What will the next Parliament look like?

How threatened by the rise of UKIP should sitting MPs feel?

Nobody is quite sure, yet, whether Nigel Farage's party will be able to capitalise on the substantial slice of local power it won last week, but a share of power in a few County Halls is a huge opportunity for them.

And MPs, who could have an early chance to vote on a referendum proposal at the end of the Queen's Speech debate next week, will be watching closely to see if they seize it.

Flashback to 1981 and the sharp gains made by Liberals and the newly-formed SDP in the county elections of that year. Suddenly a number of traditionally Tory shires became hung councils, and in quite a number of then the Alliance (which later morphed into the Lib Dems) entrenched itself.

Take Cheshire, where, rather unexpectedly, seven Liberal councillors found themselves the arbiters of the 63-member county council. The approach they adopted became the template for Liberal and later Liberal Democrat tactics as hung councils became increasingly common.

The "Cheshire Convention" was born. "We were just a bunch of dewy-eyed guys in sandals," recalls Andrew Stunell - then one of the seven, now a Liberal Democrat MP. "The establishment thought we were a bunch of inexperienced loonies who couldn't possibly hold it together. They were astonished when we did."

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, the counties provided a substantial powerbase for the Lib Dems, and they had real influence over the delivery of big-ticket public services like education and social care. Quite a number of their future MPs cut their teeth in the shires or in other big authorities where the voters gave them a share of power - one reason, perhaps, why the Lib Dems have seemed more comfortable in Coalition than many of their partners.

Newly-hung counties

The question now is whether UKIP can pull off a similar trick in newly-hung counties like Lincolnshire.

Will they make gains for their voters, to demonstrate there's a long-term value in voting for them? What will UKIP's traction be, over the next Budget-setting exercise in Lincoln or Norwich? Will some of the billion-pound spending plans of those county halls reflect a different priority because they are there? Much will depend on the streetsmarts of the new UKIP arrivals - they can't afford to spend too long finding their feet, and the old hands from the other parties will certainly be hoping to beguile and bedazzle them.

And the same dynamic may be played out again next year, when the local elections in some big, powerful metropolitan authorities will be held alongside the European Parliament elections, where the universal expectation is that UKIP will again do well.

A slice of power in town and city halls may be added to the gains in the shires. But the trouble with power is that it provides opportunities for failure and embarrassment - so the new councillors will have to show they can deliver

Meanwhile, having won a fair number of votes on the back of an, at best, patchy organisation, can UKIP bootstrap a real grassroots machine into existence, signing up party members and establishing a visible presence in the community?

If incumbent MPs open their local papers every week to read stories about the activities of UKIP councillors, and if they start to notice a flow of UKIP literature dropping through their doors, their current anxiety will escalate into real fear. There's already a clamour for policy responses on an EU referendum and on immigration - not to mention gay marriage - and some Tories are contemplating seeking a dual endorsement and running as Conservatives with UKIP support.

But that pressure will fade if gnarled political professionals conclude that UKIP's results, this May, were a blip, rather than the birth of a long-term competitor.

Study Eastleigh

Anyone who thinks that grassroots politicking doesn't matter in Westminster elections should study the result of the Eastleigh by-election - where the pervasive Lib Dem presence on the ground saved the seat for Nick Clegg. Which brings me to the other key conclusion to be drawn from the election results - a restatement of the Eastleigh lesson: the Lib Dems are very well dug in in most of their Parliamentary seats and will be very hard to shift, even given their persistent slump in the opinion polls.

Suddenly the first-past-the-post electoral system is working in their favour and they look to have a reasonable chance of returning a decent number of their MPs at the next election. Taken together with the UKIP surge, we're now in four party politics, and seats can be won on a third of the vote, or less. (Take a look at Norwich South, where, in 2010, Lib Dem Simon Wright won on 29% of the vote, ousting former Home Secretary Charles Clarke).

So the party leader who may be most confident of ministerial office in the next Parliament may be....Nick Clegg. His party may be withering outside its electoral heartland but its survival in key constituencies keeps him in the game. Can I proffer a humble - and, admittedly, derivative - suggestion for the punch line of his next conference speech: "Go back to 45 of your constituencies - and prepare for government."