The post you are reporting:
Ukip's popularity will hit Tories hardest, says professor
Professor John Curtice says about 16% of Tory supporters at last election would now vote
for Nigel Farage's party
Ukip's leader, Nigel Farage, is bullish about his chances in the local elections.
Nigel Farage, the UK Independence Party leader, presents the "most serious fourth party
incursion" into English electoral politics since the second world war - with the Tories as the
main victims, the leading political scientist Professor John Curtice has claimed.
Amid Tory fears that Ukip is on course for a strong showing in next Thursday's English
county elections, putting Farage in a strong position to top next year's European parliamentary
elections, Curtice says David Cameron is the biggest victim of the surge.
Curtice, the professor of politics at Strathclyde university, says that around 16% of Tory
supporters at the last election say they would now vote Ukip. This compares with 8% for the
Liberal Democrats and 4% for Labour.
Support for Ukip, currently an average of around 12%, started to rise after George Osborne's
so called "omnishambles" budget of last year, according to Curtice in a paper on the local
elections for the Political Studies Association. "That has been followed by a remarkable increase
in support for Ukip whose current polling rating is on average at least equal to that of the
Liberal Democrats and which now threatens to pose the most serious independent fourth party
incursion in English electoral politics in the post-war period," he writes.