Ukip failed in the Stoke-on-Trent by-election because they were not tough enough on immigration, former party leader Nigel Farage has said.
Farage — who warned last week that the contest was “fundamental” to the party’s future prospects — said they needed to learn lessons after his successor Paul Nuttall failed to unseat Labour in a hard-fought campaign.
“I feel sorry for Paul Nuttall. He fought a hard campaign. I think there are some lessons to learn from it in terms of how we campaign, in terms of how we target,”  Farage told the BBC.
“There is a debate in Ukip as to how strong we should be on the immigration issue. I personally think we should own it.
“So we will have to look at that and think: were we really tough enough, were we clear enough with the electorate? It has got to be looked at.”
Ukip had seen Stoke — which voted overwhelmingly for Brexit in last year’s referendum — as fertile ground for a challenge to Labour in a contest triggered by the resignation of former shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt.
However, Nuttall’s gamble of standing himself failed to come off as Labour’s Gareth Snell held the seat with a majority of 2,620 — raising questions as to whether Ukip could take seats from Labour in its traditional heartlands.
Party chairman Paul Oakden said it could be another two decades before the party can take another seat in a by-election.
“Politics is a long game. It took us 23-odd years to win a referendum to get Britain out of the European Union,” he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
“It may take that long for us to get a seat in Westminster via a by-election. But if that’s how long it takes then that’s what we will keep doing, because that’s what we are here for.” 
Stoke had been regarded as promising territory by Ukip. Oakden acknowledged Nuttall had endured a “difficult” campaign, in which he had to apologise over a false claim that he lost close friends in the Hillsborough disaster, but said he had the full support of the party.
“This party is absolutely behind Paul Nuttall as its leader. He is 12 weeks into his leadership. We are all going to support him moving forward.  This is one step along a long road for our party,” he said.
“He has had a difficult campaign. There is no doubt that he has been targeted by various unpleasant elements during the last four weeks.
“I think it was incredibly courageous of him to put his head above the parapet and stand to be the candidate for our party in this election.
“He did it to unify our party. I think by the evidence of the number of people who came up to support Paul during this campaign, that is what happened.”
Farage also defended Nuttall over the Hillsborough row, saying: “He had a tough time. He paid the price for some mistakes that staff of his had made. I don’t think that this reflects on Paul.”
  Nigel Farage told American conservatives Friday that Britain’s shock anti-Europe move and Donald Trump’s US presidential victory launched a “great global revolution” that will spread through more western nations.
Farage received a warm welcome at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he praised Trump’s “quite remarkable” victory.
“2016, we did it!” boomed the former head of Britain’s UK Independence Party.
“We witnessed the beginning of a global political revolution.
And it’s one that is not going to stop, it’s one that is going to roll out across the rest of the great world,” Farage said to loud cheers.
Last year “the nation-state democracy made a comeback against the globalists”.
Farage pointed to more “very exciting elections” in store in 2017 in Germany, France, the Netherlands and possibly Italy, where last year’s tumult led to the downfall of prime minister Matteo Renzi, along with British prime minister David Cameron.
The elections, he said, will “shift the center of gravity in the entire debate” as Europeans begin to reject “the idea of being governed by a bunch of unelected old men in Brussels.”
Europhobe Farage is known for his stridently anti-immigration positions, and at CPAC he slammed the “absolute madness and idiocy” of German Chancellor Angela Merkel for allowing refugees to pour across her nation’s borders.