in the UKIP leadership campaign is going to have to really radicalise the party's approach, to make the party relevant to people in their local communities. Sure, it is perfectly true to say that European Empire diktats govern local life as much as they do national politics - but examples of this need to be given by people who are clued up on local issues and can demonstrate to the local electorate how and why a decision which has an impact on their experience of daily living has been made.

Loyal local branches which are managed by really hard-working volunteers deserve more for their efforts than the demoralisation that going home with eighteen votes must generate.

We could start, perhaps, by examining what went well in those by-elections at the end of August with what has clearly gone disastrously wrong in these latest local endeavours.

This needs to be a two-way process. Not only do UKIP's hierarchy need to compare and contrast the local efforts and experiences, but the local branches need to communicate back up the chain what has actually happened here.

Certainly, we're not going to change the world - or restore our position as a sovereign state - if we're only seen as giving the right messages and being relevant to local daily life by eighteen people within a local ward.