by Nigel Farage
The first day of conference is the one intended for public consumption. The media and the provincial members with no interest in internal politics are there in force. Richard, Earl of Bradford, who had lately defected to us from the Tories, made a memorable speech. He compared himself with Michael Portillo, declaring, ‘After all these years, I am coming out! Ladies and Gentlemen, I am UKIP!’ Jeffrey and I also rallied the troops and thanked them for their efforts.
Amazingly, we enjoyed one minute fifty-two seconds of coverage on the national evening news. That was another watershed.
Holmes’s announcement would come on the morrow, when crowds were smaller and party business and specific policy would be dealt with. The media headed back home that night, duty done. So did all the loyal members who had just come along for the day to lend their support.
The following morning, Holmes struck.
We had never thought that he would go back on his word. We were totally unprepared. He, however, had carefully prepared his ground.
He swept aside the entire day’s agenda and insisted that the conference be deemed an EG M. This was promptly agreed with a lot of bemused shrugging and a show of hands.
I was in the chair but, as one of the three MEPs – and one with strong views on the subject – I at once surrendered it. Hugh Meechan volunteered to take it in my stead.
Holmes told the assembled faithful that yes, he had agreed to resign, but only under undue psychological pressure. He therefore proposed a vote of no confidence in the NEC, insisting that he had been illegally usurped and was still the constitutional leader.
Here Holmes pulled a distinctly fast one. At the time of the European elections, he had asked that NEC members should stay in office rather than standing for re-election for fear that the instability and possible controversy surrounding an internal election might adversely affect our prospects in the broader poll. Now he claimed that, in consequence, they no longer had voting rights and had no right to oust their duly elected leader. Oh, and by the way, the NEC had been infiltrated, root and branch, by the BNP – a claim subsequently proved to be wholly without foundation, but hey, what attack upon UKIP would be complete without that weary lie?
By now, the heckling was so loud that Hugh Meechan was shouting to be heard. Holmes, whose supporters had been forewarned, was confirmed as leader by 236 votes to 35 with fifty-five members, including myself, abstaining. The fact that Holmes’s supporters were there in force whilst most other members had happily gone home or were still enjoying black pudding or one another in their Travelodges meant that this was anything but an EGM.
Publicly I kept my head down. This was partly a politician’s self-interest, partly a recognition that self-interest and the interests of the party were, in this instance, one and the same. Unity was paramount. When Sked was driven out, it had still been possible to consider the formation of the New Alliance party. Now we had gone too far and achieved too much to have the party riven from top to bottom. UKIP must be preserved, and, whoever won this unseemly tussle, I wanted Jeffrey, David Lott and myself to be there to lead it onward and the bulk of our loyal supporters with us on the journey.
Holmes had behaved shoddily, but we were colleagues for now and, though I was aware that he must not continue as leader and I was in daily – often hourly – contact with the ‘rebels’, I could not declare for them without forcing every member of the party into one camp or another. UKIP must go on unified, and I was confident that the all-important rank and file of the party-branches would at length withdraw their support from Holmes without prompting.
The rebel faction, though justified, was for now anarchic and uncontrolled. My first fear was that the party’s database might be abused, in which case members would be betrayed and would never vote for UKIP again. Back in London the following morning, I sent someone round to Regent Street to secure the computers and filing-cabinets. Tony Scholefield had already been there, using his authority as party secretary, to have the locks changed. As party chairman, I outranked him. I had the doors forced and the locks changed again, and all the sensitive files shifted down to Salisbury where Holmes guarded them.
Holmes branded everyone in the party who questioned his actions an ‘extremist’. He conducted a postal poll which, he claimed, showed 90 per cent support for him – not exactly surprising since no one who did not support him would pay for an envelope and a stamp. Craig Mackinlay had Holmes’s bank account frozen. Holmes retaliated by attempting to bring an injunction against the NEC claiming that they were ‘time-barred’ and giving them just twenty-four hours to prepare a defence.
Although Holmes engaged a QC, the judge-in-chambers decided that the punitive emergency suit, of a type commonly used to prevent gross abuse of copyright, was wholly inappropriate to these complex circumstances. He made it clear that he was displeased with such abuse of process. Craig demanded costs for the defence of a frivolous suit. Holmes, at last getting the message, settled out of court before the claim could go further.
Now was the time for us to move.
Jeffrey and I nailed our colours to the mast by writing a letter in which we stated that we had no faith in Holmes and demanded that he step down. David Lott, John Harvey and I gave the go-ahead to the required twenty-five branch chairmen and women to call a genuine EGM to sort out the unholy mess.
It was held at Westminster Central Hall on 22 January 2000. Some 900 members attended. Norris McWhirter vainly attempted to maintain control.
The crowd roared and wept and shook fists and sheaves of papers. Every speaker was shouted down. I have never, before or since, attended a meeting so constantly close to eruption into violence. One member of the audience suffered a fatal heart attack.
A splinter group under the influence of Rowan Atkinson’s brother Rodney – a man obsessed with the notion of the EU as a Nazi plot who had many avid followers in Newcastle and in Oxford – made most of the noise. Poor Norris, himself heavily under Atkinson’s influence, nonetheless called for order. Disgusted members were standing, many of them in tears at seeing all their hard work undone by this battle, and storming out.
