You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to work out where the zombified Daily Telegraph might well be heading as it lurches towards the horizon ….just look at Stephen Bush,  “Editor-in-Chief” Jason Seiken’s replacement for Benedict Brogan, one of the most highly respected political journalists in the game today and the brains behind the Telegraph’s widely read weekday political e mail

During the weekend Labour’s so called rising star Chuka Umunna, a privately educated lawyer and grandson of a High Court judge, made a rather bizarre claim about UKIP voters

On the Marr Show this morning Chuka Umunna claimed voters feel disconnected from mainstream politics because they don’t know how to send emails or browse the internet and that “a lot of those voting for Ukip” in the European elections were not computer literate and can’t do things like use email or browse the internet.

UKIP’s Donna Rachel Edmunds demolished this nonsense

Umunna’s suggestion has provoked mirth because it is, quite literally, laughable. Kippers have been well known for their keyboard activism for years now. Visit almost any page on the MSM news sites and political blogs and there will be comment after comment, often thoroughly evidenced, culminating in the two words “Vote Ukip”.

But Stephen Bush  supported Umunna 100%

Why are the Cyberkippers so angry with Chuka Umunna? Because he’s right

Mr B then proceeds to scribble a piece so weird and so dismissive and ill researched that one might initially suspect it could be a parody of Dan Hodges

Such a party might yet emerge, but it won’t be Ukip, because Mr Farage’s alliance of convenience with the enraged elderly has left an unpleasant taint around the party that will not be easily expunged. To make matters worse for Ukip, it appears that Labour may, at last, be beginning to work out how to win its share of the angry octogenerian vote back.

It’s not a parody, unfortunately – Mr B, in a previous incarnation,has form

No – it’s clickbait. The new DT regime is betting the family silver on Cameron. Over the last few months the resident pundits of the supposedly conservative organ (with the honourable exception of Janet Daley and Peter Oborne) have been religiously pimping Dave and sneering at UKIP. But that was not enough so they decided to recruit Dan Hodges Mk 2

So, who is Stephen Bush?

Stephen Bush is an assistant comment editor at the Telegraph, who mainly works on Morning Briefing, the Telegraph’s must-read morning e-mail.

He , appeared out of the blue a few weeks ago “helping” Brogan – always a portent of assassination at the DT.

Where did he come from?

Guardian Bush

Telegraph Bush

The Guardian……

Stephen Bush writes a weekly blog for Progress and works in a bookshop

And left wing websites Progress Online and LabourList…….

Stephen Bush is a writer from London. He studied history at the University of Oxford, and has written on everything from party funding to underwater hockey. He writes a weekly column, the Tuesday Review, for ProgressOnline on politics and current events, and for LabourList on European affairs.

If Mr Bush is a sign of things to come then it looks like the DT zombie might be lurching towards the metropolitan chattering class hilltop currently occupied by the Guardian and BBC where, of course, UKIP is simply not acceptable. Trouble is if you check on the majority of the responses to his Chuka Umunna/UKIP post you get the feeling that the zombie might not be taking a substantial chunk of its  readership with it.

What’s that sound?  Bill Deedes turning in his grave…..

Lord Ashcroft’s recent poll of Tory/Labour “Battleground Marginals” has actually thrown up some interesting figures for UKIP. If you look at Page 4 (Voting Intentions) there are four seats where UKIP are within eight percentage points of the leading party

The figures show that UKIP has certainly got everything to play for in these constituencies – and they give the lie to the current message of “piling up the protest votes and coming second”

Moreover, looking at the rest of the marginals in most of them an increase in support for UKIP will lose those currently held by the Tories to Labour and also deny them the chance of gaining Labour held marginals. So the possibility of UKIP MPs in the next parliament can no longer be derided as a “swivel-eyed” fantasy by the political class and their symbiotic partners in the media.

