Flying Free

by Nigel Farage

  Rivalry is generally healthy but can become asinine compulsion. I have met restaurateurs who seek to put down competitors just down the road, unaware, it seems, that diners, for economic as much as gastronomic reasons, would choose to eat ambrosia every night of the week and that every halfway decent establishment profits from a Michelin star in town. Rick Stein has the right idea. Padstow’s reputation has made fortunes for the Seafood Restaurant’s neighbouring bakery, which makes great pasties. He has even set up a chippy.

  Sked was no Stein. He did not get it.

  He not only resented any popularity which my travels yielded but instantly saw Holmes too as a rival and wrote a libellous letter about him to David Lott. He also had a – to me totally incomprehensible – dislike of the Referendum Party.

  His fears were self-fulfilling. OK, Sked was neither organiser nor populist, but he was a bright guy who really could have remained UKIP’s revered founding father, still explaining the cause to those publications which could understand him, if only he had acknowledged his own failings. He preferred to fight.

  Lott, Holmes and I fought back. The alternative was that UKIP sank slowly but surely into the still and stagnant shallows. It might have done just that if the Skedites had prevailed.

  We organised a meeting in Basingstoke to which we invited all the most successful Referendum Party and UKIP candidates. Sked had proscribed all such association and instantly announced that all UKIP members were bidden to a meeting on the same evening in London.

  At his meeting, Sked effectively declared that Lott, Holmes and I were beyond the pale. His bella figura was gravely threatened when Malcolm Wood arose and told him to applause that he could ill afford to lose Nigel Farage, ‘the best platform speaker that we possess’.

  Down in Basingstoke, we simply made a lot of new friends.

  There was still room for compromise, but Sked went ballistic. He summarily suspended then expelled the lot of us without consultation. Open war was declared.

  Now that intemperate letter from Sked to Lott about Holmes came into play. Holmes, who was by nature vengeful and had money to burn, began legal action against Sked and threw a libel action into the mix. Sked was repeatedly advised not to defend the action. He rejected the advice. Craig Mackinlay, a founder member and a long-standing loyalist, told him that the libel was minimal but unquestionable, but Sked spent £15,000 of precious party funds obtaining precisely the same opinion from counsel.

  I was perhaps still stupider.

  BNP spy Mark Deavin rang. He told me that he had valuable information about Sked which might help me in the battle. It had never been his intention to betray UKIP, he said. He had been the victim of a mugging and, when susceptible, had found solace and support in the BNP. Now he wanted to make it up to me.

  Thumb in bum, mind in neutral, concerned only with winning the battle in hand, I arranged to meet him for lunch at St Katharine Docks. In my defence, that is how little I considered subterfuge necessary. I met him in a public place much frequented by city colleagues and journalists from nearby Wapping. As ever, I hailed a few passing people and casually exchanged greetings as we talked. Deavin remained apologetic and conciliatory but had no new intelligence to convey. I returned to Farage and Co. a little bemused, thinking that I had wasted a lunchtime.

  It was not a waste for the BNP. I had been photographed with Deavin on the street outside the pub, and one of the people hanging around us was proudly identified by them as Tony ‘The Bomber’ Lecomber, a peculiarly malodorous floater who had done time for possession of explosives and for stabbing a Jewish schoolteacher.

  I had been right royally stitched up.

  Sked considered his options. Common sense prevails far less often than is commonly supposed and than it undoubtedly deserves. It fares best, I find, when fighting shoulder to shoulder with force majeure. Then people start inviting common sense in and asking it to give them babies.

  Not to be immodest, Sked was up against 90 per cent of the useful energy and talent in the party at that time. Even those who liked him and admired his intellect conceded that he could not run a piss-up in a brewery. He had to go.

  He penned a last, vitriolic edition of the newsletter, anointed Craig Mackinlay his heir and departed back into the academic hinterland.

