Flying Free

by Nigel Farage

  I had hoped that, during his holiday in Spain, Kilroy might have researched UKIP, its history and the personal histories of its members so that he could more readily have fitted in and understood where they were coming from.

  I still sincerely believed that he had the acumen and flair to become leader, if only he could forget the media persona and remember where he had come from and what had originally motivated him.

  *

  Our first engagement of the new campaign was the Hartlepool by-election. This had been called because Peter Mandelson was off to Brussels to be EU Commissioner for Trade.

  This is one of the problems with the EU Commission (aside from its being unelected, unrepresentative, autocratic and all-powerful, I mean). When a government nominates a Commissioner, it cannot afford to lose a top man or woman and risk a by-election, so it sends unheard-of quangaroos like Lady Ashton who have never been elected to anything but are simply guaranteed to jump as bidden, or discredited or temporarily embarrassed former cabinet ministers, fretful and discontented on the back benches.

  This is how we ended up with Barrot, an embezzler whom I was privileged to expose, and Mandelson, who needed no exposure, having already twice been forced to resign from Blair’s cabinet, first because of the minor matter of an undisclosed £373,000 mortgage, then because of the Hinduja passport affair.

  ‘Passport to Oblivion’ read the headline when Mandelson resigned for the second time, but that, of course, is not how things work any more. Mandelson’s disgrace was a passport from Hartlepool and an MP’s salary to the Commission, £182,500 a year and sunshine holidays with some very interesting and influential company.

  I always imagine Blair saying to Mandelson, like Lord Lundy’s grandfather,

  We had intended you to be

  The next Prime Minister but three:

  The stocks were sold; the Press was squared:

  The Middle Class was quite prepared.

  But as it is! … My language fails!

  Go out and govern New South Wales!

  Nowadays, an embarrassing colleague is told, ‘Go out and generate more than 70 per cent of our laws in Brussels.’

  In 2008, Mandelson was back in Westminster, this time as First Secretary of State, Grand Panjandrum, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Lord High Executioner, President of the Board of Trade, Lord President of the Council and Lord Knows-What-Else, still on the same wage, with an EU pension of £31,000 assured – and still taking fascinating holidays.

  Anyhow, for now he was off on to Brussels, which left Hartlepool unrepresented, so we asked Kilroy to stand. I believe that he could have won it too. He refused for his own obscure reasons.

  Again, this did not endear him to our loyal members. He was also vociferous – and, worse, publicly vociferous – in his criticism of the leadership for its lack of proactive initiatives in his absence.

  Kilroy had been cultivating Paul Sykes from the first, and it was surely to Sykes’s funding that he referred when, at a press lobby luncheon to which I had been invited by Julia Hartley-Brewer, political editor of the Sunday Express, he started spritzing on a theme in the preferred key of ‘I’…

  ‘I have personally been promised all the money I need to fight every marginal seat in the country. We have the money to set up offices, agents, campaigns when I decide to press the button…’

  He signed the visitors’ book that day ‘Robert Kilroy-Silk MEP, UKIP leader de facto’.

  Now I knew that we were in trouble. We had a mini-Mosley on our hands.

  By now, Roger Knapman’s dislike for Kilroy and everything that he represented had turned into a deep loathing. Jeffrey Titford and I laboured for days to broker a meeting between the two men in Brussels. Roger at last consented to give it a go. He waited in my office … and waited … and waited… When I went down the corridor (as ever crowded with television cameras) to summon Kilroy, he announced, ‘No, no. Knapman must come to me!’

  We who witnessed the scene were astounded. We were rumbustious amateurs who had looked to these two experienced professional politicians to teach us a thing or two. Instead, we felt like kindergarten assistants. ‘Now, Roger, play nicely with Robert… No, Robert, it was at least half your fault and this is Roger’s party, so come along and let’s be nice… You’re both ruining it for everyone else…’

  Throughout that meeting, Roger was unable to look at Kilroy. He sat with his right shoulder turned towards him and his left foot nervously jiggling. Kilroy gazed at a peculiarly fascinating spot on the floor between them.

