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Nigel Farage
By George Parker
For David Cameron and Britain’s other mainstream politicians, Ukip’s maverick leader now poses a clear and present danger. Is it time to take him seriously? By George Parker
©Philip SindenOn election day May 6 2010, a man in a pinstriped suit boarded a light aircraft at Hinton-in-the-Hedges, Northamptonshire. Trailing on the dewy grass was a banner bearing a forlorn last-minute appeal: “Vote for Your Country – Vote UKIP.” Hardly anyone bothered to turn up.
While the world focused on a grey-faced Gordon Brown’s desperate fight to cling to power and on David Cameron confidently preparing for Downing St, the plane began its ascent over the English countryside. Within minutes, it was clear something was badly wrong: the banner was wrapped around the aircraft’s tail and rudder.
Nigel Farage’s relentlessly upbeat demeanour suddenly changes. “I thought: this is probably it,” he says. What does he remember? “The noise. The noise of the nose hitting the ground. Bang! I can still hear that.” His voice cracks.
“I barely want to think about it but I was upside down, completely caved in. I could hardly breathe, I was covered in fuel oil. I was desperate to get out … desperate. I kept pushing … I couldn’t get out. I thought, this thing is going to catch fire. Very scary. I promise you – that is very, very scary.”
Interestingly the pilot Justin Adams was trapped in the plane for a considerable time and suffered long term damage yet there is never any mention of him. Adams insisted that Farage sought compensation from his general accident indemnity yet he himself lost his plane, his business and aas a result his home and was divorced whilst Farage having effectively gagged him ensured he himself gained cuedos & even foolishly alluded to a Messianic status having survived!
Sadly Justin Adams, seriously damaged by the events, was persecuted by the law and Farage’s claims led to his imprisonment!
This is Farage, leader of the UK Independence party, as you never see him. The heavy-smoking, beer-drinking maverick – scourge of Brussels and terror of Britain’s political elite – is a man lodged in the public consciousness as a jovial insurgent, dispensing barroom wisdom with remorseless good cheer.
It is the bar room wisdom masquerading as policy dispensed on the fly that has done so much harm to UKIP as a party and converted it from serious politics to a cult right down to the hired and paid ‘Praise Singers’ more redollent of third world politics!
But there is another side to Farage. The man pulled from the wreckage – sternum split, lung punctured, 10 bones broken, rosette slightly askew – emerged with a new-found purpose. Behind the jokey façade is a man with a deadly serious intent: to smash open the British political system and lead the UK out of the European Union.
“I think the accident made him more ruthless and more single-minded,” says David Campbell Bannerman, a former Ukip deputy leader. The British public and an increasingly anxious political elite across Europe are now starting to ask: “Where did Nigel Farage come from and where is he heading?”
©Philip SindenAlthough Ukip has been around for 20 years and won 13 seats in the last European elections, the party’s rise under Farage’s leadership has been remarkable.
So also, it is worth noting, has the fall in identifiable individuals of probity and ethics amongst its activists where it seems personal ambition is best fulfilled, not by espousing ‘Leave-The-EU’ but by adding to the Farage cult mind set with unconstructive blind promotion of ‘Our Glorious Leader’.
The big leap forward was during the leadership of Roger Knapman which Farage inheritted but even so under Farage he has fallen out with and lost about 1/3rd. of his MEPs and it is only now that his partyu is clawing back to its previous membership levels of approaching 30,000, the recent climb back aided by issuing free membership for a period!
When Farage fell from the Northamptonshire skies on polling day in 2010, the crash was little more than a footnote in the general election. Ukip polled a modest 3 per cent and Farage’s own attempt to oust the House of Commons Speaker John Bercow in his Buckingham seat was a conspicuous failure: he was even beaten into third place by a strongly pro-European independent candidate. For many, the crumpled figure hauled out of the wreckage that morning was already a busted flush.
Less than three years later, and Farage is revelling in his party’s best-ever result in a parliamentary election. Ukip did not win the Eastleigh by-election, but it would be hard to tell from the demeanour of the party leader as he swaggers through a crowd of well-wishers amid a sea of lurid purple banners in the faded town centre.
The swagger4 is of course a studied pose as when one looks at the actual results in domestic elections over the last 3 months there is little reflection of the much quoted successes and generous pollsters results.
To be fair Farage has had a couple of notable successes in by elections which stood out from the norm but even so after 20 years UKIP has still failed to get anyone of note elected to any seat in Britain!
The contest confirmed that Ukip under Farage is becoming a serious force, shearing off support from Cameron’s Tories but also claiming that two-thirds of its Eastleigh vote came from former Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters and previous non-voters.