I too was by now close to tears. Everything for which I had fought and worked was being ripped apart by self-seeking factionalism and idiotic pride. The people now walking out, maybe forever, they mattered. The ordinary advocates of decency and freedom who had sacrificed a precious day off to come up here from Suffolk, Devon, Yorkshire … they mattered, not the vainglorious morons up there squabbling for position and power.
I felt guilty too. Maybe I could have intervened sooner and prevented this. Maybe I had tried to be too clever in my bid to force Holmes and Atkinson to show their hands against the will of the members so that UKIP would not drift asunder. Because now UKIP was falling to pieces before my eyes.
It has entered UKIP legend – the way that I leaped up onto the stage and imperiously took control. Hmm.
I leaped onto that stage in desperation. If I commanded attention, it was because I howled for calm as if I had seen my own children preoccupied by squabbling as the car rolled towards the cliff-edge rather than grabbing for the handbrake. It was not the light of authority in my eyes as I yelled ‘Enough!’ and ‘Stop!’ It was the glint of fury from behind a film of tears.
It worked.
Maybe it was because so many of them knew me from my travels. Maybe it was because they were curious as to what the weird, flashy ‘boy’ who had been silent for so long actually thought of the betrayal. I like to think that it was because they had been longing to hear a voice as sincere as theirs and that sheer passion carried the day.
I cannot say that silence fell. Silence lurched at first. Silence staggered. Silence slumped as I spoke. Then silence fell and I spoke into echoes.
Holmes was overwhelmingly ordered by the party to stand down.
Under the list system, an MEP who changes allegiance cannot be removed, even though it was his party not he who was elected. We begged then tried to bully Holmes to do the honourab
le thing and to leave the seat in Brussels for one who represented the views of those who had elected him. He refused.
He did not need the money and it afforded him no real power, but he had known what it is to be an MEP. He did not wish to lose it. He remained there, sitting on his own amongst the unattached, until at last, in 2002, after a heart attack and a stroke, he yielded his seat to Graham Booth, the man who had won it for him.
In retrospect, I regret my provident temporising. I should, I think, have taken a stand and given a lead sooner. At the time, all that mattered to me was the unity and so the survival of the party.
Whatever my feelings towards Holmes and his towards me at the time and since, he has never once spoken out against Jeffrey, me or UKIP. Temperaments may have clashed and personal loyalties foundered, but, in our very different ways, we have remained united in the cause.
Of course it was not all over. It never is. Even in a work of fiction, those two words, ‘The End’, are the biggest lie of all.
There had to be a leadership election. I think that I really might have won that one, but now was a time for healing, and Jeffrey was emollient where I was abrasive.
Although Jeffrey too had openly demanded Holmes’s removal, I was perceived with some justice as the man who had brought him down.
I was also aware that, after being leader, there was nowhere to go save down. William Hague, the best speaker and the most gifted man in his party, was then leading the Tories. He was just three years my senior, and his destiny was already obvious to me.
So Jeffrey stood and, after a fierce competition with Rodney Atkinson and the timely release of a letter written by Christopher Booker of the Sunday Telegraph and his colleague Bill Jamieson, now executive editor of the Scotsman, in which they declared that they could not support the party under Atkinson, won the day by a mere 0.4 per cent.
Atkinson vanished off the face of the earth, accusing me of ‘dirty tricks’ and the party, of course, of ‘extremism’, nature unspecified. Holmes’s supporters faded away or clambered back on board.
And things settled down.
It is not realpolitik. It was not engineered. The lesson of history, however, seems to be that every political party needs a purge, just as many a habitat needs the cleansing but doubtless painful effects of fire. This painful, spontaneous episode saw the party strengthened and those who would place their own convictions, fancies or personal ambitions above the interests of the party and the central cause burned up to make room for new, healthy shoots.
With the assistance of Richard North and Heather Conyngham, Jeffrey and I punched well above our weight in the EU Parliament but increasingly returned to our principal mission – spreading the word in the UK. The party was small and vulnerable. We nursed it at home. We were back in the pubs and the village halls. New branches opened. Established ones grew.
But there is one game in which, more than any other, the decks are marked and the dice loaded against a small party. The media may be critical of the established parties, but they are cosy with them. They too are of the establishment. The media are overwhelmingly liberal but therefore astonishingly illiberal when a new voice is heard in the land.
We made our mistakes, of course, and sometimes deserved media scorn, but, for several years, that scorn was reflex. We simply did not belong.
8
‘MEDIA SAVVY’
In October, 2009, I was ranked No. 41 in a list of the 100 most powerful right-wingers in Britain. I am unsure about the ‘right winger’ bit, preferring to consider myself a Whig, but, if individualism, advocacy of capitalism (which always seems to me a little bit like advocacy of overall wetness in water) and concern for the preservation of established institutions be ‘right wing’, I plead guilty. The principal reason given for my purported potency, however, was my ‘media savvy’.
My what?
