Flying Free (11 page)

And God and established politicians are overwhelmingly on the side of the big battalions.

Over the years, we have had to fight not just for every second of every official party political broadcast, but for every column inch. Because we were not a mainstream party, we must, it seems, perforce be extremists. There is a sort of logic to this. What just and reasonable cause, after all, would not find advocates in three established parties?

Ours, actually.

I suspect that we could never have survived even the first two years had we not acquired at this point a quiet, dedicated member whose organisational skills were equalled by his honesty and lack of self-interest.

David Lott was the desperately needed officer amongst us enthusiastic amateurs. It may sound like one of those ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ tributes, but I seriously doubt that UKIP could have survived those first years and grown up – I seriously doubt that I would have remained on board amidst all the factional in-fighting and plotting – had it not been for David’s calming, encouraging, motivating influence and his clarity of vision.

David was a master fighter jet pilot with the RAF. He flew reconnaissance planes, was one of the first to master the Harrier when it came into service, served all over the world in constant battle-readiness at a time when there were no battles to fight, rose to the rank of Squadron Leader and proved himself a superb administrator, managing three squadrons, 1,300 vehicles and a vast array of ordnance.

He retired and took up a job as a commercial pilot with Britannia Airways. He flew for them for sixteen years, soon doubling up as area manager for the north east, before taking early retirement at fifty-three.

He should then have enjoyed his existence in the Borders with his wife Kathy, but he just happened to see an article about Sked in the
Daily Mail
and made the mistake of ringing to express his support.

Within ten minutes, Sked had persuaded him to stand in the 1994 election. David won 4.25 per cent of the vote and, as he recalls with a sigh, ‘bang went retirement. This was a new organisation without infrastructure. I just happened to be the mug who had the requisite experience and rang at just that moment. The party has been at the centre of my existence ever since.’

David, Kathy and I met early that year at a UKIP lunch for all candidates in the European election. It was a long lunch. We discussed the party’s weaknesses. We envisaged its future. We were aware even then that Sked, though a visionary and charismatic enough in a small and compliant group, was a potential liability.

In his defence, he had never thought beyond establishing a League, revealing the truth, attracting adherents and so obscurely changing the course of British history.

As with Saul’s conversion, if you read history a certain way (GCSE gobbets for example), it can read thus. ‘The women’s suffrage movement encountered much traditionalist opposition but also attracted much powerful support. Dramatic demonstrations, increasing pressure from distinguished writers and intellectuals and the experience of effective female emancipation in the Great War finally prevailed…’

There. Simple. Fifty-six years of impassioned battling and brilliantly organised campaigning distilled into a simple sports result.

We knew that it could not work that way. We were mere microbes hoping to mass in sufficient numbers to fell a mammoth.

The EU empire had limitless resources and a hugely efficient propaganda machine. We had no money and desperately needed good media relations if the word was to spread and we were to be recognised and taken seriously. Sked’s ease with
New Statesman
and
Spectator
columnists was not sufficient.

We needed a structured hierarchy if there were not to be hundreds of dissidents bidding for the leadership every time something went wrong.

We needed thick skins where Sked’s was shuddering and sensitive as that of a thoroughbred filly.

Above all, even if we sang in consistently sweet harmony (which was highly unlikely), we needed a massed choir to shake the building. At present we had only a little glee-club.

David’s Luton horse-box, which had been bought for his favourite leisure activities, was converted into a mobile information centre. David drove about the country, parked in market squares or on village greens, pulled out a collapsible table and chairs, piled up the leaflets and, with a few local allies, engaged passers-by in debate. He talked to the local media. That was how many – maybe most – of UKIP’s party branches were begun.

More than that, however, David brought his RAF experience of managing hotheads to bear. At Cranwell they had been hotheads because they were young, fit and battle ready. In UKIP they were hotheads because they passionately believed in the cause and had no established hierarchy to keep them in place.