Indeed Farage’s party is becoming a ‘serious force’ and for the first time will enter the general election able to destabilise seats in a few areas as never before but that must not be construed as a threat to the Tories across the board. Farage’s staff are the first to boast that they take votes from all parties and clearly this is true and in differing proportions in different areas – so as a threat to the Tories the Tories themse4lves are the greratest threat with the pucillanimity of the cuts and resultant failure to make good the damage done to Britain and to our economy of the corrupt, self serving unlucky 13 years of misrule by the economically illiterate Labour Party.
That much of the damage is done by membership of The EU is a message UKIP has failed to get across to the public at large and thus scaremongering over immigration and overt support of racism has been the stock in trade of Farage’s cult.
A party supposedly comprised of “cranks, gadflies and extremists” – in the words of former Tory leader Michael Howard – fielded an articulate healthcare specialist, Diane James, as its candidate. James came second to the Lib Dems with 28 per cent of the vote; most agreed that if the campaign had lasted another week she would have won.
It is also noted that Diane James for all the mystery of her background, has clearly been UKIP’s best candidate in any election to date and this was reflected in the vote! Many have even said that she did far better than could have been expected had Farage stood in Eastleigh and I feel they may well be right.
Yet others have said that if only Diane James had been elected there would be just cause to oust Farage as the ostensible leader of UKIP and give her5 the job, that would of course be dependent on her having the force of character to confine Farage to the job of party performer for the media and other areas of showmanship at which he is so good.
©GettyCelebrating with Ukip candidate Diane James at the Eastleigh by-election, February 28; James beat the Tories to take second place
It is worth noting that Diane James was not just second beating the Tories and Labour but was a close second to The LibDims who although they won saw their majority cut to ribbons in one of their safest seats.
“We will take this tremor in Eastleigh and turn it into a national earthquake,” says Farage (it rhymes with “barrage”) in his clipped, military tones. But already his party has shaken the political establishment and forced Cameron’s Conservatives – fearing a fatal schism on the political right – to start engaging Ukip on its chosen battleground: Europe and immigration.
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The 48-year-old man pulling the strings has other things on his mind when we meet in an Italian café in Westminster. Heavy bags under his eyes, he is drained by a schedule that takes him between “that dump” Brussels (where he works as an MEP) and Britain, where he lives in the Olde England Kentish village of Downe.
“I caught up with the post at midnight last night,” he says. “Fines for this, fines for that. If I don’t do my tax return they’re going to put me in jail.” Such is Farage’s dominance of his party (no other Ukip member comes close to his profile) he is in heavy demand from media across Europe. “On the day of Cameron’s Europe speech I did 16 hours of broadcasts,” he says. Campbell Bannerman – who left Ukip to become a Tory MEP – says Farage recognises he has become “a cult”.
The great drawback of forming such a cult is that it is totally dependent on a single man and if Farage were bought off with a deal or offer from the Tories one could expect UKIP to collapse – it is this great ineptitude in terms of leadership and the fear of delegation that leaves Farage over stretched and UKIP with only one recognisable individual and spokesman!
©INS News Agency LtdFarage in the wreckage
“There’s no escape … no escape,” Farage says. “I’m generally a pretty ebullient, optimistic person. I try to enjoy life, but are there just little times when you think, ahhh? Of course there are. No human being can work the number of hours I do a week and not have the odd moment like that.”
Nigel Paul Farage was born in Kent in 1964, one of two sons of a colourful and hard-drinking City stockbroker. Guy Justus Oscar Farage’s propensity to mix work with pleasure was clearly influential on the young Nigel, who followed his father into the City as a highly remunerated commodities trader. (Andrew, Farage’s younger brother, also headed to the City, where he still works as a broker on the London Metal Exchange.)
Guy, who became an alcoholic, divorced his wife Barbara when Nigel was five. But Farage acknowledges his father’s influence: like Guy – “the best-dressed man in the stock exchange at the time” – Nigel bears the demeanour and attire of a City gent before the barbarians were allowed in after the 1986 “Big Bang” reforms.
©INS News Agency LtdFarage after his airplane accident, May 6 2010
The sense of nostalgia for a bygone age was summed up by the story of when Guy – who kicked the bottle in his mid-thirties – was in the lift with Sir Nicholas Goodison, chairman of the London Stock Exchange, at the time of Big Bang and lamented, “You’ve ruined the best gentleman’s club in the world.”
