Whoosh – UKIP swept aside the UK’s main political parties to score an historic EU election success as the overnight results shook the political firmament, reducing the Lib-Dems to just one MEP.
Leader Nigel Farage declared the triumph to be the “earthquake” event he wanted, a victory for a non-mainstream party as historic as that of the Liberal Party in the general election of 1911.
While UKIP’s campaigners in the South West failed to hit their highest target of three, possibly four of the six seats, their surge of support took two, with the Conservatives sending two MEPs to Brussels and the Greens and Labour one apiece.
But UKIP were hot on the heels of the Tories, as they proved at last year’s Wiltshire Council elections.
“It was a mighty victory across the nation and here in the South West too,” Tony Molland, chairman of Devizes UKIP told Marlborough News Online. “But I have to admit that I am slightly disappointed that we won only two seats, although we were very close indeed to the Tories.
“Nearly half a million people voted for UKIP in the South West and I think that is fantastic. The Tories however did better than I thought after talking to hundreds of people in the campaign.
“They do have a stronger organisation whereas we are a very young organisation which has been operating in the constituency now for just over a year.
“And as for the massacre of the Lib-Dems it didn’t surprise me in the least. The Lib-Dems, who are they? people were saying to us.”
UKIP’s victors were their sitting MEP William Dartmouth, 64, otherwise known as the Eton-educated 10th Earl of Dartmouth and biochemist Dr Julia Reid, 61, who has lived in Calne for almost 40 years.
Mr Dartmouth, one of the hereditary peers excluded from the House of Lords, defected to UKIP from the Tory Party seven years ago after declaring his distrust of then party leader David Cameron.
And the Green Party, which had set out its stall in Marlborough High Street, also triumphed with the election of 51-year-old economics professor Molly Scot-Cato.
Across the South West, UKIP received 484,184 votes, the Tories 433,151, Labour 206,124, the Green Party 166,447 and the Lib-Dems 160,376.
That last result means that the Lib-Dems have lost their only MEP in the South West, Sir Graham Watson, while the Green’s have overtaken them in the polls.
The UKIP vote was plus 10.6 per cent on the last EU election in 2009, the Tories minus 0.6 per cent, Labour plus 5.6 per cent, and Greens plus 1.7 per cent and the Lib-Dems down 6.1 per cent.
The successful Conservative MEPs were former Bristol City councillor Ashley Fox, a 44-year-old solicitor, re-elected after having served as an Euro MP for the past five years, and 57-year-old Julie Girling, former leader of Cotswold District Council, who lives in Chipping Camden, Gloucestershire.
And for Labour it was Clare Moody, 48, a trade union official with Unite, who lives in Salisbury, where she was the party’s unsuccessful parliamentary candidate in 2005.
The turnout in the South West was 36.9 per cent, slightly greater than the national level of 36%. Across the country, UKIP topped the poll with 27.5 per cent of the vote (compared to Labour’s 25.4 and the Tories 23.9%) and, with the Scottish results yet to come, have 23 MEPs.