Election results: Ukip leader Paul Nuttall loses by wide margin as party collapses nationwide
Ukip has won just 3.8 per cent of votes so far
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Your support makes all the difference.Paul Nuttall has come third in the Boston and Skegness constituency, trailing both Labour and the Conservatives by a huge margin.
The seat was held by the Tories with a majority of 16,600. Matt Warman, the Conservative candidate, received 27,271 votes to Labour's 10,699.
Mr Nuttall was a distant third, picking up just 3,308 votes - 7.7 per cent of the total. Ukip had come second in the constituency in 2015, trailing the Tories by just 4,300 votes.
The defeat marks a disastrous night for Ukip, with the party's vote share having collapsed across the UK.
As of 3.40am on Friday, Mr Nuttall’s party had won just 1.9 per cent of the vote – a fall of 10.9 per cent on its 2015 share.
The party got less than 5 per cent of the vote in many of the seats declared so far, meaning it will lose the £500 deposit all parties must pay to field a candidate.
Ukip sources had begun the evening talking privately of the possibility of the party gaining two seats.
They now look set to win none, with the Clacton seat that was previously held by former Ukip MP Douglas Carswell looking likely to be retaken by the Conservatives.
Mr Nuttall claimed the exit poll suggested Theresa May had “put Brexit in jeopardy”.
Writing on Twitter, he said: “If the exit poll is true then Theresa May has put Brexit in jeopardy. I said at the start this election was wrong. Hubris.”
Voters who previously backed Ukip appear to have switched to both Labour and the Tories, with both of the main parties seeing swings towards them in all of the seats that have so far announced results.
According to the general election exit poll, more Ukip voters will transfer their backing to Labour than the Tories, helping Jeremy Corbyn to increase the number of his party’s House of Commons seats from 229 to 266 and depriving Ms May of an overall majority.
The shock poll suggests the Conservatives have won 314 seats – 12 short, crucially, of the 326 threshold needed to command a parliamentary majority.
Experts suggested Ukip could be losing support among Brexit-supporting voters who are now confident that Brexit will take place whoever is in power, and therefore believe a party founded to campaign for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU is now largely redundant.
Mr Nuttall is also widely considered to be less popular among voters than former Ukip leader Nigel Farage.
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