In spite of his father, Farage enjoys a pint, using his local, the George & Dragon, as a testing ground for Ukip policies: “In my village pub they are totally against,” he says of Cameron’s plan to legalise gay marriage. To complete the anti-politician image, Farage is a heavy consumer of Rothmans cigarettes and enjoys sea-fishing and country sports. A Barbour-clad Farage loves cricket and used to be seen enjoying hare coursing – until it was banned in 2005. In short, he is a young-ish fogey: most people are surprised to learn he is still in his forties.
Farage is also a walking health-insurance nightmare. After leaving the prestigious Dulwich College in south London – alma mater of P.G. Wodehouse – and embarking on his City career he was knocked down by a car, aged 21, on his way home from a pub argument about UK-Irish relations – heavily lubricated by Irish whiskey and English ale.
Lucky to survive, he was only just emerging from a year in half-plaster when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Farage has expressed his “gratitude to evolution” for providing him with a spare: he has gone on to father four children in the course of two marriages. Given his track record, it was perhaps no surprise to see him staggering out of a crashed plane.
©GettyTraders at the London Stock Exchange in 1984; Farage followed his father into the City before taking up politics
In spite of his success in the “trench warfare” of commodities trading – a lifestyle punctuated by spread betting and drinking – by the early 1990s Farage was becoming increasingly political. He feared that the traditional British way of life he cherished was in some way under threat from a European project whose ambitions were expanding rapidly.
His opposition to the EU crystallised as Britain dabbled with what he regarded as the lunacy of the Exchange Rate Mechanism – the precursor to the euro. The Maastricht treaty of 1992, which paved the way for a much closer union and the creation of the single currency, radicalised him.
But Farage was very different from most of the other founder members of Ukip in the early 1990s. He was young for a start and had an internationalist outlook. After divorcing Clare Hayes in 1997 (the couple had two boys, Sam and Tom) Farage married a German government bond broker, Kirsten Mehr, with whom he has two girls, Victoria and Isabelle. He had an agency business in Milan and worked for two French companies. By contrast, his new colleagues had personal memories of when a real military threat came from across the Channel: “You could always tell a Ukip meeting by the number of Bomber Command ties,” he says.
Interestingly Kirsten was working for Damian Hockney, in his office, when Farage met her I believe, where she was far from being a German Bond Broker as Hockney owned a hairdressing magazine!
Articulate and media-savvy – Farage likes to hold press briefings in pubs – he quickly rose through the party. By 1999 he was an MEP and in 2006 he was elected party leader. Although he briefly quit as Ukip leader in 2009 to contest the Buckingham seat – he said he was fed up with being “head cook and bottle washer” – he was back a year later. A remarkable renaissance was now under way.
Thast Farage defined himself as ‘head cook and bottle washer’ is a reflection on his ineptitude as a leader and his inability, or is it trust, that leads him to fear delegation!
The crisis in the eurozone fuelled Ukip’s rise, as did a sense that Britain lost control of its borders in the past decade when hundreds of thousands of Poles and Lithuanians came to the UK. But polling suggests that Farage is primarily surfing a wave of hostility towards all mainstream politicians: Ukip has become Britain’s protest party of choice.
Sadly this is all too true and thus UKIP as a party has a very questionable future as its dependence on one man makes it fragile particularly in its cult nature and people do not, it seems, vote for UKIP anymore as a Political Party or even as an anti EU membership party but merely as an accrual point for the protest votes.
The most dramatic consequence of Ukip’s growing popularity was Cameron’s decision in January to offer a British referendum on EU membership in 2017, if he wins the next election. The move was intended to halt the Farage surge, but for now at least it seems to have had the opposite effect. “They’re coming to play on our pitch now,” Farage says.
This does rather read as a Farage cult PR handout as in fact neither Farage nor UKIP had anything to do with the Westminster debate on EU membership nor the issue of a Referendum.
Farage failed the EUroSceptic movement pronouncing that he did not wish to destabilise the Tories during the EU Constitution efforts that were subsequently enacted as The Lisbon Treaty!
Farage’s fan club took absolutely no action in opposing the new and ever more binding EU Treaty! Nor had Farage or UKIP taken any action to promote a referendum nor a debate in The UK that was almost solely down to Nikki Sinclaire an Independent MEP forced out of Farage’s UKIP based on gender, lies about her promoted by Farage and his stooges and her refusal to compromise her integrity in support of overt racism, anti homosexuality and convicted anti Jewish fellows of Farage’s party in the EU.
In Eastleigh, Farage proved he could combine his anti-EU message with a more visceral campaign against mass immigration. He claims that Europe’s free movement rules will lead to a mass influx of Romanian and Bulgarian migrants next year when travel restrictions are lifted.
