by Nigel Farage
Many Lib Dems that I meet actually believe their party to be committed to liberalism and democracy. In fact, they are resolved to resisting the views of the electorate as expressed through referendums and wholly wedded to the EU, which is reconcilable with neither.
I hope that I have adequately explained how and why I came to be a UKIP activist. It sprang from bloody-mindedness, independence, libertarianism, a knowledge of history and a deep love for Britain – by which I certainly mean stereotypical symbols like cricket, warm beer, village churches and crumpets, but rather more importantly democracy, the rule of law by means of common sense, common law (evolution!), skilful fudge and good humour.
But above all, I am motivated by an ardent belief in self-determination, self-definition and the inalienable freedom to go to hell on one’s own chosen path without intervention by self-appointed mentors.
There is nothing wrong with being a UKIP member because you love Gentleman’s Relish and Land of Hope and Glory, because you hate Ted Heath or love stories of sturdy little Britain, because you think that the French are conspiring to ruin the recipes for English sausages or because you believe that the Nazis (or Bonapartists or intergalactic aliens) plotted the entire EU as a rather more tactful way of ensuring German/French/ Martian world supremacy.
A party is a broad church and must be able to accommodate eccentrics, obsessives, romantics and downright nutters.
It is my experience, however, that the UKIP members who endure and can best explain the cause to others are principally motivated by libertarianism and therefore accept that even opponents of English sausages have a right to be heard.
They will fight with the same ferocity and commitment for flat-Earth geeks, vegetarians, Trotskyites and other ‘deviants’ to be heard as for their own causes. They will not allow their own tastes prior claim over others.
It is a sad reflection of what remains of our culture that a sort of aesthetic ‘genetic fallacy’ makes certain subjects taboo even for discussion – so I am not permitted to discuss the undoubted virtues of tobacco or the liberties of smokers because I am one myself, and only immigrants are permitted to have views on immigration.
You will frequently hear people (not generally Jews, who have a sense of humour and know the value of liberty) declaring that only Jews may tell Jewish jokes, whilst women exclude men from any discussion of abortion.
Hunting is perhaps the classic subject that can barely be discussed because people ‘get emotional’ about it. The fact that ‘getting emotional’ in argument about a serious subject to the point where you cannot consider the opposing view is grossly irresponsible and self-indulgent and should be a cause for shame does not seem to occur to them.
For myself, I have participated in hundreds of arguments about hunting and considered both sides but, ultimately, as with smoking, buggery or taste in food, it all comes down to the same thing: What the £$^&*%+ business is it of mine or the government’s how people spend their leisure hours or manage their lands provided that they hurt no one else?
If we are to defer to popular tastes and squeamishness, Hitler might also claim a mandate for his crimes. This is not democracy. It is mob-rule.
And this above all is what I meant about Malcolm Pearson when I described him as ‘the only serious, credible candidate’. He had no personal axes to grind, just as a good ecologist is not emotionally committed to one species or another. His concern is for balance and, ultimately, to accept that there is a greater force – be it nature or history – which we may influence but can never ordain.
Things will change. We must roll with the punches, accept evolution and keep fighting.
Malcolm Pearson is a scrapper. He reminds me of some Border terriers – equable, determined, playful, not overtly belligerent – but woe betide those who pick a fight with him.
He was first spotted by Jonathan Aitken on his first day at Eton. It was Michaelmas Term. There was a game of rugby in progress. Big boys who have felled a smaller opponent expect submission and a certain deference. Aitken noticed, however, a fierce melée from which several large boys were retreating, sporting injuries and looking affronted. When the pile of bodies was disentangled, Malcolm was found, still struggling, at its base.
Since then he has demonstrated the same equable ferocity and a rare combination of spirituality and spiritedness – in international insurance, where he made a sizeable fortune, in supporting dissidents in the Cold War and those with mental disabilities and in fighting the EU. He is, in short, a doughty champion of democracy and fairness.
As party leader, he was as valiant and honest as ever. He raised money for our campaign, he applied balm where there was inflammation and ginger beneath the tails of those behind the bit. He was a much cooler administrator than I.
He was wrongfooted just once, when John Sopel questioned him about our manifesto – a rambling, 486-page document submitted very late in the day by my garrulous former colleague David Bannerman.
Anyone, possibly barring Bannerman himself, would have been stumped, but modern politicians are not expected to be honest. They are expected to pretend to know everything.
Malcolm would never dream of glibly pretending to knowledge which he did not possess. He simply admitted that he had not a clue about this or that paragraph. That sort of honesty meant that the media were able to rag him where they should have been grateful.
Malcolm also made one tactical error. I had established the policy that we would not oppose candidates who had signed up to Freedom Association’s ‘Better Off Out’ campaign. I had too much experience of firm pledges, mostly but not exclusively from Tories, which had proved soluble in the warm water of office. Unless there was a signature committing a candidate to the cause, we would fight him.
Malcolm, however, counted certain Tories among his trusted friends and, rightly or wrongly, believed that we should not stand against Jacob and Annunziata Rees-Mogg and David Heathcoat-Amery – all good sorts, all prominent Eurosceptics, but all non-signatories. The party rank and file, who shared my scepticism, regarded this as particularity towards friends.
