Take a long look at this chart. Think about it. Following Thursday’s political tremor, UKip has just 163 local seats. It doesn’t control a single Council anywhere. Labour has 2047, the Conservatives 1,333. Even the LibDems still have 2.3 times as many seats….with a fraction of the popular vote compared to the size of UKip’s polling figures to date.

On the Richter scale, this is a political earthquake in the region of 0.02.

Nigel Farage says that UKip is now “a major player”, but it’s hard to read that from these results. He will, of course, blame Britain’s woefully undemocratic electoral system….but it won’t wash.

What the British Nation did this week was give a massive protest vote to a ramshackle Party whose organisation on the ground, in most of the country, is risible. The LibDems (the big losers in this debacle) are a Party of local professionals, and they always have been. UKip is twenty years old as a Party, the LibDems are twenty-six years old with a mental age of seven. The Cleggies have had a disastrous history of being completely ineffectual as a coalition partner, whereas UKip are supposed to represent the biggest single unenfranchised opinion in Britain….and be “surging”.

Today, the LibDems still have 409 seats, and UKip 163. I’d love to know what difference it’s going to make.

But then, I don’t live on the Channel island of Brecqhou des Foucons. In that rarified realm, one day Nigel Farage is a satanic buffoon, the next he’s a winner. Which is, of course, because these results so far are about local UK politics, about which the Brothers Barking giveth not a monkey’s. So Nige is a suitably safe weapon with which to bash….the Labour Party.

Yes, I know that really the Barking Twins of Tinkytonk Island would much prefer to bash Cameron with the blunt instrument, but one must recognise priorities in this world. The Ed Miller Band is the main enemy now, because based on these results, they’d get a clear, non-Coalition 40 seat majority a year from now. And for shadowy, unelected power-freaks in the Channel Islands, that could be a disaster.

It wouldn’t be, actually, because a Labour Government would really mean power switching from the Greedy Deaf wing of the élite to the Fluffy Deaf wing of the élite. It would be bad in slightly different ways, but the medium term result for Britain would be the same: overpopulated bankruptcy inside a neo-fascist Superstate.

But wait for Sunday’s later-in-the-day results of the EU elections, at which point Nigel and his Faragistas will resume their normal position as deranged clowns on the pages of the Barclay Torygraph.

Only the Independent now has a relatively centrist agenda….and it is going down the pan at an alarming speed. Every other title in the mix is controlled by a spectrum of unearned privilege, soft porn and incompetence whose sole purpose in life is (a) to survive commercially and (b) bat for the side most likely to ensure its survival. In that sense, they are barely distinguishable from the political class.

Major earthquake, not many dead.

Last night at The Slog: More sparks on the dry hay that is the Stock Market