The ability to govern people is as Thomas Jefferson made clear ‘dependent on fear’ and was it not Benjamin Franklin who taught the Labour Party their only political wisdon that ‘No people will elect a government that raises taxes once they realise they can vote for free handouts’ or some such ;-(
That Farage has led his party down the populist route of gaining votes through the shibboleth of fear is to have demeaned and debase the very noble aim of Leave-The-EU espoused by EUroSceptics.
Ukip has other radical – some would say ludicrously unaffordable – policies to cut taxes and increase spending on the police, prisons and army, but the public is barely aware of them: Europe and immigration are Ukip’s greatest hits. Farage makes immigration sound like it is the most pressing issue facing Britain and the message is resonating.
One can relatively safely show that the vote for Farage’s party in Eastleigh was almost totally dependent on the fear of immigration which they promoted. Indeed that their candidate, though standing as a UKIP ppc, is actually an Independent Councillor involved with an adviser and lobbyist of The EU!
“I moved out of Southampton because you had a job to hear English being spoken,” says Stuart Wellstead, a handyman living in a cul-de-sac in the Eastleigh suburbs. “I can’t understand why we have an open-door policy when so many of our own are unemployed.”
Cameron and Labour’s Ed Miliband have inexorably been drawn on to policy terrain where Farage knows he is invincible: while mainstream politicians cannot rip up Europe’s commitment to the free movement of workers, the Ukip boss can offer voters like Wellstead the simple expedient of leaving the EU altogether.
Many of the so called policies of the Farage message are not only uncosted but unworkable as is the childish notion that we could pass a law in our UK Parliament to Leave-The-EU and just quit. It is only from the security of knowledge that one will not be elected to enact such populism that such foolish concepts can be put forward as facts or even policies and promises.
It is only recently, it seems, that UKIP has even heard of Article #50 and the mechanism to which we have signed under international law for the concept of Leave-The-EU!
After Eastleigh, Cameron insisted he would not desert the centre ground, but his team spent the next few days talking about Britain pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights and taking measures to stop “benefit tourism” by Romanian and Bulgarian migrants.
Cameron’s team may ‘talk’ all they want but membership of The ECHR is enshrined in law as a constituent part of The EU’s Lisbon Treaty and thus can not be withdrawn from as with the status of EU citizens from Romania & Bulgaria or anywhere else.
It has been made abundantly clear to Cameron & his propagandists that The EU is not a pick and mix menu for all of young George EUstace’s protestations or the posturing of some on Cameron’s front bench!
“They’re all at sea,” Farage says as he surveys the post-election fallout. “They are just being blown around by the wind. They’re more split than they’ve ever been and the problem is that nobody in his party believes Cameron any more.”
It is hardly surprising no one believes Cameron any more with such light weight advisers as George EUstace and the vacillation from outspoken opposition to EU membership of William Hague to his present position supporting The EU and some of the most ridiculous and divisive policies as the idiotic attack on Libya and now Mali in a so called ‘Arab Spring’ that has proved so catastrophic and ill informed speading the idiocy of US bellicose foreign policy in potential flash point or flames from Pakistan though Africa in a swathe of misery and war in almost every country on route and those it has so far missed live in teetering fear!
One Tory minister admits Ukip is already having a profound effect on British politics without having a single seat in the Commons. “It’s like the Green party in the 1990s – they ended up greening all the major parties and Ukip could have the same effect on issues like Europe and immigration.” Critics would say that Farage’s influence is malign and mean-spirited; he says he is only speaking up for the people.
Populism as a cult is always deeply questionable and destabilising and seemingly has so very much more influence from the more vile aspects of Nationalism than the laudable values of Patriotism, where so very many do not understand the differentiation!
The arrival of Ukip in 1999 at the European parliament was a culture shock to say the least. Ukip brought a penchant for banners, occasional public protests and rare flashes of passion to the sterile European parliament hemicycle. When Tony Blair came to the parliament in Brussels, Farage and his Ukip colleagues taunted him from their seats, festooned with Union Jack flags. The anger flashed across Blair’s eyes: “This is 2005, not 1945. We are not fighting each other any more.”
It was however Daniel Hannan’s erudite speech, excoriating Labour & its crass incompetence, that resonated both across the peoples of EUrope and those in America who have discovered where Europe is!
Farage says a defining moment for him came in 2005. He was drinking champagne in the Brussels press bar to celebrate the Dutch rejecting the EU constitution in a referendum when a German MEP came by and said, “You may have your little celebration tonight but we have 50 different ways to win.” I thought, ‘My God, these people are frightening, they’re fanatical.’”