Some of them believed in the cause for the wrong reasons and had their own agendas. Some were no doubt nationalist or racist. Some believed the EU to be a long-established Nazi plot. Some may well have thought that it was a Merovingian plot hatched by gay-lib Knights Templar with highly trained Roquefort cheese-mites, its codes clearly discernible in Beethoven string quartets and the works of Johnny Hallyday. I don’t know. Any new party will attract its share of strange bedfellows and, God knows, we had ours.

The vast majority, however, had seen the truth and believed in democracy but, on seeing the chaotic nature of the Party at that stage, either sought to take control or wanted to give up in despair. David created the structure which, I think, had been beneath Sked’s attention and beyond his abilities.

I followed David’s meandering lead. I was soon being referred to as ‘the Billy Graham of the Eurosceptic movement’. For the next ten years, my every free evening and weekend was spent in sparsely attended village and town halls and upstairs or back rooms in pubs, making speeches and spreading the word less formally in the rather better attended bars afterwards.

With the assistance of a few other truly committed new members, including Graham Booth, a successful hotelier in Torbay, and John Whittaker, a doctor of economics at Lancaster University, both in time to become MEPs, the branches increased in size. I made many friends in my travels. We were still broke and still disorganised. Sked reserved media relations to himself.

I have just learned an interesting if obvious lesson in narrative. If a working girl has amazing sex, there is no story. If a dull virgin has a halfway moderate shag, it is a foundation for inspiring romances and fairy-tales.

Keep the central characters’ lives uneventful. When they are full, the story gets dull.

There is precious little to say about the years between 1994 and 1997 because every day was filled with activity and new, fascinating characters. We were engaged in building a political party nationwide. From dawn to dusk, I risked millions on the exchange. From dusk onward, I made converts and many, many friends. I drove tens of thousands of miles every year. I spoke at meetings all over Britain. I was arguing until the small hours. There were occasional fleeting affairs. Dawn saw me heading back to London.

When I had no other meeting, I headed for Salisbury.

Shortly after the 1994 election, a retired farmer named Tony Gatling rang me to ask if I would be interested in standing there at the next general election. Tony was a founder member of the Salisbury branch and he impressed me from the outset by his commitment. I considered his suggestion for a few weeks and was at last persuaded by the sheer number of letters in
The Times
and
Telegraph
correspondence columns signed ‘A. D. Gatling, Salisbury’.

In 1995, I set to work with a programme of leafleting, canvassing and public meetings. Every four weeks, we held a well-organised action day. We rapidly acquired a superb, dedicated team of helpers. With such a programme and such a team, we could surely have won that seat with ease if only people had known who the hell we were. Instead, we had to introduce not just me but the entire party and the entire concept.

This was my first bid at door-knocking and public-speaking on my own account. I was lucky enough to be able to stay with Tony and Mary Gatling in their delightful thatched cottage for weeks on end. I was lucky too to have a first-rate agent and chairman in Malcolm Wood, who has since been a UKIP stalwart in the south west. We drew small crowds. We counted an audience of thirty a triumph. At one memorable meeting in a village called Hanging Langford, no one turned up. We still did our double-act before retiring to the pub. It was all great practice.

A couple of months before the election in 1997, several of our members received anonymous, libellous letters alleging all sorts of things of which I did not even want to be guilty. That was the start of a campaign which continues to this day.

I already knew that our prospects in the 1997 general election were negligible. I did not care at all. No sooner had Jimmy Goldsmith been elected to the EU Parliament for the French party L’Autre Europe than he decided that he was after all going to serve the cause by means of party politics. He announced the foundation of the Referendum Party, which was to stand for this one election only in every seat where the established parties’ principal candidates had not already declared themselves in favour of a referendum on the future of the EU.

Goldsmith’s wealth meant that he did not have quite the same problems as we in getting the message across. He simply took out double-page advertisements in all the major newspapers and, as the election approached, sent a VHS tape to five million British homes. The support which he mustered and the prominence of many of his candidates – Mrs Thatcher’s economic adviser, Alan Walters, Tory MP Sir George Gardiner, TV botanist David Bellamy, entrepreneur Peter de Savary – merely drew attention to the extent of Euroscepticism in Britain and drew many supporters out of the woodwork.

