A groundbreaking result for UKIP

It is a stunning result and I think it has the potential, and let's not put it at more than that, to be groundbreaking.

Before the last election, the main parties said that if there was a coalition the roof would fall in.

Well two things have happened since then - we have had a coalition and the roof clearly hasn't fallen in.

So I think you can look at today and see perhaps a sense that politics might, just might, be beginning to break up and people think well voting for a minor party can make a difference.

Of course the other factor is, that in the past people have tended to turn to the Lib Dems when they feel like making a protest and clearly they don't want to do that, because the Lib Dems are in government and they partly blame them for the problems.

I don't want to overstate these things, clearly there is an element of protest but I think the question is, is it a protest across that broader adjustment of peoples approach to politics and I think that's what would really worry the two biggest parties.

Nigel Farage has quite cleverly combined the issues of Europe and immigration by talking a lot about the threat, as he perceives it, of a lot of Romanians and Bulgarians coming here.

You're going to see him doing a lot more of that.

I think you will see Labour shifting its stance a little bit more on immigration perhaps.

The big question though is for the Tories. Obviously David Cameron has assumed that the secret to winning the next election is to occupy the centre ground and to make it very much a choice between him and Mr Miliband.

That may still work, but his going to have an awful lot of people in his party saying look at what's happening with UKIP, look at why people are voting for them - we've got to shift more over to the ground that they occupy.