by Nigel Farage
In 2003, I met Alan Bown, an enormously canny former bookmaker who in manner and appearance matched the stereotype of his profession – the wedge of cash, the loud houndstooth jacket with leather patches at the elbows – who had just declared his wish to donate £50,000 to the party.
This is no flash Harry. He has since given us so much more, not merely in money but in practical and intelligent advice. He recognises the necessity for UKIP to be united and to communicate efficiently, internally and externally. It was thanks to his generosity that our telesales agency was set up in an old bookmakers’ shop in Ashford, Kent. In time, seven other call centres about the country were to be set up. He pointed out that standard political leaflets were routinely chucked away at election time. He suggested glossy cards instead. Again, he paid for the extra cost.
We were taking expert advice now in the dark arts of electioneering, where formerly we had relied solely on enthusiasm and goodwill, in which we were richer than ever thanks to the party’s growth under Roger’s temperate leadership. The nine million glossy cards distributed by party members carried Dick Morris’s message, loud and clear: ‘Say NO to the European Union.’
Thanks to Alan, a further £800,000 from Paul Sykes and innumerable smaller donations, we had around £2 million to spend on disseminating the message. We had billboards all round the country. Heather Conyngham and David Lott were once more doing what they do so supremely well – calmly commanding and co-ordinating operations. It still wasn’t enough.
Dick Morris had told us that it was now or never for UKIP. We went for broke. Although the public were interested, the media persisted in large measure in ignoring us. We needed commercial billboards. David Lott had some big decisions to make. With my encouragement and support, he booked billboards, estate agents’ boards for roadside and railside fields and high-quality election material. At one point, we were in the hole to the tune of some £450,000 over budget. It was an enormous risk. Today, I am sure, the Electoral Commission would close us down for taking it. Roger Knapman knew nothing of the situation. We were electioneering on a wing and a large number of fervent prayers.
I pillaged the branches’ bank accounts. I damned nearly ordered backs of chairs and sofas searched for loose change. Candidates raided their savings, pensioners their piggy-banks…
As if fortuitous meetings on cruise-ships had not been enough, a new phenomenon occurred in mid-April and a new performer shimmied onto the scene. This time, it was far from a rough-and-ready crank or buzzing gadfly. It was a slick, polished-to-dazzling dragonfly.
It was a Kilroy.
11
SILKY SKILLS
There are many – and as time goes by, there will be many, many more – who have never heard of Robert Kilroy-Silk. In 2004, however, his perma-tan, orange and glossy as a duck in a Gerrard Street window, his lychee-flesh hair and his long, long fingers which caressed the air, one another and every interlocutor of whatever age or gender, were known throughout Britain.
The son of a Royal Navy stoker who had been killed in the war, Kilroy (as he was generally known) had risen, if that is the word, via academe to be Labour MP for Ormskirk from 1974 to 1986. UKIP has attracted and welcomed members from all quarters of the political spectrum, but Kilroy’s dirigiste attitude towards politics in those days – as a means of instructing and coercing the public rather than of serving and representing them – was then the antithesis of all for which we stood.
‘Politics’, he said then, was all about ‘compromises and bargains’ and aiming for ‘spurious consensus’, and the function of government was ‘to impose its values on society. Its role is creative: to cast, so far as it is able, society in its image.’
Classic doctrinaire, undemocratic left-wing stuff – the people as tools of the state rather than vice versa, smoke and mirrors and social engineering as instruments of government.
Nonetheless, Kilroy’s voting record on all matters relating to the European project was consistently good, and he frequently broke the Labour line. On resigning from politics in 1986, he immediately became compere of a BBC daytime show called Day to Day which later metamorphosed into Kilroy.
This was one of those patronising ‘You may be idiots and freaks but your opinions matter’ shows on which people with an urge to be on television relate their intimate stories of sex, spots and social privation to an invited audience.
‘Raped a Midget? Damaged by Spoons? Thought No Meant Yes? Bisexual Neighbours? Brought up by Badgers? Suspect That You May Die? Too Fat to Walk? Living in a Cello? Plagued by Big Game?’ OK. These are parodies on a witty website of the questions regularly asked by Kilroy to introduce his show, but they are terrifyingly close to the reality.