Though I would incline to the belief that Farage’s more notable Damascine moment was his rejection by the short lived Declan Ganley and the realisation that even when the peoples of France voted against The EU Constitution it made not a wit of difference as the unelected bureaucrats of The EU in complete contempt for democracy or the peoples of The EU merely renamed the document and forced it into being aided by a good measure of corrupt politicians and yet more it had bribed or were too stupid to understand they were being manipulated!
It was at this stage, if my memory serves me right, that Farage increasingly moved from a position of Leave-The-EU towards a policy of appeasment and seeking to reform The EU whilst UKIP invented a series of policies, seemingly left over in David Bannerman’s briefcase from when he betrayed the Tories – a pretence to be a fully fledged political party rather than a campaigning Party with an aim other than self advancement!
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In 2009 Britain returned 13 Ukip MEPs – the party finished second – and Farage became the leader in Brussels of a group of rightwing European parties which shared his desire to throw sand in the wheels of the EU. But with increased success came increased scrutiny of Farage; was he the jolly frontman for a movement with a less savoury side?
Let us not forget that the largest group in Farage’s odious Pan EU EFD political Group are the Italian Lega Nord who are strong advocates of membership of The EU and reformists espousing racial hatred, violence and extremism!
Ukip’s associates: in their own words
Mario Borghezio of Italy’s Northern League, a Ukip ally in Europe
Admires some of mass-murderer Anders Breivik’s ‘excellent’ ideas
Ján Slota, leader of Ukip’s Slovak allies in Europe
Suggested dealing with Slovakia’s Roma with a ‘long whip in a small yard’
Godfrey Bloom, Ukip MEP
‘No employer with a brain would employ a young, single, free woman’
Ukip describes itself as a “democratic libertarian party”
Yet UKIP leadership show a singular misunderstanding of the meaning of Libertarian being inclined, it would seem, mor to the concept of libertine!
opposed to discrimination of any kind,
Yet Farage, Bloom & UKIP themselves have been found guilty of discrimination by a British Court of Law and Bloom has been censured and/or fined for his anti homosexual stance and anti German racism by The EU Parliament!
but it is part of the Europe of Freedom and Democracy group that includes the Italian Northern League, some of whose members have expressed sympathy with the extreme racist views of Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik.
The Northern League’s Mario Borghezio declared in a radio interview that Breivik had “excellent” ideas, remarks which Farage condemned.
To condemn is somewhat meaningless from a so called leader, when he took absolutely zero action – just lip service to populism that totally betrayed the principles of almost all UKIP members!
Meanwhile Ján Slota, leader of the Slovak National Party, Ukip’s Slovak allies, has railed against his country’s Hungarian minority as a “tumour” and suggested dealing with Roma with a “long whip in a small yard”.
Farage rejects forcefully any suggestion his party is racist and points out that it does not allow any former BNP members to join (a proscription that is not applied by other mainstream British parties). This ban is on one level a defensive measure: Ukip fears that the shambolic BNP will try to reassemble under the Ukip banner through a policy of entryism.
Again populism of its lowest form and clearly for gain even inventing groups to hate who travel on the same Leave-The-EU track which UKIP members follow whilst UKIP leadership seem to have ameliorated their position as reformists for expediency and income!
Ukip’s members are at times famously politically incorrect, some would say misogynist. Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom once quipped that “no employer with a brain in the right place would employ a young, single, free woman”, while Marta Andreasen (the party’s only woman MEP) last month defected to the Tories claiming Farage was “an anti-woman Stalinist dictator”.
Let us not forget UKIP’s female vanguard was headed up by Nikki Sinclaire MEP who had quit UKIP over its support of racism, dishonesty and corruption whilst Marta Andreasen was still happily wallowing in the gains she had made by supporting Nigel Farage and as his placement!
Having failed to get a place in the Tories and various other parties Andreasen was eventually manipulated into position as a UKIP MEP by Farage!
Farage chuckles at the idea that he does not like women. In 2006 he drunkenly suspended his hostility to the EU’s open borders policy to accept an invitation for a late-night drink from a “sleek and seductive” 25-year-old Latvian called Lita.
Lita told the News of the World that Farage was something of a stud and that they had had sex seven times before he fell asleep, “snoring like a horse”. Farage, in his memoirs, Flying Free, claims he was too drunk to perform, although he concedes the snoring. “Lita wasn’t screwed. I was.” He was in “fearful trouble” with Kirsten, but the master of unlikely escapes survived with his marriage intact.
This incident was probably THE greatest display of just how fragile is leadership of a cult and how little one can trust ones associates protestations of friendship in politics.
Not one single solitary member of Farage’s clique nor member of his party stepped forward to give one iota of support to him when he was exposed as consorting with this prostitute, who sold her story to the media.