  Even then, there were plenty of members who believed that we had struck too soon or too savagely. Graham Booth, John Harvey, Gerard Batten – all regretted the manner of Sked’s departure and thought that he deserved better. John and Gerard even resigned from their posts in protest. All, however, were to be shocked and hurt by the fury which he has subsequently expended on UKIP and on all who remained in the party.

  He has become the lazy journalist’s easiest source of a space-filling story about UKIP. At every election, Sked has re-emerged on air to accuse UKIP of right-wing extremism – he who invited Deavin to the NEC – to reiterate the claim that I have been known to drink too much (moi?), to chastise us for non-attendance at the EU Parliament (though this was our long-stated policy), to quote BNP troublemakers and ‘certain observers’ as to non-existent ‘pacts’ and to urge everyone to vote Tory.

  I suspect that, by appealing, as any democratic political party must, to all and sundry – including, as with any mob, some nutters (welcome if benevolent), ragamuffins and academic duffers (both especially welcome) and downright villains (welcome until so proven and then purged), we had tainted Sked’s lovely, pure, nineteenth-century vision of his League and brought him, to his mind at least, into disrepute amongst his academic peers.

  But a party is not a private club – though many of today’s parties are run as such, and mere supporters are dismissed with sneers as irrelevant cannon-fodder. It is merely an assemblage of people of all backgrounds and intellectual abilities who share certain broad principles.

  We cannot and would not blackball members for expressing their views a little coarsely, for wearing dirty shoes or for failing to grasp precisely what Hans von Essen zu Frankfurt und change at Bremen meant in his seminal paper on European union (1936).

  Broadly speaking, we believe that an individual has the freedom to live her life as she pleases provided that she harms no one else, that she may elect whom she will to speak for her local community and can remove that person from office if he fails to do so, and that local communities should, where practicable, speak and act as a nation in her best interests and with due regard for her culture and environment.

  And that’s it.

  It may seem incredible that it is necessary to assert such a principle in Britain, mother of the free and exemplar for the world’s democracies, but today all the major parties have a different view. They all believe that our laws should be made and our freedoms constrained by a distant, unelected body of people unknown and unaccountable to us and unaware of our particular requirements. These people are self-appointed and regard themselves as masters, not servants. We cannot sack them.

  There are those – the functionaries, the doctrinaire, the natural apparatchiks – who love such government. In denying the citizen choice, it also spares him problems of conscience or individual taste. It wraps him in down, croons lullabies with subsections and tells him not to bother his pretty little head about anything. So long as he abides by the rules, he is in the right. Hence genocides and gulags.

  UKIP, however, attracts the other sort – the bolshie buggers who believe that they should be consulted before thousands are killed in their name, who see no reason why they should not strew their brains on the tarmac if it means that they can feel the wind in their hair or risk ptomaine poisoning in exchange for Colchester’s or Galway’s finest, who consider it their inalienable freedom to cause offence and so accept the freedom of the offended party to bop them on the nose, who believe that they know more than bureaucrats about bringing up their own children and so on.

  Inevitably, some of these will have some very weird notions indeed. So? I once had excellent times with members of the Flat Earth Society. I even count so
me vegetarians and teetotallers amongst my friends.

  To be frank, then, I consider that Sked and much of the metropolitan elite, with particular reference to the BBC, are snobs. They do not like to be associated with those who cannot speak in acronyms and cite obscure papers. They mistrust the accumulated and inherited wisdom of the common man or woman. They believe that those who are a trifle eccentric about the shape of the globe, for example, must be stupid about everything else. They assume that inarticulacy indicates empty-headedness. They assume, in other words, that there is a natural ruling class.

  Anyhow, it is a source of sorrow to me that, since his departure, Sked has engaged in so sad and so interminable a sulk. Democracy means getting your hands dirty and associating with the common herd. The League in its ivory tower could never have won elections.

  We had every intention of doing just that.

  *

  Even now, though Sked had lost, we had not won. Craig Mackinlay could yet have claimed the crown, maintained our banishment and so killed UKIP. We would then have had to start again from scratch with the New Alliance.