I sympathise with Malcolm. I can’t count the number of nice chaps and sterling women – going right back to Patrick Nichols – who have begged us not to stand against them because they were with us in spirit, but spirits falter all too easily when surrounded by party whips, hail-fellow-well-met chums in the club and prospects of advancement. We have had to become absolutist.
It is a sad indictment of our politics that, throughout that summer, Malcolm came under a great deal of attack from the media and the party just for being Malcolm – honest and proportionately trusting.
He was not the only one to make mistakes.
*
With all my energies now freed to one short-term end, I flung myself into that Buckingham campaign. I vowed that I would try to have a drink in every pub in the constituency and oh, I tried. I did not quite accomplish it.
I spoke at meetings. I am enormously grateful to Simon Heffer, Christopher Booker, Tory ex-Foreign Minister Sir Nicholas Bonsor and former Labour MP John Lee for their active support on the stump and off.
I was back in my element. I liked the people of Buckingham. I think that in general they – particularly in the working-class areas – liked me and our policies. I had, however, made a few grave miscalculations.
One of these was a certain speech I made in the European Parliament on 24 February 2010.
*
Herman Van Rompuy owes me big-time.
Before that day, everyone in the world barring Van Rompuy’s immediate family was asking the question I wanted to ask as I stood up that day: ‘Who the hell is this man?’
After 24 February 2010, the answer was – and remains – ‘Isn’t he that chap Farage called a dishcloth?’
International branding like that is expensive.
He has yet to thank me, which is strange.
Van Rompuy was appointed President of the European Council precisely because he was
a nobody from nowhere with no perceptible allegiance which meant anything to anyone. He would never overshadow the all-important national leaders – Merkel and Sarkozy – but had proved himself a fanatical EU federalist.
His biography reads like that of one of those academic Catholic clerics who quietly work their way up through the Vatican hierarchy simply by being quiet and cleverish and making few enemies. A classicist with an interest in youth clubs and a penchant for writing minor but unexceptionable verse, he found himself elevated to parish priest (by appointment, not election) then bishop of the funny little parish of Belgium because it was falling apart.
The resemblance to the ill-fated Pope John Paul I, elected on the fourth ballot because the Conservatives and the Liberals could not find an acceptable candidate of distinction, is striking.
First the Flemish, French and German-speaking components of the Belgian population had voted for irreconcilable parties, so the King called in Van Rompuy to lead a government of sorts. Then the European Union thrashed around to find someone wholly inoffensive to represent a Union which is anything but united.
Tony Blair was much touted, but he was a high-profile warmonger whose inability to discern the dowdy plumage of facts from the gaudy splendour of phantasms was universally known. It wasn’t that colour-blindness disqualified him. It was the fact that the world knew of the affliction. Besides, Britain had opted out of the Schengen agreement and the single currency.
Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel both had far better things to do at home. They bottled it, and anyhow, the long-term Franco-German dominance of the EU has always inspired mistrust and resentment amongst other member states.
So once again, an obscure seminarist found himself elevated to high office as an inoffensive compromise.
In my childhood, before the British people discovered how wines were meant to taste, there was a craze for Mateus Rosé, whose principal merit lay in the fact that it was neither red nor white, still nor fizzy, dry nor sweet. It could thus offend no one save those who sought character and distinction. To them, of course, it was profoundly offensive.
Of such is Herman Van Rompuy: the Mateus Rosé leader.
And that day, when at last, five months after his appointment, he deigned to pay the EU Parliament a visit, all that I meant to say was just that: ‘Er, sorry. Who are you?’
This was a reasonable question, I think, to an unelected man from an almost-nation, presuming (along with the inept Baroness Ashton who has never been elected to anything) to usurp the sovereign power of the British people in Parliament and the peoples of every other member state, to overrule the stated wishes of the people of Holland, France and Ireland and to impose their project by coercion and bureaucratic force majeure…
But oh dear. A speaker who wings it is always a hostage to fortune.
I have always spoken unscripted.
It’s a bit like being a chef, I suppose. Naturals cook by touch, responding to their moods, to the qualities of the key ingredients, to barometric pressure – to the moment – and so make their creations infinitely more interesting than the mass-produced, identical dishes served up by those who abide by formulae.
Unfortunately, it takes just one bungling sous-chef or washer-up and a distracting flash of irritation for everything to go just slightly awry.
I confess that, to my mind, everything went slightly awry on that day.
I still feel that the so-called Parliament should be a damned sight more robust.
For all the calm, balanced speeches of Canning and Burke as read in the tranquil, flickering firelight and the rules of parliamentary debate (among the most beautiful of human inventions), real democracy is seldom refined. If the mob is not permitted into the chamber with its dead cats, eggs and other missiles, its representatives certainly are. Passions can and should run high.
By the time Rumpy had finished his dirge-like maiden speech to the Parliament on that day, my passions were running high.