Offscreen, Kilroy has a habit of hitting people of whom he disapproves and is renowned in television circles as a bully when crossed. ‘I have never worked for anybody who was such a bully,’ said an ex-producer quoted in the Independent, ‘…If guests deviated from what they were expected to say, he would go absolutely nuts. He would shriek, and shriek, and shriek. The air was blue. “You haven’t given me a fucking programme…” He was nastier to men than women. You didn’t want to go into the production meeting because you knew you were going to be publicly humiliated.’
On camera, however, he spent the bulk of this programme with his arm around sufferers from spoon-damage or whatever, sympathetically coaxing out their tales, and only occasionally becoming ferociously censorious on behalf of straight dealing and family values.
This was in keeping with his private life. He was not only married. He was quite the most married man whom I have ever met. His wife Jan, whom he had met when at grammar school, accompanied him everywhere short of – but only barely short of – the gents’ loos. How much this had to do with occasional but persistent tabloid headlines about an unacknowledged child by a mistress and alleged advances to fans and colleagues, I don’t know.
Kilroy’s television fame bought him a stab at a game-show – the notorious Shafted, which ran for just three classic appalling episodes – and a column in the Sunday Express.
In December of the previous year, he had been on holiday in his Spanish villa when his secretary mistakenly filed a column which had, in fact, already been published earlier in the year. Headlined ‘We Owe Arabs Nothing’, it was not exactly temperate or scholarly, but it catered, as he no doubt thought, to popular distaste for Islamic fundamentalists.
Unfortunately, Kilroy’s style is rather … inclusive. He probably had not meant in an earlier article that Ireland was ‘a country peopled by peasants, priests and pixies’ but only that, according to weary stereotypes and Finian’s Rainbow, it might be thought so.
So, when he referred to Arabs in general as ‘barbarous … suicide-bombers, limb-amputators, women-repressors’ and declared, ‘Few of them make much contribution to the welfare of the rest of the world. Indeed, apart from oil – which was discovered, is produced and is paid for by the West – what do they contribute? Can you think of anything? Anything really useful? Anything really valuable? Something we really need, could not do without? No, nor can I,’ (to which my friends and I instantly responded with just one Arabic word, ‘Alcohol!’) he almost certainly intended, as he was to claim, to refer to ‘certain Arab regimes’, and it was all the fault of sloppy sub-editors.
Unfortunately for Kilroy, the BBC was rolling on its back and nervously widdling beneath the stern gaze of Alastair Campbell at the time because it had told the truth about the ‘dodgy dossier’ which had been used to justify the Iraq war and was terrified of the consequences of the experiment.
Now (totally illegally) threatened with the loss of its Charter, the Corporation had instructed its presenters to say nothing controversial at all. The Commission for Racial Equality reported Kilroy to the police, Labour MPs squealed. He was suspended then sacked. He lost £600,000 a year from the BBC. He also lost the oxygen of publicity.
For all the intemperateness and imprecision of the offending article, there
was a widespread feeling that he had been treated harshly. He had been writing, after all, in the usual glib shorthand of the tabloid columnist, expressing widespread popular sentiments of the sort all too readily inculcated by censorship. Many suddenly saw Kilroy as an abused ‘voice of the people’.
After a touching interview with Lynn Barber in which he bewailed the fact that the BBC had ‘disenfranchised’ his (long dead) mum by sacking him, Kilroy retreated to his villa in Spain to consider his next move.
It was at that point that Richard Bradford, who had an estate up the coast, invited the Kilroy-Silks for lunch. He already knew of Kilroy’s anti-EU views. Intelligence indicated that Jan was already a UKIP voter, which probably meant that he was too. So how would he feel, Richard asked him, about playing an active role within the party? Given his prominence and his parliamentary track-record, it was likely that he would leapfrog up the selection list. He might easily be a candidate in next month’s election…
Kilroy was very interested.