I well recall the incident as I was THE ONLY individual who stepped forward in his defence and published a detailed rebuttal of the claims of the whore who had clearly invented the lurid details selling her body & reputation for a sum of around £15K.
One can only commiserate with Kirsten who has stood by him in this instance and others!
Polling shows Ukip’s abrasive message – anti-immigration, anti-Europe, anti-wind farms – appeals more to men than to women, but Farage angrily rejects suggestions that his party is an expression of the male midlife crisis: a party yearning for the past and railing against uncontrollable external forces.
For many UKIP is clearly based upon a fear of change viewing the past with rose tinted glasses. Some vote for UKIP out of xenophobia but it is my belief that very few of the votes for UKIP are actually for UKIP and rather using UKIP to register a protest against the two main parties that have formed our government in Britain in one form or another as the ‘establishment’ parties.
The selection of Diane James as Ukip’s candidate in Eastleigh is hailed by Farage as evidence that the party is broadening its base, and Farage describes as “moronic” the portrayal of his party as a bunch of be-blazered men drinking in the 19th hole. “Actually we’re picking up quite a lot of support from cool, trendy youngsters, who view Europe as an anachronism,” he says.
UKIP has failed to show the benefits of leaving the EU having banged on for so very long showing all the evils of tyhe EU. UKIP has in fact failed to convince and explain just how arcane is the concept of forming a super state behemoth in a global and increasingly agile world!
The party has seen questions raised about its funding arrangements. Some of his MEPs have run into trouble for expenses irregularities: indeed, a lot of Ukip’s money comes from the legitimate expenses payable to its dozen MEPs. Farage said in 2009 he reckoned he had received “pushing £2m” from the taxpayer over the previous decade. Farage also runs an office in London from the headquarters of the European Commission – ironically Margaret Thatcher’s former HQ in Smith Square – joking that he “takes the devil’s money to do the Lord’s work”.
Ukip was almost ruined after it received a £367,000 “impermissible” donation from former bookmaker Alan Bown – “honest Al” as Farage calls him – after it transpired that he was not on the electoral register when he handed over the cash. Only an appeal to the Supreme Court in 2010 spared the party from having to pay the money back.
The most damaging aspect of this incident was not the possibility of refund and the need to have the money re-donated via legal channels, a process UKIP had historically used when it was found a donor was a resident of the West Indies!
The damaging aspect for UKIP were, in my opinion, the costs UKIP incurred and the exposure of their policy of misleading British authorities and clear contempt for British laws and British Courts.
The party received donations of £314,000 last year from 66 sources – roughly 2 per cent of the money donated to Cameron’s Conservatives – including from Lord Pearson, a former Ukip leader and insurance man.
Stuart Wheeler, founder of the spread betting company IG Index, has also bankrolled the party. It has just nine staff in its central operation.
Ukip’s recent success – it is regularly scoring 10 per cent in national opinion polls – has brought new pressure to bear on Farage. A party that attracted eccentrics and the politically incorrect is now starting to lay down the law to those who bring the party into disrepute.
Let us not forget that consistently Farage’s UKIP do not reflect in votes the results that are attributed to the party by polls!
©AFPSpeaking in France last year.
On his home turf, the ‘media-savvy’ Farage likes to hold press briefings in pubs
Andreasen, who quit Ukip in a dispute over candidate selection, claims Farage is “desperate to control things” and surrounds himself with yes men, adding: “Either he gets what he wants or you’re out.” Farage has shrugged off the attacks, noting that Andreasen, a former EU chief accountant, has made a habit of acrimonious departures from various organisations.
Let us not forget it was the contol over candidate selection practiced by Farage that had gained Andreasen her position as an MEP in thwe first place! The ethics of exploiting corruption to one’s advantage yet renouncing it when it was likely to go against one must be considered a reprehensible lack of ethics, which is unsurprising from the dishonest and self serving Andreasen.
The party has acted to remove a local Ukip chairman for waging “a war against homosexuals” and, more recently, the leader of the party’s youth wing for saying he backed gay marriage and wanted to legalise drugs in breach of party policy. As it grows, the party’s constitutional commitment to “libertarianism” seems to be waning.
For a party claiming to be Libertarian one must question the move to authoritarian centralised power in one man’s hands.
“I don’t want us all to agree,” says Farage. “But here’s my problem: on the one hand I want us to take a traditional, liberal approach to politics and debate where we do feel free to say what we think, but on the other I can’t have people bringing the whole thing into disrepute.”
