(Photo: Joel Goodman/NLP)

The British system is no friend to new challengers. Today, 452 parties are registered with the Electoral Commission but most will sink without trace. While each dreams of breaking the grip of the two Goliath parties that have monopolised power for generations, they face an electoral system that routinely turns dreams into despair. Unlike proportional systems in Europe that provide a relatively simple path into the legislature for new movements, Britain’s first-past-the-post system stacks the deck against new parties. Only those who can win a local seat outright progress on to the next level. The winner takes all. Second place is nothing.

Only a few new parties have many to break through in the past 50 years. While they later faltered, the Social Democratic Party of the 1980s did win a swathe of seats. More recently, the Greens and Respect each managed to break into Westminster, while the BNP attracted concerns in Barking and Stoke. And the Liberal Democrats have steadily increased their Parliamentary representation despite a heavy bias in the electoral system against them. The ingredients for local success were similar in all of these cases: build a local presence; hit the streets; knock on doors; win a presence on local councils; and take parliamentary by-elections seriously.

As we show in our new book – now available at a discount for Telegraph readers – Nigel Farage and Ukip have learned from these earlier political incursions by shifting their energy and resources to local elections and parliamentary by-elections, which they had dismissed in their early years as a distraction from their fight against the European Union. As Farage elaborated to us in an interview: “I know enough about this game now to know this local activist thing is absolutely key to Ukip being known. It’s the little things: the Ukip boot fair; the high street stall once a month. It’s just being part of the furniture, and not this feeling that we’re here today and gone tomorrow”. This Thursday’s by-election in Wythenshawe and Sale East is the latest stage in that strategy. So what are Ukip expecting?

“We’re trying to come second, from the 3 per cent we won in 2010”, explained Farage to us last week. “And if we achieve that, we’ll have done well. If we get anything over 15 per cent it will be very, very, very good. Anything over 20 per cent would be ‘bloody hell!’ If we get below 10 per cent, we’d be very disappointed, but we won’t get below 10 per cent.”

More from UkipWatch
Meet Ukip, Britain’s most working-class party
A pact with the Tories doesn’t make sense for Ukip
Ukip supporters really dislike posh Dave

Interestingly, Farage gave us this prediction before an opinion poll by Lord Ashcroft suggested that Ukip are on course to take 15 per cent of the vote and are neck-and-neck with the Conservatives in the fight for second place. But for a party that at its last three by-elections polled 21.7 per cent in Rotherham, 27.8 per cent in Eastleigh and 24.2 per cent in South Shields, Farage’s forecast and Ashcroft’s poll look disappointing. Shouldn’t Ukip be aiming to hit new heights? Furthermore, at first glance the seat appears to offer favourable conditions for another record result for Ukip. It has a history of Eurosceptic campaigns, with Ukip or the Referendum Party fighting three of the past four elections, and like Rotherham and South Shields it is a Northern, working-class Labour stronghold, which has been returning Labour MPs since Harold Wilson was elected in 1964.

But there are two reasons why we would urge Ukip Watchers not to read too much into Thursday’s result: the first is the local climate, which makes it less favourable to Ukip than first appearances suggest; the second are factors specific to the local campaign, which we will likely not see replicated in 2015.

Elaborating on his cautious estimate, Farage explained: “Our problem is that a lot of people in Sale, who live in detached houses, are public-sector employees. They work for quangos, local government, you know that sort of upper middle-class group”. Farage is right that the seat does not feature the concentrated decline found in other Northern working-class seats where his party has done well. Nor are there local controversies for the party to exploit – in both Eastleigh and Rotherham, the by-elections were triggered by a scandal forced the local MP from office; in Rotherham the local Labour council decided to remove three children from the care of a couple due to their support for Ukip, triggering a fierce backlash which benefitted the party. South Shields did not feature any immediate scandal, but resentments still festered over the controversial 2001 selection process, which handed the seat to David Miliband.