His was not the cocky, braying triumphalism of the City trader nor did he have the steely arrogance of the aristocrat. It was something far, far more provocative. It was the meek but invulnerable, smirking complacency of the prim little sister who knows that the parents are just yards away, that same, unthinking smugness that you find in airline officials and telecom operators who droningly reiterate the regulations at you, incapable of apology and impervious to personal grief or distress. Even a good joke cannot penetrate such a carapace.
He was President. This entire institution was there to assure him that he was right. All dissent was, by diktat and by definition, wrong and probably a result of mental illness.
My harangue was spontaneous. It sprang straight from the heart.
In general, I avoid arguments ad hominem, but the insignificance of the homo in question was the crucially important subject of my speech. Sadly, too, the European Parliament does not favour debate through the chair. It prefers direct, face-to-face address. I could not therefore address my remarks to anyone else, referring to my subject in the third person, but must resort to the far more offensive second person.
‘Would you not agree, Mr Chairman, that Mr Van Rompuy has all the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk?’ is just mild, discerning expression of a valid aesthetic appreciation. Even the most scrupulously impartial chair would, after appraising Rumpy, have nodded.
Alas, what I actually said sounded a little impolite, nor does it help that the microphones picked up only my words, not the barrage of barracking over which I spoke:
We were told that when we had a President, we’d see a giant global political figure, the man would be the political leader for 500 million people, the man that would represent all of us on the world stage, the man whose job was so important that of course you’re paid more than President Obama.
Well, I’m afraid what we got was you … I don’t want to be rude but, really, you have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk and the question that I want to ask is: ‘Who are you?’ I’d never heard of you. Nobody in Europe had ever heard of you…
This caused Martin Schulz to have his usual practised apoplexy. Rumpy just sat there looking bemused, affronted and sad like an embarrassed father listening to the rantings of a demented child from behind a reinforced glass screen. He pursed his lips only when I said,
I have no doubt that your intention is to be the quiet assassin of European democracy and of European nation states. You appear to have a loathing for the very concept of the existence of nation states. Perhaps that’s because you come from Belgium which, after all, is pretty much a non-country.
At this, he started to rub his nose. This is a gesture I have observed in the Japanese when they are asked, for example, for their personal opinions rather than those of the corporation or the State. It means, I think, ‘Me. He is talking to me, not the institution from which I derive my protection and my identity…’
OK. It did come out as a faintly childish jibe. It was intended to be a just appraisal of a nation designed on a drawing board (a British drawing board, as the egregious Herr Schulz later pointed out to me) rather than evolved by popular consensus.
Belgium has not had a government since 13 June 2010 and, at the time of writing, shows no sign of co-operating sufficiently ever to have such a thing again. It is a non-country, a Frankenstein’s monster in which the Flemish head no longer talks to and certainly cannot work with the French groin. It has no national newspaper, no national political party. It might profitably serve as a microcosmic model of the similarly artificial European Union, and is similarly breaking up into its constituent parts.
That is what I meant to say, but I was angry and rattled.
Ah, well.
That weekend the Belgian media went berserk in two languages. Martin Schulz demanded my expulsion (a strange form of democracy this, where an elected member can be expelled for evoking distaste or disapproval in a dissenting member) for the hundredth time.
&
nbsp; On the Monday morning, I was promptly ‘invited’ in for an interview with the Parliament’s President, Jerzy Buzec, the former Prime Minister of Poland. This was what I have come to call ‘an interview without coffee’.
He told me that yet again I had gone too far. I pleaded in my defence that he should take a look at other truly democratic parliaments. He should study, for example, the wit and wisdom of Dennis Skinner in the British Commons. ‘The Beast of Bolsover’ memorably branded David Owen ‘a pompous sod’ (he withdrew ‘pompous’ when ticked off by the speaker) and called John Gummer ‘slimy’ and ‘a wart’.
In Australia, the words ‘dumbo’ and ‘liar’ were only deemed unparliamentary in 1997, whilst Dáil Éireann – the Irish Parliament – having systematically and reluctantly banned ‘buffoon’, ‘chancer’, ‘coward’, ‘fascist’, ‘fatty’, ‘gurrier’, ‘guttersnipe’, ‘hypocrite’, ‘rat’ and ‘scumbag’, was still in 2010 mulling over the status of ‘fuck’.
I pointed out that Buzek himself had fought for free speech in Communist Poland and that free speech surely included comparing people to rags. He was not impressed by my arguments. He required me to apologise to Rumpy, to the EU Parliament and to the people of Belgium, not, it seemed, for the references to Rumpy’s appearance nor for declaring him to be the assassin of democracy but for insulting Belgium. I was mildly surprised that he did not require me to apologise to the entire world.
I refused.
I declared, however, that, on sober reflection, I owed an apology to bank clerks the world over.
So he imposed the maximum fine at his disposal – the same penalty that I would have received had I accepted a £100,000 bribe from a lobbyist – the loss of ten days’ expenses’ allowance.
On my return to Britain, I found embarrassment to be the prevailing emotion. That a nicely brought up English boy should behave so churlishly to such a mild-looking old chap was, well, positively unacceptable.
No matter that that mild-looking old chap presumed to overrule their power to govern themselves and to assume arbitrary, unaccountable power over 500,000,000 people who had not voted to give it to him. One should still behave nicely, Nigel.