It was rumoured that Sked and Goldsmith met in the run-up to the election. Sked has since denied that any such meeting took place. The story that I was reliably told is that Goldsmith actually offered to stand down his candidates in seventy-five seats where UKIP candidates would instead stand on ‘UKIP/Referendum Party’ tickets. Goldsmith was willing to pay all costs.

Sked, so the story goes, refused the deal. This would, alas, have been entirely characteristic. Aside from his insistence on being top dog, Sked displayed a quite unreasonable dislike for Goldsmith and the Referendum Party, who were, after all, natural allies.

Now the bloodshed started.

Two events – both apparently trivial in themselves – occurred which were to come back to haunt both me and the party.

On 12 October 1996, I was back where it all started for me at Westminster Central Hall. Over 1,000 UKIP delegates turned up for the party’s second ever conference.

The buckets were being passed around in hope that a few enthused members might have backed a winner when a benefactor, plainly unconcerned to preserve his privacy, stood and pledged that he would personally match whatever sum was raised. Other patrons had been discreet in their donations. In any language, however, this one translated as ‘I have lots of money and seek prominence in this party.’

And that is another problem common to all newly launched parties. They need fuelling and can as well be boarded with grapnels of gold as by mobs of mutineers or troublemakers marooned by other boats.

The grand gesture had in fact cost a mere £4,500 and the cheque took a long time in coming, but, on investigation, it seemed that we could well use the acumen and the energy as well as the cash of Mr Michael Holmes. He had at least £8 million in the bank. He was just fifty-eight. He had worked in the advertising and marketing departments of the
Sunday Times
and the
Evening Standard
before launching his own free newspaper
company in 1970. The business had boomed and he had sold it to Reed International in 1987. He had thus been rich and effectively idle for the last nine years.

There is a lovely old adjective which describes me now. It is
hadiwist,
as in ‘His tone (or his expression) was hadiwist as he considered Michael Holmes’. It means just what it says. Had I wist that Holmes’s retirement until now had been empty, that he had had no passion or interest aside from his family into which to channel his undoubted energies, I might have been less eager to have him on board.

As it was, I was as delighted as everyone else to have a proven and
well-capitalised
businessman on our team. I was young. I did not feel that I knew enough to challenge Sked, though the volunteer staff in our London office was discontented, ill-informed and totally disorganised and the provinces were all at sea.

John Harvey was a teacher, Gerard Batten a salesman, Graham Booth a provincial hotelier and so on. Why British society is so structured that such practical men must defer to a metropolitan theoretician I do not know, but we did.

Only David Lott had the experience and seniority to tell Sked that the party was a mess. ‘I told him that we needed delegation, organisation, staff – help in what we were doing. He was still hogging the limelight in all media interviews and seemed to think that was all that was needed.’

Apparently, Sked made it clear to David that he resented my smallsuccesses as a speaker around the country.
‘L’etat, c’est moi’
was Sked’s attitude. He wanted no rising stars. His invention was running away from him and he couldn’t stand it. He just wouldn’t listen.’

Holmes appeared to be the means for us to move on to the next stage of our development.

And so, in a sense, he proved, though not as we had anticipated.

And then there was the Deavin business – the first direct attack which UKIP sustained. It wasn’t to be the last.

Just as an accusation of promiscuity is the first and cheapest made by a woman of a rival, so racism is the charge most readily brought against any contemporary political party and perhaps the most difficult to refute. ‘Some of my best friends are Jews’ is in fact a perfectly acceptable response to the charge of anti-Semitism, but what defence does not sound patronising and particular, and how can a negative be proven?

UKIP had the added disadvantage of representing the interests of one nation, albeit that nation comprises many races, against the perceived or presumed interests of others, albeit those others also have anti-federalist movements. I will not deny that, amongst our members, there are blazered buffoons and unschooled oiks who have not progressed beyond the 1950s in their attitudes towards other cultures. So there are in the Tory and Labour parties, but they are more easily ignored.

