Nigel farage

What few results there have been so far suggest that UKIP has scored about a quarter of the vote and gained more seats than Labour.  A ‘phenomenal performance’ says Prof John Curtice. Nigel Farage now looks like the main winner, suggesting that his party is mutating from an EU protest party into a being broader party of the working class. The local elections have nothing to do with the European Union so there’s no rational reason that one-in-four voters would chose UKIP — unless they believed the party was addressing their concerns on wider issues. The reason that David Cameron’s referendum pledge did not shoot the UKIP fox is that

We might this week have seen some scrutiny of UKIP candidates, but so far we’ve seen little scrutiny of their policies. But the better the party does, the more policy scrutiny it will start to come under. This is what makes UKIP’s changing tax policy so interesting. It tells us a lot about where Nigel Farage is trying to take his party. At the last election, UKIP was committed to a flat tax. There is an intellectual purity to this idea – see Allister Heath’s book on the subject – but it is hard to sell to voters as it would result in ‘the rich’ paying a lower rate. After

UKIP are buoyant and, all of a sudden, everyone’s favourite protest-group. In a curious way, the confirmation that many of their candidates really are boggle-minded, eyes-popped extremists of one stamp or another almost helps UKIP. It confirms that they’re not like the other political parties and encourages people to adopt them as the Sod it, I’m just mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more party. (These people tend not to be attracted to libertarian parties; just as well UKIP is not a libertarian party.) But UKIP should enjoy this moment while they can. They will remain a presence on the political scene and they will

Dirty tricks against UKIP by the establishment are not a new phenomenon. Though in recent days the Conservative party have been found engaging in them, there are far more striking examples from the recent past. On 25 May 2001 the Spectator published a piece by Norman Tebbit that deserves to be far better known.  Tebbit recounts the tale of two serving or former British intelligence agents who infiltrated first Jimmy Goldsmith’s Referendum Party and then UKIP. Tebbit gives examples of how UKIP’s efforts were derailed during the period in which these agents were inside the party. It is important to stress before directing you to the Tebbit piece below that

How do the Tories deal with UKIP? The party likes to split on most issues, and it has got a nice little fault line running across it at the moment on whether to squash the party as ‘fruitcakes’, or, as Conor Burns eloquently argued on Coffee House this morning, engage with the problems and anxieties that are driving Tory voters towards Nigel Farage. If UKIP does have a good showing in the local elections later this week, one side will blame the other for taking the wrong course. MPs like Burns will worry that colleagues such as Ken Clarke will have insulted their own voters, or that the party’s obsession

Nigel Farage was on Question Time again last night. This was hardly unusual, but what was interesting was that the UKIP leader U-turned on one of his flagship policies. When he spoke at a press lunch on Tuesday, Farage accepted that UKIP’s flat tax policy was ‘incomplete’, but that UKIP’s aspiration was to have taxes as low as possible. Last night, asked whether he still wanted a flat tax, he said: ‘It was in 2010, but it isn’t now, and don’t tell me about manifestos: you haven’t even got one!’ Simon Hughes pressed him on what his tax policy was, to which he replied: ‘We will have no tax on

Talk of a by-election in Portsmouth South has been growing, fuelled by allegations against MP Mike Hancock. And, in a speech to the parliamentary press gallery lunch yesterday, Nigel Farage claimed Ukip could win it. The reasoning is simple: Ukip are on the up, and they came within 2,000 votes and 5 percentage points of a win in Eastleigh, so surely they can go over the top in another Hampshire by-election where the Lib Dem incumbent has had to step down amidst a scandal. Of course Ukip could win — but its chances may not be as high as that reasoning suggests. Indeed, Farage himself seems to think his party

Nigel Farage joined lobby journalists in Parliament for lunch today. Like many of his hustings, it was a box office event, and indeed like many of those campaign trail appearances, he made plenty of the same jokes that those who follow him about have heard many times before such as the one about being married to a foreigner, and about the problem with the Westminster bubble: ‘They look the same, they sound the same, God! They’re dull! I mean, they are not much fun to be with.’ Farage, of course, is fun to be with. He was sporting a red rose for St George’s Day, and decided to regale journalists

