Charlie, Farage resigned all right, but UKIP’s governing committee refused to accept his resignation.

Here’s what the party’s chairman has said:

The NEC also concluded that UKIP’s general election campaign had been a great success. We have fought a positive campaign with a very good manifesto and despite relentless, negative attacks and an astonishing last minute swing to the Conservatives over fear of the SNP, that in these circumstances, 4 million votes was an extraordinary achievement. On that basis Mr Farage withdrew his resignation and will remain leader of UKIP. In addition the NEC recognised that the referendum campaign has already begun this week and we need our best team to fight that campaign led by Nigel. He has therefore been persuaded by the NEC to withdraw his resignation and remains leader of UKIP.

The Spectator:

It is not clear whether the Labour NEC will follow suit with Ed Miliband’s resignation. But what is clear is that the party feels that none of the candidates to succeed Farage can match his magnetism or ability to hold the party together. Which, in spite of the fact that Suzanne Evans and Paul Nuttall are impressive in their own ways, is probably true.

Indeed it is.

Does that committee do what Farage wants? Pretty much, I reckon, in which case we’ve just been treated to some choice political theater.

I would not be surprised if this, um, interlude proves a little (or maybe more than a little) damaging to UKIP. It will certainly do nothing to ease fears that the party is a one-man band, and the stigma of a ‘broken promise’, even if technically unfair, will linger. Anyone who has to parse a promise is in trouble, even more so when he has built up a reputation as a straight-talker.

That said, consider the background. I don’t know why Farage made the (completely unnecessary) promise to quit if he lost South Thanet. Bravado? Overconfidence? In any event, it backfired, not least because it set him up for defeat by tactical voting (it is striking that UKIP won Thanet in district council elections held the same day). The fact remains, however, that UKIP took 12.6 percent of the vote in Britain’s general election, more than four times its haul in 2010, an extraordinary total and an extraordinary achievement. To walk away from that would be…odd.

Writing in the UKIP-friendly Daily Express before today’s news, Leo McKinstry had this to say:

It was Labour that really suffered from the Ukip insurgency. But Ukip did not just help the Tories on the day of the election. Throughout the past few years, the growing national popularity of Farage has forced the Conservatives to become more robust, more willing to listen to mainstream public opinion on key issues such as immigration, tax and Europe. Cameron’s embarrassing hug-a-hoodie language of modernisation was abandoned, replaced by a tougher approach, as symbolised by his pledge to hold a referendum on Britain’s EU membership in 2017….
In 2006 Cameron notoriously described Ukip members as a bunch of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”. But as the Ukip surge accelerated, he had to drop such sneers and embrace parts of their agenda. Without Ukip it is unlikely that the Tories would have promised to hold a referendum on the EU, leave the European Human Rights regime, cut benefits for migrants, or end health tourism. With their usual complacency and ideological certainty, Labour paid no heed to the Ukip surge, convinced that Farage’s party was a threat only to the Tories.
So they continued to alienate traditional working-class supporters by clinging to the dogmas of multiculturalism, European integration and mass immigration. At the election, Labour paid a terrible price for this disdain towards Ukip. As the polling expert Stephen Fisher put it in his analysis of the results, “Ukip’s rise hurt Labour more than the Tories”.
Such a trend can clearly be seen in several of the key seats that Labour lost to the Conservatives, such as Ed Balls’s base of Morley in Yorkshire, where Ukip’s vote went up by 8,000, pushing the Shadow Chancellor to defeat. It was the same story in Southampton Itchen, a Tory gain where Labour’s vote fell by 0.2 per cent and Ukip’s rose by 9 per cent. Just as importantly, the strength of the Ukip vote acted as a shield for the Tories across many marginal seats such as Nuneaton and Thurrock.

That said, for all its extraordinary progress, UKIP still struggles organizationally and there are, shall we say, gaps in its thinking, most notably its failure to produce a properly thought-through case for Brexit, a case that encompasses the why, the how and the consequences. With the EU referendum set for 2017 (or maybe even late 2016), time is short, and that failure could be catastrophic.

In the course of a characteristically smart (which is not to say that agree with all of it) article on Cameron’s re-election for CapX, Rupert Darwall notes this:

As for the [EU] referendum itself, the election and last year’s independence referendum show that voters north and south of the border voters prioritise the economy. So far, debate about Britain’s membership has revolved around the costs of leaving the EU. Advocates of withdrawal have yet to demonstrate the economic benefits of leaving. Following the Gordon Brown/Ed Balls playbook, doubtless the Treasury will produce an economic assessment to underpin the government’s case for remaining members of the EU. It is likely that the prerequisite for withdrawal is having a government that not only makes the economic case for withdrawal, but has policies showing how Britain would make a success of Brexit.

But unless Cameron’s ‘renegotiations’ fail (I doubt they will be allowed to), his government will be campaigning to stay in the EU….

Euroskeptics have a very long way to go.