Assim vai a Europa! - "Ukip: the party that's coming in from the cold"

In the long slipstream of this year's party conference season, British politics seems to have gone strangely quiet. But listen closely, and under the sound of all that rain, you can make out something very interesting: the metaphorical forces politicians usually call "tectonic plates", shifting in ways that, three or four years ago, no one would have predicted. This winter's biggest political story, in fact, may turn out not to be focused on the Conservatives, Labour or the Lib Dems, but an organisation that until recently was routinely condemned to the fringes, or smirked about as a collection of eccentrics and oddballs.