Looks like the “UKIP peaking and now on the way out” narrative being assiduously peddled by Tory HQ and their cheerleaders at the Telegraph needs to be filed under “False Rumours”…

A few days ago we went, as “guests of honour” to a school reunion which included several people I had taught nearly half a century ago in the 1960s. Several of women asked my wife how old I was as I didn’t look much different to all the other men in the room. In fact they were all round about 60 while I’m in my early 70s….at those ages the grey hairs, wrinkles and paunches make us all seem the same whereas to a 12 yr old even someone in their mid 20s (as I was then) just looks….ancient…

Everyone was very kind and some said they remembered one or two things I had taught them. A few even told me that I had sparked off a lifelong interest in history. They reminded me of things I had said and done in the classroom (much of which I could not recall…lol…) and there was a collective reminder of idiosyncrasies (some of which, I confess, I had deliberately cultivated)

It was fascinating to also hear about their own pathways through life and see the pictures of children and grandchildren from men and women I had last seen in school uniform filing out of my classroom or running across the playground.

I felt honoured to be there and touched that they should want to include me in their fellowship. But that is the bonus of being a teacher. Despite the myths and caricatures that surround schools I have found that there was very little difference between the young adolescents in the 60s and those I was teaching nearly forty years later (and most of my career was spent in bog standard comprehensives…)

I always made it clear that I was in charge of the classroom and that there were certain behaviours that were unacceptable. But within those boundaries the work we did would be laced with good humour and mutual respect and, whatever happened, I was always guided by one key factor.

That these young people are not yet adults and will sometimes be immature, thoughtless and irresponsible – just as we were at that age….

No, as a teacher there is little chance of getting wealthy – but there can be other riches that go beyond price…

The chaps at The New Statesman, the parish magazine of the chattering class left, have clearly not been paying too much attention to Planet Telegraph and the musings of Benedict Brogan and Dan Hodges who have used the Newark by election result to prove, beyond doubt that UKIP has shot its bolt and is now in terminal decline

Yet Ukip’s results in the 2014 local and European elections demonstrate the importance of blue-collar voters for Labour. These are the voters it has been haemorrhaging for over a decade; those who once sat at home on election day and are now coming out to vote Ukip………….This is a logical consequence of abandoning blue-collar Britons and becoming a party of the urban middle class alone.

Wow…..you mean winning Hackney with a coalition of young white middle class professionals and ethnic minorities won’t make much of an impression on those working class people in Rotherham and Thurrock? You know, the ones who never appear in colour supplements?

As John Denham, MP for Southampton Itchen, has observed, we need to recognise the pressures immigration has put on some working-class communities

But…but…but…I thought uncontrolled immigration was A Good Thing….

According to a whole range of media pundits (yes you, Benedict Brogan of the Telegraph) when I arrived at the South East England Regional Conference of UKIP  in Eastbourne last Saturday the hall should have been almost empty with just about thirty party members wandering around all sad and miserable – dumbstruck by the massive Tory victory in the Newark by election last week…you know, the election where the Tories doubled their 16,000 2010 majority and UKIP got even fewer than the 1,900 they got in 2010.

I had been told that the wheels had come off the UKIP juggernaut, the earthquake was now a squeak and purple was so…..yesterday. Clearly the People’s Army was, like Bonaparte’s in 1812, fleeing the battlefield in chaos and confusion.

Yet when I stepped into the hall I found it packed out with a thousand members and the whole place buzzing with excitement. Far from an air of despondency everyone was eager to prepare for next year’s General Election and listened intently as Nigel Farage outlined the leadership’s plan to target those 30/40 key constituencies where UKIP had done exceptionally well in the local and EU elections. They were also pleased to hear that between now and September the party would be putting the finishing touches to its 2015 election manifesto and that the responsibilities of presentation would be shared out between UKIP’s 24 MEPs with Farage himself more “primus inter pares” than the dominant voice he has been up to now.