  Kilroy did not want to play pass the parcel or musical chairs. He was not going to share. That was how the meeting ended, with Kilroy and Jan tutting and flouncing out and Roger still pouting at the wall.

  I don’t think that Roger ever recovered from the Kilroy experience.

  He had never before been leader of anything. Whilst he was steadfast in face of attacks from outside the camp, fighting those within it totally unnerved him.

  If the virtuous tend not to thrive, it is not because their virtues inhibit them but because they judge others by their own standards. Roger had done nothing but good service. Being loyal and just, he could not conceive that one of his own was now approaching him, dayglo fangs flashing, spit slobbering from his copper-toned dewlaps, eyes greedily fixed upon his basket and his store of bones. It is a rare politician who understands and anticipates the vices of others yet does not share them.

  Virtue, of course, is on display where vices are disguised, and even the most flawed pretend to, or aspire to it. It is just as rare, however, for one with pervasive faults truly to understand it. Kilroy did not understand UKIP’s loyalty and common sense.

  It was not his fault. He had spent twenty years in the spotlight, from which viewpoint it is nigh impossible to see into the shadows where the researchers and technicians labour to make you shine. Worse still in Kilroy’s case, he had had daily contact with common people – common people on camera, under lights, clinging to him as the one recognisable beacon amidst chaos.

  Contentious libertarian columnist Nick Cohen wrote perceptively:

  Kilroy embodies in extreme form the power and vices of British television and shows how they can be transferred to politics. His apparently mystifying decision to join UKIP and then storm out when he wasn’t made leader at once was politically ludicrous. In politics you have to work your way up. But it was a reasonable way to behave for a man from television. For UKIP to take Kilroy and not make him leader would have been as incomprehensible as Channel 4 News taking Jeremy Paxman and not making him lead presenter.

  Television is a medium which turns balanced men and women into narcissists. The off-screen staff’s job is to do everything possible to make the presenters better than they are: to coach them so they will sound good, cover them with cosmetics so they will look good and flatter them so they will feel good. After a while they can begin to believe that this best possible version of themselves is the true version of themselves…

  …Presenters are meant to treat guests with suspicion and ask the hardest questions imaginable. And rightly so. But it’s easy for the celeb to fall from necessary scepticism into the delusion that they are the last honest men in England and the true representatives of the people. Kilroy shows what happens when they do. He is what Paxman would become if he let his grip on reality relax for an instant.’

  Only twelve years earlier, another singularly pretty television presenter, David Icke, resolved on very little evidence that he was the son of God whilst Her Majesty, the Rothschilds and, for some reason, Kris Kristofferson were reptiles from the constellation Draco. He has, unsurprisingly, made quite a name for himself in the society in which such things are routinely discussed.

  For a long time, I had believed that Kilroy had been diverted by his celebrity but was bright enough to return to reality, to study UKIP and its members and to serve the cause. He had never hobnobbed with us, still less with the party faithful, and it was now clear tha
t he and Jan were determined to follow their own path no matter how far it diverged from ours.

  I had created the monster. It was for me to kill it.

  I have been accused of briefing against him. I had no need to. I simply let it be known that, if he made a bid for the leadership, I would reluctantly stand against him – and fight to the bitter end.

  I was forty, Kilroy sixty-two. I was known to the party. Kilroy had remained aloof from everyone. And, as I say, ours is a party peculiarly unimpressed by surface glitter.

  It was not necessary. Now forewarned, Kilroy might still have responded intelligently and become a team-player. And who knows? Within a year or two, with his gifts, he might have ousted me and led the party to great things. This, it seemed, was no longer an option for the Kilroys. They were being cheated of the position which was theirs of right. They must strike now.

  It was time for our triumphant conference, this year in Bristol’s Colston Hall.