For all that, those who sought to tar us with that brush were in large measure unsuccessful. There was a memorable attempt in
The Guardian
of 30 December 1996. In his desperation, Europhile Liberal Democrat Lord Wallace ended up apparently demonstrating the very vice of which he accused UKIP:

As Wallace tied himself in knots, the NEC met to draw up its election manifesto. At this point Sked introduced one of his post-graduate students who, he said, was writing a ground-breaking history of post-war Britain with particular reference to Harold Macmillan’s government.

This physically personable but otherwise unprepossessing young man’s name was Mark Deavin. Sked believed that such a sterling chap would be
very useful to UKIP. He even proposed that we take him on as our research director at a cost of £3,000, which we barely had in the coffers.

We all shook hands with our leader’s protégé and said rhubarb. Deavin attended two more meetings then vanished. By then, word had reached me that Deavin might be associated with the BNP. I raised concerns with Sked but he said things like ‘All nonsense, I’m sure’ and ‘There’ll always be tittle-tattle’ and proceeded to the next business.

In April 1997, just a couple of weeks before the election, Radio 4’s investigative programme
The Cook Report
telephoned. Deavin was indeed a BNP activist.

My apologies here to the majority of British readers who are all too painfully aware of the BNP and its principles, but a word of explanation may be needed for those hitherto more fortunate.

The British National Party is the slightly more polished and professional successor of the National Front. It is determinedly white-supremacist. Its constitution, until February 2010, required that all members must be ‘of British or closely kindred native European stock’. Even then it was only changed because of the threat of legal action. It opposes mixed-race relationships and immigration and proposes financially aided repatriation for law-abiding immigrants and compulsory repatriation for all others.

All such organisations seek to justify their policies with academic research ‘proving’ that Aryans discovered fire or invented jazz, that the
Wizard of Oz
was covert Zionist propaganda, Auschwitz a naturist holiday camp which suffered technical glitches and so on. Deavin, as their research director, is the guru of such ‘studies’.

The BNP is rabidly anti-foreign. Ergo and ipso facto it is also rabidly anti-EU. Deavin’s thesis is that the EU is part of a Jewish (natch) plot concocted by ‘a homogenous transatlantic political and financial elite [somehow including Harold Macmillan and Stephen Spielberg for all its homogeneity] to destroy the national identities and create a raceless new world order’. The BNP therefore bitterly resents UKIP, which supplies a somewhat saner and more inclusive voice for those who value freedoms and cultural rather than racial autonomy.

Deavin was immediately expelled from UKIP, but the damage was done. 
A month later I was to compound it with the worst mistake of my political life.

The election went as poorly as I had expected. The country’s priority was removing the Tories and replacing them with new, fresh Labour, so there were few stray votes to be picked up either by us or the Referendum Party. The RP contested 547 constituencies, we just 194. They won 3 per cent, UKIP 1.1. Of the 106,000 votes which we won, I, standing in beautiful Salisbury, received 3,332 – 5.7 per cent of the poll and the highest UKIP vote in the country.

I am a bull-trader by nature, but no one can survive on the markets with blind optimism alone. Nonetheless, I declared then with absolute certainty that we would have MEPs in the 1999 election and that I intended to be among them. I had no idea how I would manage it given that I was already living on four hours’ sleep a night, but heigh-ho.

Thanks to Goldsmith and us, the nation had awoken – slowly, groaning and with more pressing things on its mind, perhaps, but it had nonetheless awoken – to the threat from Brussels.

The Referendum Party had caused a host of ardent Eurosceptics to raise their heads above the parapet. These were not just millionaire chums of Jimmy but stalwarts such as the indispensable, infinitely good-natured and inventive, bearded, sea-booted fisherman Mick Mahon of Falmouth and mild-mannered, retired Frinton undertaker Jeffrey Titford, who had bagged 9.7 per cent of the vote in Harwich.

Rivalry is generally healthy but can become asinine compulsion. I have met restaurateurs who seek to put down competitors just down the road, unaware, it seems, that diners, for economic as much as gastronomic reasons, would choose to eat ambrosia every night of the week and that every halfway decent establishment profits from a Michelin star in town. Rick Stein has the right idea. Padstow’s reputation has made fortunes for the Seafood Restaurant’s neighbouring bakery, which makes great pasties. He has even set up a chippy.