  Craig, however, remained loyal to the cause rather than to a faction. He concluded, as we had done, that ‘having got this far, we just had to keep this thing going’. He called an election for the leadership.

  There were a few enthusiasts who suggested even then that I might have stood and stood a chance of winning. It did not even cross my mind.

  First, I was thirty-three years old, with young children and a busy life.

  Second, I was no politician. My idiocy with Deavin had shown that. Even as a businessman, I had only ever been a cheery rails bookie, albeit in a dark suit rather than a loud check, not an industrialist or a Goldsmith-style corporate raider, accustomed to devious dealings and hiring and firing. The experience with Sked had been instructive but harrowing.

  Third, I could not begin to afford such indulgence. I could not at that point have afforded to take on the role as the Tories’ leader, let alone UKIP’s. I was earning a great deal, but every penny was swallowed up by my lifestyle, children’s education and, above all, politics.

  Holmes was the obvious choice. He could not only afford it, but he had ample time and, as it seemed, the businessman’s dispassion, so often wrongly characterised as ‘ruthlessness’, which enabled him to make executive decisions without turning a hair.

  Craig Mackinlay and another founder member, Gerald Roberts, stood for the leadership but were too closely associated with the ancien régime. They stood no chance. Holmes appointed me party chairman with particular responsibility for attracting former Referendum Party members.

  To his credit, Holmes was energetic and an effective fund-raiser. He was like a parody of the eighties businessman, always on the move, permanently barking into his mobile phone.

  It was only later that I discovered that Holmes’s brusque, peremptory manner might also mark a martinet. The difference between Holmes’s style and David Lott’s was hugely instructive. Holmes was an organiser. David was a manager.

  UKIP was all but unknown. We had just pulled ourselves from the brink of annihilation. The coffers were empty and our perceptible prospects poor. Nobody worked for UKIP in hope of wealth or glory. Everyone was therefore a volunteer, motivated by conviction alone, which is why there was a preponderance of retired people in our Regent Street office (supplied by a founder member) and in our regional branches.

  In that these people chose not to vote for the major parties, they were free-thinking and bloody-minded. In that they chose to devote their leisure hours to licking envelopes, setting out chairs, distributing leaflets and so on rather than watching daytime television, they were energetic and determined. These people and these headstrong qualities were our most precious assets.

  David was a great manager because, like Mike Brearley captaining a Botham, he recognised this. In the RAF, after all, he had nurtured the wildness of his wild, headstrong men and women even as he had attempted to keep productive order. All his working life had been spent in maintaining such a balance between battle-readiness and passion and the discipline required by peace.

  Holmes’s style indicated impatience with individuality. It was as though he were running a call-centre rather than a team of eccentric and ardent libertarians. He was even affronted by Mackinlay’s gross presumption in having stood against him in the leadership contest, though there would have been no leadership contest without Mackinlay’s good sense and lack of personal vanity.

  He treated our most indefatigable volunteer at the London office, Tony Stone, like a Dickensian skivvy. ‘I was working all hours,’ says Tony, ‘and Holmes would call whenever he felt like it, demanding to know who had joined and what this person or that had said. Even when I had gone home, he would call, even in the middle of the night. No greeting. No “sorry to bother you, Tony”. Just “I need to know this or that” as though I carried the entire membership list and all the members’ life-stories in my head.’

  In time, I came to see that Holmes was perhaps the only member of the party whose principal motivation was not passion for the cause but his own leadership and amour-propre. This was in large measure my fault. I had seen him from the outset as our saviour. I had swallowed the cliché, very much of that era, of the turbo-charged, go-getting high-flier.

  On reflection, I see that that aggressive image, though it plays well enough in the movies, has precious little to do with management skill or commitment. I suspect that Holmes’s passion was to prove to himself that he still existed and mattered.