Richard arranged a meeting for us at his London home. Almost unprecedentedly, I somehow forgot the appointment. Perhaps the gods were telling me something again.
If so, I reckoned that UKIP’s guardian angels were also having their say, and I was more interested in listening to them.
I got to know Kilroy (in so far as I can claim to have done so, which is hardly at all) that day in the smoking-room of the East India Club and, later, at Beel House, the Buckinghamshire mansion which he had bought from Ozzy Osbourne. I was impressed. The man was quick, smooth and unquestionably charming. As we spoke, he repeated my best phrases to himself. I thought that this indicated eagerness to learn. He was certainly passionate about self-determination for the individual and for the nation.
I discussed with all our main players the possibility of having Kilroy stand for us. David Lott and Alan Bown approved. Roger Knapman, however, had grave reservations. This was a high-risk strategy. He acknowledged that it would be a wonderful publicity coup, but after the election, what then? Was the man sound? Did he have, in good old eighteenth-century terms, ‘bottom’? Would he roll up his sleeves and work as part of the team? He was certainly skilled before the cameras, but he was also known to be egotistical, unpredictable and temperamental behind the scenes…
From their first meeting, Roger and Kilroy were viscerally antagonistic. Maybe it was no more than Kilroy’s arrogant assumption that Roger was some mere caretaker who would be honoured to yield his position to the great man and Roger’s resentment of someone whom he perceived as lightweight and meretricious. Maybe it was the rural Tory against the urban former socialist. For all his dislike for the man, however, Roger allowed me to make the final decision.
For myself, whilst aware of Kilroy’s weaknesses, I found him amusing enough company when things were going his way. When his hair was out of curl, it was another matter, but the spoiled – and I had met many of them in my media activities – tend to be less than attractive when in adversity.
Jeffrey Titford was also mistrustful. He told me that Kilroy was using us. As a professional, he said, Kilroy was parroting us, learning key words and catchphrases so that he would belong. His non-specific passions were evident, but where were his convictions? And how in the world could we control him once we had let him in? This, he warned me, was a man with his own agenda…
They were right. I knew it, but I was willing to take the risk. If Kilroy fancied another deep draught of the oxygen of publicity, UKIP had been gasping for a mere whiff of it for years. We needed the public to take notice of us and to realise that we represented many views which they shared.
If anyone stood to lose from having Kilroy on board, it was surely I. He was a fine speaker and a master of the media. I might have a few fans, but he would command the worship of thousands.
It has been alleged that I gave Kilroy a pledge that he would be leader. I did not. First, I have no way of giving any such assurance. Second, I had no need to.
It is the conjuror’s and the con-man’s first principle. Let people deceive themselves. They will always do the job far better than you. If they want to see fairies or hear their long-deceased Aunt Flossie enough, there is no call for elaborate artifice. A drifting dandelion seed or an airlock in the drainpipes will do the job just fine.
Kilroy assumed that he would stroll into the leadership. I nodded and assured him, quite truthfully, that, with a little work and patience, he might well do so. Since he always talked at you, not to you, and never listened, I doubt that he heard the qualification.
He was, after all, no innocent ingénu. As he kept telling us, he was an academic and a far more experienced politician than we. If he chose to believe that his personal beauty, charisma and authority would win him the leadership without turning a single impeccable nacreous hair, why should I dash his illusions? If he really thought that a democratically constituted political party could be given to him, gift-wrapped and bearing a label reading ‘To Robert, for being wonderful’, was it my obligation to explain to him that it did not – could not – work that way?
I suspect, in truth, that you would be hard put to find a group of people who watched daytime television less and were less impressed by Kilroy than our mob. They tend to be busy people who either laugh or believe that sufferers from spoon-damage should ‘shut up, buck up and get on’, both crimes in Kilrovia. Kilroy did not believe that there were people who were unimpressed by him. I certainly saw no reason to hurt him by telling him the terrible truth.
Had Kilroy served the party and trusted to his personality rather than his persona, he could surely have been leader. He was better known in the country than Michael Howard and probably as well-known as Tony Blair. The man was able enough. He just was not humble enough.