Sked was no Stein. He did not get it.

He not only resented any popularity which my travels yielded but
instantly saw Holmes too as a rival and wrote a libellous letter about him to David Lott. He also had a – to me totally incomprehensible – dislike of the Referendum Party.

His fears were self-fulfilling. OK, Sked was neither organiser nor populist, but he was a bright guy who really could have remained UKIP’s revered founding father, still explaining the cause to those publications which could understand him, if only he had acknowledged his own failings. He preferred to fight.

Lott, Holmes and I fought back. The alternative was that UKIP sank slowly but surely into the still and stagnant shallows. It might have done just that if the Skedites had prevailed.

We organised a meeting in Basingstoke to which we invited all the most successful Referendum Party and UKIP candidates. Sked had proscribed all such association and instantly announced that all UKIP members were bidden to a meeting on the same evening in London.

At his meeting, Sked effectively declared that Lott, Holmes and I were beyond the pale. His
bella figura
was gravely threatened when Malcolm Wood arose and told him to applause that he could ill afford to lose Nigel Farage, ‘the best platform speaker that we possess’.

Down in Basingstoke, we simply made a lot of new friends.

There was still room for compromise, but Sked went ballistic. He summarily suspended then expelled the lot of us without consultation. Open war was declared.

Now that intemperate letter from Sked to Lott about Holmes came into play. Holmes, who was by nature vengeful and had money to burn, began legal action against Sked and threw a libel action into the mix. Sked was repeatedly advised not to defend the action. He rejected the advice. Craig Mackinlay, a founder member and a long-standing loyalist, told him that the libel was minimal but unquestionable, but Sked spent £15,000 of precious party funds obtaining precisely the same opinion from counsel.

I was perhaps still stupider.

BNP spy Mark Deavin rang. He told me that he had valuable information about Sked which might help me in the battle. It had never been his intention to betray UKIP, he said. He had been the victim of a mugging
and, when susceptible, had found solace and support in the BNP. Now he wanted to make it up to me.

Thumb in bum, mind in neutral, concerned only with winning the battle in hand, I arranged to meet him for lunch at St Katharine Docks. In my defence, that is how little I considered subterfuge necessary. I met him in a public place much frequented by city colleagues and journalists from nearby Wapping. As ever, I hailed a few passing people and casually exchanged greetings as we talked. Deavin remained apologetic and conciliatory but had no new intelligence to convey. I returned to Farage and Co. a little bemused, thinking that I had wasted a lunchtime.

It was not a waste for the BNP. I had been photographed with Deavin on the street outside the pub, and one of the people hanging around us was proudly identified by them as Tony ‘The Bomber’ Lecomber, a peculiarly malodorous floater who had done time for possession of explosives and for stabbing a Jewish schoolteacher.

I had been right royally stitched up.

Sked considered his options. Common sense prevails far less often than is commonly supposed and than it undoubtedly deserves. It fares best, I find, when fighting shoulder to shoulder with
force majeure.
Then people start inviting common sense in and asking it to give them babies.

Not to be immodest, Sked was up against 90 per cent of the useful energy and talent in the party at that time. Even those who liked him and admired his intellect conceded that he could not run a piss-up in a brewery. He had to go.

He penned a last, vitriolic edition of the newsletter, anointed Craig Mackinlay his heir and departed back into the academic hinterland.

Even then, there were plenty of members who believed that we had struck too soon or too savagely. Graham Booth, John Harvey, Gerard Batten – all regretted the manner of Sked’s departure and thought that he deserved better. John and Gerard even resigned from their posts in protest. All, however, were to be shocked and hurt by the fury which he has subsequently expended on UKIP and on all who remained in the party.

He has become the lazy journalist’s easiest source of a space-filling story about UKIP. At every election, Sked has re-emerged on air to accuse
UKIP of right-wing extremism – he who invited Deavin to the NEC – to reiterate the claim that I have been known to drink too much (moi?), to chastise us for non-attendance at the EU Parliament (though this was our long-stated policy), to quote BNP troublemakers and ‘certain observers’ as to non-existent ‘pacts’ and to urge everyone to vote Tory.