Wythenshawe and Sale East, by contrast, has been held for five decades by two popular and effective MPs, with strong links to the constituency: Alf Morris (uncle to Labour minister Estelle) and Paul Goggins. The by-election was triggered not by scandal, but by the sudden and tragic death of a widely respected MP. And this time around Labour have selected another locally rooted and well-liked candidate, Mike Kane. As a result the struggling blue-collar workers who Ukip appeal to are more loyal to Labour in general, and to their local Labour representatives in particular, than in some of the seats where Ukip have taken off. The seat also has a significant affluent, Conservative vote, referred to by Nigel Farage. It is quite possible that such voters will switch tactically to Ukip if and when they consider Farage’s party to be the best prospect for defeating Labour locally. However, at present Ukip do not have the track record in the seat to make this claim credible, and so will struggle to peel off Conservative votes.

Aside from these local conditions, there are also factors specific to the campaign itself that work against Ukip. First, unlike past battles in seats like Eastleigh Ukip lack a local presence. A few weeks ago the party undertook some private polling in the seat, asking Labour voters who they would vote for if there were no Labour candidate. Less than one in ten said they would support Ukip. The conclusion that Farage drew from this polling was not that his party were unpopular, but that few voters in South Manchester are actually aware of his party: “I saw that and knew what we were going to find; an overwhelming lack of knowledge about who Ukip are and what we stand for. Sure enough that’s what we found.”

This reflects Ukip’s grassroots weakness in the seat. Since 2011 the party have certainly become more active in by-elections. Before 2010 Ukip fought 35 by-elections and averaged just 2.3 per cent. But since 2011 the party have fought 14 by-elections and averaged 10.5 per cent, all of which except Eastleigh were in Labour seats. But whereas in seats like Eastleigh the local Ukip branch had been fighting local council seats each year, in Wythenshawe and Sale East Ukip simply does not have this strong local presence. In the seat’s Manchester wards, their best performance in 2012 was less than 15 per cent, while in Northenden ward, which is home to the Labour candidate, they finished fourth behind the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Wythenshawe and Sale East also contains three wards in Trafford City council – in the 2012 elections there, Ukip did not stand a candidate in any of these wards. The party has little experience of competing in the Greater Manchester area, as Farage admits: “We haven’t done local elections properly in that part of the world. Our levels of preparedness and activism are behind other areas of the country”.

A second campaign factor is that Ukip’s weakness in the area has been compounded by a short campaign and Labour’s ruthless use of postal votes. “There are 17,000 postal votes and a three and a half week campaign. That’s not democracy”, laughs Farage, even if he knows the point is a serious one. While Labour’s inbuilt advantages in the seat are most likely sufficient to deliver a strong majority, Labour can also take advantage of a strong local organisation to turn out the postal vote and lock this advantage in. Having to build a local organisation from scratch, and at short notice, Farage’s troops cannot compete. Like other struggling competitors before him, Farage is quick to allege the use of intimidation: “You’re the little old dear at number 33. The postman delivers the ballot paper. Two minutes later, there’s a knock on the door. It’s the Labour canvasser. ‘Do you want some help with that? Can I take that from you?’ They’ve even got a barcoding system.” We cannot say whether there is any truth in these allegations, and it is highly unlikely that postal vote mobilisation will prove decisive given Labour’s other advantages in the seat, but it is certainly true that turning out postal votes is an effective strategy in a by-election with a short campaign and low voter interest – the Liberal Democrats deployed similar tactics successfully at Eastleigh.

So for these reasons – the unpromising terrain, and their large organisational disadvantage – Ukip will be happy to come away a distant second in Thursday’s by-election. This will give them a case to take to Conservative voters next year that they are the only credible local alternative to Labour. Many in Labour will no doubt cheer another strong by-election success, and may point to a lopsided victory as evidence that Ukip’s campaign in its heartlands is fizzling out. This would be a foolish conclusion – there are many other seats where Ukip start with more favourable demographics, and a less popular local Labour party. Ukip have plenty of time to build organisations and local presence in those seats, starting with May’s local elections. We suspect Wythenshawe will deliver a disappointing outcome for Ukip, but the real fight for Northern hearts and minds is yet to come.

Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin’s Revolt on the Right is available to Telegraph readers at a 20 per cent discount. Click here and use the code RTR14