Nigel Farage: after Ukip’s Rochester win general election is unpredictable

The result of next year’s general election is “unpredictable beyond comprehension”, Nigel Farage has declared after the UK Independence party notched up its second parliamentary byelection win in Rochester and Strood.

As Ukip’s second elected MP, Mark Reckless, said the party represented all communities across Britain, Farage said that many Tory MPs would be now “sucking their teeth” and assessing whether to defect to his party.

Speaking on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, the Ukip leader said: “My guess is this: I think there’ll be a lot of sucking of teeth over the course of the next few weeks. There will be MPs who will work out actually they’ve got a better chance standing as Ukip. If they join us I’ll be delighted. If they don’t, frankly that doesn’t really matter.”

Meanwhile, David Cameron has pledged to win back the seat at the general election on the grounds that a Ukip victory in May would endanger the economic recovery by increasing the chances of a Labour victory. The prime minister tweeted: “I’m determined to win back Rochester and Strood at the election – anything other than a Conservative Govt would put our recovery at risk.”

Reckless, an ex-Tory MP, defeated his former party by 2,920 votes in the closely fought Rochester and Strood byelection, inflicting a humiliating blow on Cameron. The prime minister had promised to throw everything at winning the contest, visiting the seat five times and ordering his MPs to each make at least three trips.

Reckless, whose defection to Ukip triggered the byelection, received 16,867 votes, or 42.1% of the poll. His Conservative opponent, Kelly Tolhurst, took 13,947 votes (34.8%). The Tory vote fell by 14.4 percentage points.

Labour’s Naushabah Khan came third with 6,713 (16.8%, down 11.7 percentage points) and the Liberal Democrats just 349 (0.9%, down 15.4 percentage points). The Lib Dems came behind the Greens, who polled 1,692 (4.2%, up 2.7 percentage points).

In his victory speech, Reckless told Britons that Ukip would “give you back your country”.

William Hague, the leader of the Commons, said the Tories were confident of regaining the seat after what he called a “dramatically closer result” than Douglas Carswell’s emphatic win in the Clacton byelection. Carswell won 59.7% of the vote in contrast with the 42.1% for Reckless.

Peter Kellner, president of YouGov, said Ukip had failed to achieve the sort of decisive result that would be difficult for the Tories to overturn in the general election.

Hague told the Today programme: “We will work every day from now until the general election to make sure we win this seat back at the general election. There is every prospect of doing so.”

In a message to Tory voters tempted to support Ukip at the general election, Hague warned that they could help Ed Miliband “sneak into Downing Street by default”. He said: “This byelection does illustrate that if Ukip take votes from Labour, which they obviously have done to a large extent, but take seats from the Conservatives, then Ed Miliband can sneak into Downing Street by default.”

Farage said Ukip would present a major threat to both main parties at the general election but added that the uncertainty over the impact of four political parties meant it was difficult to predict the outcome. He told the Today programme: “It means the whole thing is thrown up in the air. Anybody that now tries to attempt to predict what’ll happen next year frankly is wasting their time. It is now unpredictable beyond comprehension. This was seat number 271 on Ukip’s target list. We’ve shown here that if you vote Ukip you get Ukip and I think the consequences are very difficult to predict.”

Farage spoke out as two highly Eurosceptic Tory MPs said it would be wrong to defect to Ukip. Stewart Jackson, the Tory MP for Peterborough, tweeted that Reckless would be “gone in May”. Jackson had earlier tweeted: “Any Tory MP who defects to Ukip on the basis of the result in Rochester and Strood (whatever it is) would frankly be completely insane.”

Mark Pritchard, the Tory MP for the Wrekin, told ITV News that he had seriously considered defecting to Ukip. But Pritchard wrote: “Mark Reckless MP may have won another byelection for Ukip, but his defection is politically misguided and self-defeating.”

Asked about Jackson’s tweet, Farage said: “I couldn’t care less. If people like Mr Jackson want to lose next year they can stick with the Conservative party. But where you get seats where the Conservatives have the majority over Labour but there is a big Labour second vote then I think Ukip has a very strong chance of winning those constituencies.”

Farage also strongly defended Reckless after he appeared to suggest that east European migrants could lose their right to live in the UK if Britain left the EU. He said Reckless had been answering a complicated question on transitional arrangements which had been “deliberately inflated, conflated and exaggerated beyond all belief in the press”.

The Ukip leader also said that he remained committed to an NHS free at the point of delivery after the Guardian published a video which showed him raising the possibility of an “insurance-based system of healthcare”. He said he had been talking about funding the NHS along the lines of the French and Dutch systems.

Farage added: “We’ve had that debate and we’ve actually decided that it is better to maintain the NHS as it is currently structured but to do everything we can to cut the massive growth in middle management and bureaucracy. The idea we get from Andy Burnham and the Labour party that it is immoral and wicked to have a debate about how we might do things differently is what led to Mid Staffordshire and so many of the disasters.”