How seriously should we take Nigel Farage? He’s an exceptional politician but when UKIP did so well at Eastleigh I suspected they may have peaked. I went along to test my theory at a UKIP rally in Worcester last week, expecting to find a few hardline Eurosceptics huddled together in a room and I wondered how the audience would compare with that of the old BNP rallies. What I found was quite different: it was mobbed, Farage spoke very well – speaking about housing, unemployment, school places – essentially, UKIP is trying to reposition as a patriotic party of the working class. I write about this in my Telegraph column

A couple of reflections upon Eastleigh. Firstly it was indeed an appalling night for Labour; midterm the party came second in this constituency in the early 90s. It received the votes a joke candidate might expect this time around. Maybe that’s because they put a comedian in the seat. I have no objection to John O’Farrell’s writing at all; but maybe one reason for Labour’s failure – and probably not the most important – was his candidature. He is the sort of thing London Labour loves; metropolitan, cool, ever so witty. Ever so PC. Does any of that play outside the M25? I don’t think so. And the result would

David Cameron’s Europe speech already had a Tutankhamun-style curse on it before events forced him to postpone it, with the much longer delay from its original date of mid-autumn causing a feeding frenzy in the media, in his own party, his coalition partners, and in the opposition. By the end of last week, it was difficult to find an opposition MP or columnist who hadn’t written a whimsical piece imagining they were Cameron giving the speech (or indeed twisting readers into an even greater willing suspension of disbelief by imagining they were John Major talking to Cameron about the as-yet undelivered speech as David Miliband managed to do). James reports

Is a group of MPs preparing to leave the Tory party’s benches and defect to UKIP? Christopher Hope has a good scoop in today’s Telegraph that UKIP’s Treasurer Stuart Wheeler has had secret talks with eight MPs about a possible defection. Wheeler told the paper that he had held ‘completely confidential’ meetings with MPs. Apparently unaware of the irony of spilling the beans to a journalist about these ‘completely confidential’ meetings, even if he doesn’t name any of those involved, the Treasurer said: ‘I have had lunch secretly if you like, in a completely confidential way, with eight different Tory MPs.’ He added: ‘Each was promised by me that I

I have a feeling that we haven’t heard the last of the idea of Tory / UKIP pact. However much Grant Shapps tries to knock the idea down, it is going to keep coming back. Why? Because Nigel Farage will never totally dismiss the idea — hence his mischief-making about doing a deal with a Michael Gove-led Tory party — and enough Tory MPs want one to give the idea oxygen. When I spoke to Farage back in May, this is what he said on the subject of candidates standing on a joint Tory/UKIP ticket: ‘What I do know is there are Conservative Associations up and down the country who

With UKIP regularly challenging the Liberal Democrats for third place in the polls, the party is now beginning to be treated with the seriousness it deserves. In an interview on the Sunday Politics, Nigel Farage made his usual, spiky case for leaving the European Union. Farage argued that he wants a free-trade deal with the rest of the EU and that the other countries would agree because ‘they need us more than we need them’. Even if Farage is right on the numbers, there’s a major doubt if the rest of Europe would be inclined to cut a deal in the wake of a British exit: a country leaving and

Should UKIP do some sort of electoral deal with the Conservative Party? This is being talked about at the moment: Cameron pledges himself to a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, Nigel Farage agrees not to field candidates against a bunch of Tory MPs somehow characterised as Eurosceptic. I can see how this would appeal to the Prime Minister, languishing fifteen points behind Labour in the opinion polls. But what good will it do Farage? UKIP has spent a considerable amount of time and energy attempting to convince people that it is not a single issue party, but rather a sort of revamped Monday Club led by nicer people.

Dave is chasing Boris across the Pond and onto the set of the Letterman Show, but Mr Steerpike understands that the prime minister is not the only British party leader heading stateside today. On the back of UKIP’s most successful ever party conference, Nigel Farage is on his way for a lap of honour around Wall Street for a series of meetings with expat hedgies, traders and fund managers. Sources close to our man in pinstripes tell me that his popularity over there is phenomenal and that he’s got a packed twenty-nine hours. To prove the point, Farage has been granted a rare meeting with the brains behind the market-moving ZeroHedge