He really did not understand that the party had not been built by Jeffrey, Roger or me but by the fishermen and farmers, the shopkeepers and mechanics, the soldiers, sailors, airmen, teachers, nurses, doctors, midwives, WRVS volunteers, musicians, poets, peers, prostitutes (and those are just the first few categories which spring to my mind) who care enough for their fellows and their freedoms to give up their time to the cause. I might drop dead tomorrow, but the party will, I trust, throw me a salute, a platitude and a bunch of garage-forecourt carnations – and go on.
I think such an idea was beyond Kilroy’s comprehension. He had a problem common to many in the media spotlight. He believed that he was the show.
So we met up with Derek Clark, top of our candidates-list in the East Midlands. I did not even need to point out to him how Kilroy’s candidacy would help the party. To his eternal credit, Derek immediately volunteered to step down from the No. 1 to the No. 2 spot.
On the campaign trail, Kilroy was brilliant, though his stamina was suspect. He would do an hour of street canvassing. He drew huge crowds and he wowed them. Then he needed a lie-down. The publicity which his candidacy won for us saw instant results in the opinion polls. UKIP was tipped to take 18 per cent of the votes, pushing the Liberal Democrats into fourth place.
Michael Howard panicked. It was now that he launched the ‘cranks and gadflies’ taunt at us. We were flattered and delighted. He then realised that perhaps he had insulted rather a lot of his own people and, according to the polls, 58 per cent of the public at large who also deplored rule from Brussels, so he made a weird speech in which at last he addressed the subject of Europe.
The Lib Dems and Labour wanted to give away more British powers of self-determination, he said. UKIP wanted to drag Britain out of the EU altogether.
Only the Tories offered ‘a sensible middle way’, to whit, making proud nationalistic noises AND giving away more British powers of self-determination. Oh, and he hadn’t really meant it about UKIP. Well, maybe some of us…
Twelve peers, four of them Tories, including Malcolm Pearson and Lord Willoughby de Broke, declared their support for us in matters related to EU integration. Tory MP Christopher Gill, an old ally, published a letter explaining that he cou
ld no longer vote Conservative because ‘I and countless other free-born Britons want out of this evil empire.’
I suppose the victorious professional politicians who won seats on 11 June experienced some joy. I’m sure they cheered and embraced and congratulated one another on the achievement. I’m equally sure that they experienced nothing to equal the elation and the incredulity which we amateurs, all of us with real lives and proper jobs, knew as result after result rolled in. Godfrey Bloom in Yorkshire & the Humber, John Whittaker in the North West, Kilroy and Derek Clark in the East Midlands, Mike Natrass in the West Midlands, Roger Knapman and Graham Booth in the South West, Gerard Batten in London, Jeffrey Titford and Tom Wise in the Eastern region, Ashley Mote and me in the South East…
Twelve MEPs… 2,650,768 votes… 16.1 per cent of the total… Tories and Labour given a hiding by the electorate… Lib Dems knocked into fourth place…
Only one thing marred my joy that night. It was that David Lott was not at my side at the count in Didcot but a strange, bespectacled man who looked a little like actor Anton Rodgers at his most blimpish and whose wife was inexplicably crying as the results were announced.
Just as Kilroy had strolled into his candidacy by merit of television, so David, the architect of so much of our success, had been displaced by Ashley Mote because David worked quietly in the offices (and horse-boxes) whilst Mote was a marketing man and author who impressed the faithful by his pompous speechifying and his impressive publications.
Mote had written a popular book called Vigilance – A Defence of British Liberty before he joined the party in 2000. He was therefore ‘an authority’. A further book about immigration, Overcrowded Britain, was much hawked at party meetings and conferences and cemented his reputation as a good researcher and a pundit to be heeded. He was a busy emailer and a skilful self-promoter. He drafted a petition to Her Majesty requesting that she withhold assent to the Nice Treaty. He persuaded twenty-eight peers to sign it, and, with Trevor Colman, now a UKIP MEP, made a series of videos about the EU which also sold well within the party.