  This extraordinary event – the failed Kilroy putsch – has been well chronicled elsewhere. Two days before it opened, we had another triumph which enormously boosted our mood. At Hartlepool, our candidate Stephen Allison took third place, forcing the Conservatives into fourth (‘a fucking awful result’ said Nicholas Soames). A Labour majority of 14,571 was cut to 2,033.

  The Kilroys arrived late. Their big, chauffeur-driven Jaguar purred up to the foot of the steps and they stepped out, for all the world as though they were stars at a premiere. The cameras flashed. The microphones nuzzled up to them. They swept past Roger and other lowly MEPs and led their media-train upstairs to the bar where Kilroy held court.

  I have never been so proud of my beloved party of cranks and gadflies as at this conference. The members observed the travelling circus, sniffed and continued about their business. I was on stage mere minutes later, welcoming them whilst Kilroy kept the media occupied.

  There was to be an important debate later in the day. For years now, I had been unhappy about our candidates standing against the very few Labour and Conservative candidates who very genuinely and demonstrably opposed the EU and favoured Britain’s withdrawal. We had no desire to be responsible for the loss of allies of either party. Our members, however, were quite reasonably mistrustful. They had heard too many protestations of Euroscepticism, particularly, but not exclusively, from Tories, which were followed by abject submission and, on occasion, pathetic and slavish devotion to the Eurosoviet.

  We had therefore drawn up a motion which would, we hoped, satisfy honour on all sides. The other MEPs and Paul Sykes and Alan Bown had all given it their approval. ‘This Conference resolves to fight the general election in every constituency in the United Kingdom, but should reserve the right, subject only to the approval of the constituency association in question, to reach an accommodation with the sitting Member of Parliament of another party on receipt of an irrevocable undertaking that he/she will oppose further EU integration and will support Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union.’

  This was plainly pretty much a pointless gesture since no major political party as currently constituted would permit a candidate to sign any such undertaking, but we did not want to be the ones to hinder genuine Eurosceptics, and could truthfully point at the other parties and argue that, if they really meant what they said about opposing further integration, they were at liberty to put their money where their outspoken mouths were.

  Kilroy stepped out onto that conference stage – essentially to introduce himself. He was unknown save by repute to most of the people in that hall.

  He was brilliant. He soothed. He confided. He made us strain to hear him. He told us in mellifluous tones what we already knew – that we had been led by lies into a Common Market but that the French and the Germans desired a superstate and were working towards that end. He outlined all the wonderful things that we could do with £15 million pounds a day, our net contribution to European government.

  We were like children lulled by the same old bedtime story or Catholics by the sung Latin liturgy. Even I who had written some of his best lines was nodding admiringly. He was telling us nothing new, singing no new words, but he was rehearsing the old stuff quite beautifully.

  But then, as with his disastrous ‘wreck it’ intervention at the first press conference, a strange streak of violence emerged in his tone and in his words. It was as though, in his mind, an invocation to destruction rather than an assertion of solidarity or an exhortation to creativity was the most stimulating rhetorical device that he knew.

  Ducking the heat of the forthcoming debate by anticipating where he could not be challenged, he declared that no deal must be struck with the Conservatives (not that any such deal had been proposed). ‘The Conservative Party is dying,’ he said. ‘Why would you want to give it the kiss of life? What we have to do is kill it!’

  It worked with the crowd just then, though killing a dying creature which might be resuscitated was not an image which I would have chosen, nor did it play well when our largely rural supporters awoke from their trance. Many of them too would have counted themselves members of the Tory family. For all that that family was now dominated by parents under the influence of noxious substances, they had residual loyalties. Amongst these was our principal financial supporter, Paul Sykes. Nor had anyone proposed a deal with the Tories. The carrot which we were proffering was intended for anyone bold enough to take it…

  The debate took place after lunch. I knew that we had lost it before it had started. I also knew that battle was now joined. And that Kilroy was history.