Double standards seem to be the order of the day with the dishonesty and criminal behaviour of such as Mick McGough or the verdict of guilty leading to the enforced repayment of over £30,000 purloined from the public purse by Derek Clark or the odious behaviour of Godfrey Bloom and I quote from an entry of today on UKIP controlled Forum where lies promoted by UKIP supporters are all too frequently endorsed whilst the truth is challenged and those who provide it are censured or abused if presenting facts that expose corruption within UKIP!
QUOTE one extraxt from one of the longer standing UKIP members, a past branch chairman of some standing:
Mr Pain says that the charges against Mr Ellwood were disciplinary ones, and it were those which led to his dismissal. Quite ludicrous. Mr Ramsome chose to name UKIP in a drink-drive matter which had nothing whatever to do with his UKIP work. No disciplinary procedures followed. Mr Bloom was banned from a Brussels hotel for urinating in the foyers plant pot. The same gentleman’s protestations about disappointing service in a brothel was, likewise, not deemed a disciplinary matter. When did misconduct ever result in disciplinary action for any senior or professiojnal member? Mr Ellwood’s findings which showed about ninety percent of bank statement deposits over a three year period, had been converted into cash. It was this which prompted immediate action against him. All else is sheer sophistry.
Campbell Bannerman says that as Ukip becomes more like other political parties, Farage will struggle because “he doesn’t like policy, he doesn’t like detail”. But Farage rejects the idea that he is some kind of dictator. “I wish I was more of one really,” he says. “I don’t think I’m as tough as I ought to be.”
David Bannerman is a poor source when considering detail, facts or integrity as he has so often sought to pass himself off as some sort of nephew of a British PM from before WWI! Though in this instance I agree his analysis!
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Farage acknowledges that the party is experiencing growing pains. He says there is a “lot of catching up to do” as Ukip tries to match its threadbare central organisation with its burgeoning national support, but says he has talented people around him – like Stuart Wheeler and Steve Crowther, the party chairman – to handle the day-to-day running of the party. He focuses on the “politics, media and helping with fundraising”.
To date Crowther would seem to be nothing more than a Farage placement puppet of little political ability, exp[erience or merit and clearly has introduced not one iota of professionalism of note.
Stuart Wheeler on the other hand has been the antithesis of professional in ethical terms – displaying a total, if sensible, lack of trust in UKIP’s, structure as in return for his support he insisted on being Treasurer! A position he took on with no concept of responsibility or ethics as he refused to accept the responsibilities of any treasurer of erthical stance stating he refused to consider the clear lack of integrity of the party he took over!
Just where are the talented people Farage speaks of for certainly there are no signs of independent competence and Farage controls the party from the center even having enacted diktat that permits only himself to select and control staff placement and the listings for candidates.
There are certainly plenty of potential problems ahead if Ukip continues to grow, but those problems are for the future. For David Cameron and Britain’s other mainstream politicians, Farage poses a clear and present danger.
Surely the facts show that the influence is directionless and dependent on just one man – surely an intolerably fragile state for any situation and hardly a model worthy of being called a party of consequence.
The indespensible man is, in this case, UKIP’s only media performer, spokesman or individual of consequence – hardly a model worth investing in in any commercial terms and less so in terms of reliability for these United Kingdoms!
With Sophie Raworth on The Andrew Marr Show, March 3
The challenge is to work out what the danger is. Pollsters analysing Ukip’s surge from 3.5 per cent in Eastleigh in 2010 to 28 per cent this month – or indeed its national ascendancy – tend to agree on one thing: it has relatively little to do with the public’s hostility to Europe, an issue which never makes the top 10 of their daily concerns.
UKIP has patently failed to educate the British public or make a clear case to Leave-The-EU and as every commentator seems to agree UKIP does not gain votes based on a stance of Leave-The-EU or even on its own proclaimed policies but rather as the dustbin of the protest votes.
Lord Ashcroft, the Conservative business tycoon and pollster, has urged Cameron to keep calm and not pander to the Farage agenda. He argues that voters in Eastleigh know the difference between a by-election protest and the choice of a government in a general election.
Ashcroft expects Ukip to fade in the 2015 poll (when Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system discriminates against smaller parties), just as it did in the 2005 and 2010 elections.
There is every reason to expect Lord Ashcrodt is right as track record has shown since UKIP’s showing in real domestic elections has to date proved consistently risible as it tries to forge ahe4ad as a one man band centrally controlled with little or no meaningful infrastructure or even management ability. Just look at the calliber of UKIP’s NEC!
In an extensive piece of research, Ashcroft says Farage and his party appeal because of their general outlook. “Certainly, those who are attracted to Ukip are more preoccupied than most with immigration, and will occasionally complain about Britain’s contribution to the EU or the international aid budget,” he wrote.
Clearly he is right and UKIP has lost focus, assuming it ever really had any!
