Local election result best ever for UKIP

Thursday's election was undoubtedly UKIP's best result in a local election in the party's history.

Despite the fact UKIP gained only 8 seats, the result needs to be looked at in the right context. The Conswervatives were always going to win the election although I don't think anyone would have predicted The Tories gaining 217 councillors, Liebour losing 250 and "others" having the same total number of councillors as Liebour.

The fact is, the Tories were always going to win the local election and they were always going to win it convincingly. The Lib Dims, in their traditional role of the "none of the above" party, were always going to mop up the left wing votes that didn't go to the Tories and they'll be quite happy, I'm sure, to have only made a net loss 8 councillors.

With only a couple of exceptions, UKIP candidates came either first, second or third in seats they contested. Taken as an average over all seats contested by the party, UKIP came a very close third overall. There are too many results to go through to work out the position as an average of all seats, whether there was a UKIP candidate or not, but there's a good possibility that UKIP came above Liebour on vote share even though Liebour contested almost every seat.

I don't expect any of the papers will report on UKIP's historic performance, they'll all be too busy writing about the success of the Conswervatives, lamenting the decimation of Liebour or navel gazing about the BNP getting 2 councillors elected. I'll be sending letters to newspapers pointing out what a fantastic result this was for UKIP, hopefully a lot more UKIPpers will too.