  Reared by the notoriously puritanical Plymouth Brethren, from whom, no doubt, though a victim himself, he inherited a mistrust of natural impulse and infantile disorder, he never felt that he belonged at his school where, as a scholar, he was forced to wear a shirt of a different colour from that of ordinary boys. The only time in his life of which he spoke with pleasure was his spell with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.

  He was ideally positioned to note that advertising revenues exceeded production and distribution costs and so to be in the vanguard of the free newspaper market. He was then bought out just weeks before the crash. For all the appearance, then, of being a high-flying, innovative businessman, I think that he was a creature of circumstance who never felt at home amongst schoolboys or on editorial desks, nor was quite certain how he had become a tycoon. Since his early retirement, the highpoints of his life, by his own account, had been daily lunches down at the pub.

  Reports of his abrasive, unsympathetic style began to reach us daily as we geared up for the European elections. These were the first to be decided on the basis of proportional representation. We were enormously hopeful.

  The Referendum Party was proving a rich seam of talent. Dr Richard North and Heather Conyngham, without whose skills in research and organisation the first years in the EU Parliament would have been totally shambolic rather than merely profoundly confusing, came to us from Goldsmith’s team. Norman Tebbit has repeatedly alleged that Heather was working for MI6. All I know is that her dedication and industry over those first years in Brussels did us nothing but good.

  I invited Jeffrey Titford, the Frinton funeral director who had done so well at Harwich, to lunch with Holmes and me at Simpson’s in the Strand. I explained that we had resolved that, instead of boycotting any seats which we might win at the election as per Sked’s plan, we would take them up and use them to investigate an institution whose members were unknown and whose structure and workings were a well-concealed mystery to the British public.

  Jeffrey had swallowed the myth that withdrawal from the EU was practically impossible. We pointed out that, on the contrary, the EU needed Britain far more than vice versa and that we had a cumulative trade deficit of £30 million a day in relation to the EU. We expatiated on the practicality of Britain’s withdrawal. We dreamed, then, in silence for a few minutes. Jeffrey became enthused. He joined the party and expressed an interest in a more active role.

  I liked Jeffrey. His st
yle and personality were the antitheses of mine. He was quiet, meticulous, reassuring, determined. We worked well together.

  And suddenly, astonishingly, the turning-point was upon us. The Labour MEP for South Yorkshire resigned. Michael Holmes was convinced that we were not ready to fight the resultant by-election, but David Lott, John Whittaker and I disagreed. John Whittaker even put up the £1,000 deposit out of his own pocket. David moved his horse-box to Doncaster. We had fastened on the pound as the symbol of British autonomy no less than as a means to it. Our slogan was ‘Keep the £. Vote UKIP’.

  It struck home to the extent that the Conservatives nicked it (all save the ‘UKIP’ bit) for themselves within months.

  Peter Davies, our candidate, won 13,380 votes. The Conservatives had 21,085, the Lib Dems 22,051. There had never been the slightest question as to who would win. This was Labour territory, and Linda McAven was returned with over 62,000 votes, but we, in an inhospitable environment, were in an honourable fourth place which, if a similar pattern were seen about the country, would win us seats in Brussels next year.

  I worked flat out, confining my travels now to home ground – the south-east. I was still running my company by day, then rushing off to the endless village halls throughout the region. Jeffrey worked his region with a vigour incredible in one who had retired nine years before. Graham Booth took charge of the south-west in his purple and gold double-decker. Michael Holmes rode on his coat-tails as a candidate for the south-west, but, as leader, claimed the leading spot on the closed list. Graham graciously deferred.

  At the same time, I was chairman, running the entire national campaign. David Lott, on whom I had come to depend for logistics, had bought a motor-home and, no doubt with a sigh of relief, had set off to the States for a year-long tour, hoping at last to enjoy his long-expected and well-earned retirement. I did my best to develop a telesales department. I dealt with stickers and banners and the demand, growing daily, for leaflets and membership forms.