“But these are often part of a greater dissatisfaction with the way they see things going in Britain: schools, they say, can’t hold Nativity plays or harvest festivals any more; you can’t fly a flag of St George any more; you can’t call Christmas Christmas any more; you won’t be promoted in the police force unless you’re from a minority; you can’t wear an England shirt on the bus; you won’t get social housing unless you’re an immigrant; you can’t speak up about these things because you’ll be called a racist; you can’t even smack your children.”
Few of which are factually accurate but cleverly exagerate, generalise and play on prejudice and fear – To get votes!!!!
Ashcroft concluded after Eastleigh that Cameron could best tackle Farage’s insurgency by proving that a mainstream Tory government could improve the quality of people’s day-to-day lives. “Our task is not to become more like Ukip, the party of easy answers, but to be the party of government that people want to vote for.”
One is tempted to say ‘No sh*t Sherlock’ but isn’t that what Governments are charged to do in the execution of their duty yet more and more we see politicians acting in their personal interests in pursuit of nothing more than power or in some cases merely gain!
Cameron’s problem is that many Tory MPs can see their chances of election victory in 2015 disappearing and are pushing him to the right – partly for self-serving reasons – to try to neutralise the Ukip threat.
Tory and Labour nerves could be shredded come next year if – as Farage hopes – Ukip win the 2014 European elections, only a year before the next general election. Many at Westminster now believe it is only a matter of time before Labour and the Liberal Democrats are forced to match Cameron’s promise of an EU referendum.
The result of Nikki Sinclaire’s Team effort which has already delivered 250,000 valid signatures to the UK Parliament, in her petition to hold a free, fair and informed referendum on an In / Out basis!
Won’t that make Ukip irrelevant? Farage says that successive hardline Tory leaders have promised to get tough on Europe and each time he has been told his party would be obliterated. “I’ve heard this before,” he says. “Do I trust Cameron? No.”
Does anyone in the face of his Government’s abject failure to implement the swinging cuts that stand any chance or repairing the British economy and the damage done by 13 years of misrule and economic illiteracy of their predecessors!
In any event, Farage’s uncanny ability to articulate Britain’s 21st-century concerns suggests he will remain a big factor in the next election. Some compare him to Alex Salmond, the Scottish Nationalist leader, who has channelled patriotism and a desire to break free from the dominance of “the other”. Farage says he hopes he has some of Salmond’s ability to “speak a language that ordinary folk understand”.
Sadly it is all too apparent that Farage has those same skills and the matching ineptitude in broadening the message beyond dependence on one man and with little or no conscience or competence in creating long term survival of the concept or the party without their presence!
After Eastleigh some Tory MPs believed they had found a chink in Farage’s bulletproof political persona. If Farage had stood, they claimed, he might well have won the seat. “Farage bottled it,” says George Eustice, a Tory MP. Andreasen claims he has grown to love the life in Brussels he professes to despise and does not really want to win a seat at Westminster.
I believe this is over simplistic and Farage is increasingly in a position where he can not afford Westminster exposure on a daily basis nor the loss of income he would experience – possibly realising that his stridency and showmanship may well shine on the EU stage but loses support in domestic elections where more substance is required!
Farage is getting used to the barbs but sounds like he is digging in for the long haul. Can Ukip win seats in the House of Commons? “It’s not guaranteed, because we’ve got a hell of a long way to go. And we’re going to need some senior figures to come and help us do that.”
Let us face facts – UKIP has never come even close to winning a seat in a Domestic General Election where people are inclined to both caution and habit.
But you can never be sure with Farage. After his surprise resignation as Ukip leader in 2009, he was persuaded only with some reluctance to come back to the top job after his brush with death at Hinton-in-the-Hedges.
“If I was honest, on a personal level, all of this has come at a massive sacrifice,” he says, staring into his Italian coffee. “The financial sacrifice has been huge. Many of my colleagues from the late 1980s are now extremely rich people and I don’t mean comfortably off, I mean extremely rich people.”
Many of Farage’s colleagues in the City from the late 1980s are also bankrupt, now in prison or spent in mental and medical terms. Thaty Farage might have progressed to achievement or even wealth seems unlikely based on his actual results in The City whether before he was fired by his French employers or after.
The long string of ‘closed’ companies that follow his track record is worthy of note in this context!
He pauses. “If I’d concentrated on business I would have been a very wealthy man. Do I mind that? No, I chose it. But I think the sacrifice of time, the complete lack of time for family and any sense of normality, that is a sacrifice. I’m not whingeing because I chose it, but it gets a bit wearing. And I did walk away from it once, remember.”
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