Nigel Farage's admission that Ukip has more than its fair share of Walter Mittys might look like the very latest in candour from the man who styles himself as a straight-talker, but it is in fact an insult. Not to the rogue Ukip officials and activists Farage was referring to, who have embarrassed the party with their off-message opinions – but to Walter Mitty.
For the great James Thurber creation – played first on film by Danny Kaye and recently revived by Ben Stiller – is a harmless daydreamer, lapsing into pleasant fantasies in which he himself is cast as the hero. Ukip's problem is not an over-abundance of fantasists, but an excess of misogynists, homophobes and those whom David Cameron famously referred to as "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists".
You would not have caught Mitty mocking a disabled student, asking him whether he was Richard III, as the MEP and Ukip member Godfrey Bloom did at the Oxford Union last week. Mitty may be in his own little world, but he is not so disconnected from reality as to suggest a series of floods might be God's punishment for a change in the law allowing same-sex marriage. That was left to Ukip councillor David Silvester, sparking the rather brilliant social media response, @Ukipweather.
So Farage is letting himself off too lightly when he announces that Ukip will now get a tighter grip on its candidate selection to keep out the Mittys. Ukip's problem goes beyond a tendency to daydream. Bloom was not daydreaming when he called women who don't clean behind the fridge "sluts" and argued that Britain should not be giving aid to "bongo-bongo land". Nor was Ukip treasurer Stuart Wheeler spacing out when he said that because women come "absolutely nowhere" when they take on men at chess, poker or bridge, they had no right to expect representation on corporate boards.
It's similarly disingenuous to pretend that this is a matter of a few, kooky individuals (albeit ones at the top of the Ukip hierarchy). Last week Farage had to confess that the party's 2010 manifesto was "drivel", with its pledges to repaint trains in traditional colours, to bring back "proper dress" at the theatre and to investigate discrimination against white people at the BBC. But Farage himself had launched the manifesto and written the foreword. Turning the clock back is not the fantasy of a handful of Walter Mittys: it's Ukip's core mission.
And yet none of this is likely to dent Ukip's standing in the polls. The eccentricity of its activists is already well known; it's "in the price", as the money men say. What's more, Ukip's brand is as the anti-politics party, the party that dares challenge "political correctness". These mini-scandals reinforce that aspect of its identity. If a serving Tory councillor (which Silvester used to be) had made that remark about the floods and equal marriage, it would have been far more damaging for the Conservatives than it was for Ukip.
Polls suggest Farage's army is still on its way to a very strong result in May's European elections. With the Lib Dems in government, Ukip is now the receptacle of the protest vote – and the contest for the European parliament is traditionally a protest election. But the general election of 2015 will be a different story. If Farage is dreaming that his party might top the poll in that battle, well, we'd better start calling him Walter.