  Dick Morris and I had chatted over lunch. Dick could read all the signs. He had witnessed Kilroy’s performance and talked to the party members. That afternoon, he made a speech warning of the danger of ‘messiahs’ who leaped aboard small parties and attempted to steal their souls.

  Kilroy did not hear it. He was presumably back at home. Having tossed his burning taper into the powder-keg, he was just waiting for the explosion surely to come. That evening, the entire party met for a convivial dinner and a lot of drinks in a hotel. All the MEPs, the NEC, the branch chairs and the party enthusiasts were there. Two places were left empty at the table for the Kilroys. I glanced frequently at the doors, expecting yet another entrance – this time with what? A flurry of cloaks? A flourish of trumpets? A roll of thunder and a flash?

  Nothing.

  This was surely Kilroy’s chance. It had still not occurred to him that, in order to win the party leadership, he might need to befriend the members in person or show an interest in their views. He relied on his fame to do the job for him.

  He resorted to the only thing that he understood – omnipotent television. I was in my shirtsleeves in my hotel room, running late and once more struggling with the cufflinks, when Breakfast with Frost came on, and there on the screen was my colleague, languidly discussing our domination.

  ‘I would like to be leader of UKIP,’ said Kilroy to Sir David. ‘I think I could turn it into very effective electoral fighting-force… What everyone tells me they want is for the current leader to accept the inevitable and to stand down… During the last June elections, the current leader told me and others that he would stand down after the election, but then of course he got a massive election result and probably liked the size of his new train set and now he’s changed his mind. That’s fine… Now, you will think me arrogant and presumptuous and I’ll get accused of all those things, but of course I think it would be better. Otherwise I wouldn’t want to stand.’

  I set off for the hall.

  Oh, how I love our bloody-minded, self-reliant, determined, loyal, passionate, companionable, hard-working, funny members. I could have hugged every damned one of them that morning.

  They had all seen Kilroy’s interview or heard of it from friends. They thought it funny. They thought it ridiculous. They thought it irrelevant.

  They got on with UKIP’s business.

  Paul Sykes was so angry at Kilroy’s death sentence to the Tories and at UKIP
’s consequent determination to oppose even Eurosceptic candidates that, two days later, he withdrew all support for us.

  Even then, Kilroy did not get it. Even I, who had been well aware that Kilroy had been making up to Sykes and that Sykes was hoping that the Tories would return to sanity, could not quite work out just who had been playing whom. Sykes had been encouraging Kilroy to press for the leadership. Had Sykes been endearing himself to the Conservatives when he approved the motion at Conference? Had Kilroy struck out on his own with the ‘Kill the Conservatives’ business? And if so, how could he still suppose that Sykes would support him?

  There was now a Channel 4 interview so memorably cringeworthy as to rival Shafted at its best.

  Paul Sykes had openly declared that he was leaving UKIP because of Kilroy, yet Kilroy still somehow persuaded himself that Sykes’s argument was with anyone but him. I have met with plenty of selective deafness in my time, usually in relation to the questions ‘Who’s buying?’ and ‘Isn’t it your round?’, but this took the entire Huntley and Palmer Luxury Teatime Selection.

  In order to run for Parliament in the East Midlands or to win the party leadership, he announced, ‘I will have more money than I can spend. Paul and I want the same thing. We both believe in UKIP.’

  ‘I don’t believe in UKIP,’ said Sykes. ‘I believe in the message on Europe.’

  ‘Well, I’m pretty confident that if I want him to help in the East Midlands, he would help,’ persisted Kilroy with a little laugh.

  ‘Not in a general election, I wouldn’t,’ snapped Sykes.

  Comprehensively embarrassed and bemused, Kilroy explained the interview away as some sort of marital tiff. ‘Paul and I go way back,’ he later told the Telegraph. This was untrue. I had been working with Sykes since 2001 and had arranged for Kilroy to meet him only this year. ‘It’s very strange that he’s decamped. All last week he was going to help fund the general election campaign if I was in charge of it.’