My media savvy consists in enjoying a drink or several with journalists and broadcasters, recognising that they, like me, have a tough job to do, speaking my mind and, I hope, being mildly entertaining.
But then, I don’t suppose that anyone in politics has tried that technique in quite a while.
When I started out, I had no experience of the media whatever. I have had no training. Despite growing evidence that we were going to win seats in 1999, the national media – and particularly the BBC – tried very hard to pretend that UKIP did not exist. There was a profile in the Telegraph with a rather fetching picture of me in a cream suit, and that was about it.
This had been the case for the entire Eurosceptic movement for years. We were simply ignored.
Of course every small party will develop paranoia and accuse the establishment of censorship, but independent analysis after the election demonstrated the extent of the BBC’s Europhilia. Stories about Europe concentrated exclusively on the largely fictional split in the Tory party. Labour, it seemed, had no Eurosceptics at all. A party called the Pro-Euro Conservatives of whom no one has ever heard since received more coverage in that campaign than UKIP.
On the Record conducted interviews only with dedicated servants of the European project – Margaret Beckett, Paddy Ashdown, Jack Cunningham, Sir Leon Brittan (by then a European Commissioner) and Romano Prodi (who had nothing to do with the election at all). Their sole concession to the Eurosceptics was an interview with William Hague – he of ‘in Europe but not run by Europe’ infamy.
The BBC is meant, as a public service broadcaster, to retain impartiality. It signally failed in that obligation here. It began to be known as the ‘Brussels Broadcasting Corporation’.
Even this was not entirely fair, because Brussels thinks that its doings are of paramount importance, whereas the British media like to ignore European elections then bemoan the fact that voter turnout has dropped yet again. The BBC News department afforded 2.5 per cent of its time to the forthcoming poll.
All in all, in that campaign UKIP received 3½ minutes of national coverage out of a total of 624 hours, and yet we won 7 per cent of the nation’s votes. Speculation is bootless, but I hazard that, had we received even 5 per cent of the coverage, we might have won a much larger share of the poll.
Radio 4’s Today programme is possibly the most influential and best-researched current affairs programme of the lot, and, when I am asked with which broadcaster I best like to work, I unhesitatingly name John Humphrys, who puts me on my mettle like no other and draws out the best and worst in his interviewees.
Being grilled by him is like donning white tie and tails for a party. Suddenly the back straightens, the vowels become purer, the consonants crisper and the mind sharper. And, of course, any defects in deportment or thickening about the intellectual waist become more apparent. It is uncomfortable. It is daunting. It is infinitely more fun than ‘smart casual’.
I did not approve of him, however, on my first appearance on the programme – my first ever interview on national radio.
It had been arranged that a car would pick me up at 5.30 in the morning to drive me to the London studio. At the last minute, however, I received a call from the BBC. The car could not make it, but no matter. A telephone interview would suit them just fine. David Lott and I sat waiting nervously in my kitchen. The phone rang at 6.55. I was almost immediately on air.
‘So, Mr Farage,’ said Humphrys, ‘I have here a copy of Spearhead, the BNP’s magazine. You are singled out for particular praise. What’s it like to have friends like that?’
How do you answer a question like that without being on the defensive and so appearing to have something to hide? I had thought journalists wise to ‘When did you stop beating you wife?’ stories, but no. It still makes good copy.
Nothing which I had ever said or written indicated sympathy with the BNP or its so-called policies. If a badger-baiting or Europhiliac magazine had made me its playmate of the month or dish of the day, would the BBC therefore have concluded that I must share their perversions? A lazy researcher had simply heard malicious gossip, noted that we had �
�UK’ in our name as the BNP had ‘British’ in theirs and, had, in effect, done the BNP’s work for them.
But it was I, not the lazy researcher, who had to suffer.
I spent those 3½ minutes on the ropes.
The BBC may barely have noticed our existence or the threat which we posed, but the dirty tricks departments of other parties were plainly rather more alert. On the Friday before the election, I received a call from my friend Nick Jones, the BBC’s political correspondent who was in the end to lose his position for being ‘off message’. He was invariably on the side of those who challenged authority, no matter what their political affiliations.
Nick felt it only fair to give me notice that tomorrow’s Times was to run a piece by Andrew Pierce about UKIP’s ‘links’ with the BNP and that Francis Maude of the Tory Party had already indicated his willingness to comment on air.
It was a terrifying moment. We had waited and worked for so long for this moment, and now, I supposed, some idiotic branch chairman was about to reveal that he and his mates also happened to run the Budleigh Salterton chapter of the Ku Klux Klan or something.
Andrew Pierce rang. It was nothing so dramatic, but it might at the time have been still more destructive. Sked had been singing a favourite tune, now well known to be inspired by injured amour-propre but then still novel. He spoke of Deavin – his protégé, but he preferred to recall my later lunch with the man. He alleged that I had in conversation referred to ‘nig-nogs’. The paper had the picture of me with Deavin and Lecomber.
I did something which I have never done before, something which was against my nature. I called the famous libel solicitors Carter-Ruck and appealed for the protection of the law against allegations without substance.