We heard from new SE MEPs Diane James, Janice Atkinson and Ray Finch, people whose faces will become much more familiar as one part of this collegiate leadership cadre. Local councillors and party officials spoke about political issues, campaigning and branch organisation. UKIP’s national infrastructure is clearly becoming more professional, its message more consistent.

Diane James, in particular, got a lot of respect. She doesn’t do tub thumping but comes across cool, calm and measured especially under fire. She is a great asset for the party at a time when it needs to be taken more seriously.

This was not a congress of the defeated – and why should it be? Those figures in the opening paragraph were figments of my imagination – just as the media’s interpretation of Newark was an expression of their wishful thinking. In this “safe” Tory constituency the Conservative majority was less than half the 2010 figure. UKIP’s share went up from 3% to 25%. They replaced Labour as the main opposition party and the Lib Dems evaporated. True we didn’t win the seat but away from the Cameron cheerleaders at the Telegraph and Spectator there was recognition that it was still a good result for UKIP.

Ukip didn’t quite sustain their momentum from last month’s local and Euro-elections. But it was a good result, especially as Labour’s charge that the Tories threw the kitchen sink and more into the campaign is echoed by Nigel Farage, who will be studying young Jenrick’s election expenses carefully. The Tory money wall and Ukip’s inability to match it are two of the five shrewd reasons Sparrow cites on his blog for the likely outcome.

Just consider this. In 2010 the Tory majority in Newark was 16,000 yet they were unable to gain an overall majority in Parliament. If the Newark 2014 pattern was repeated throughout Britain in 2015 Cameron and his mates would not have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning power in their own.

That’s the real message of Newark – and this is why we departed Eastbourne in such high spirits…the Purple Revolution has only just begun……..

That Ashcroft Newark by election poll has Tory HQ and their media drones at the Telegraph and Spectator ordering extra bottles of champagne.

Purple tide pushed back…..UKIP stuffed……earthquake fails to appear….Brogan & co are dancing with glee….

But are our pollsters  reliable predictors of UKIP by election performance?

UKIP, of course, have never managed to win a Westminster constituency either in a general or a by-election. Their best performance was the 27.8% at Eastleigh in February last year.

It is important to recall that all the polls in that contest, as the chart shows, understated the purples by quite some margin. None of them had UKIP any higher than third place.

It was a similar pattern in Corby in November 2012 when the Tories were trying to hang on to the seat following Louise Mensch’s decision to quit politics. The final Ashcroft poll had UKIP on just 6% – they ended up on 14.3%.

Maybe the Tories should just hold back on those champagne orders until the votes are actually counted……

The Tory candidate for the Newark by-election, Robert Jenrick,  appears to embody everything that is wrong with our current political class

Robert Jenrick denied being a ‘carpetbagger’ or a ‘career politician’ ,claiming he had ‘has never worked in politics’, despite having stood in Newcastle-Under-Lyme in 2010 and attempting to get selected to a safe Tory seat in Croydon before landing Newark. He stood by his claims that was an ‘entrepreneur’, but admitted to never having set up any business beyond the company he registered while renovating his £2.3 million SW1 property.

Jenrick made much of the fact that he had moved his family to the area, settling in Southwell – although our informants in the Midlands say that Jenrick needs to sharpen up his pronunciation: it’s ‘suthull’ to the local cognoscenti.

Do we really want to be continually ruled by people like this?

In fact, he and American wife Michal own not one, but two, £2 million homes in London and a £1 million country pile built by an 18th Century slave-trader.

Their Newark ‘home’ is a rented house obtained when he was picked as a candidate six months ago.

And his Party CV omits to say he went to a £13,000-a-year private secondary school.

Together with his director’s job at Christie’s auction house, it is just the type of posh Tory boy image Cameron and co can’t shrug off.

Mr Jenrick, who looks even younger than his 32 years, sticks rigidly to his Tory HQ autocue when asked about national issues.