Flying Free (15 page)

When he arose to make his maiden speech, we sat open-mouthed as, winging it without consultation, he called for the European Parliament to be given increased powers.

UKIP voters were demanding Britain’s withdrawal from the Euro-Soviet, not the usual palliative and effectively ridiculous policy of reforming it from within, as favoured by every other political party when confronted by the undemocratic nature of the institution and the undeniable corruption of its members. And here was our leader apparently advocating just that!

In fairness to Holmes, his point, if he had been allowed to complete his off-the-cuff ramble, if we had for one moment accepted the necessity or the validity of the EU, if one man’s, one party’s – one nation’s – voice had counted for anything in this giant, unresponsive institution, his point would have been a valid one – that ‘the elected representatives should have much more authority over the programmes and policies of this institution’. As it was, he was speaking both nonsense and heresy.

Being an MEP had plainly turned Holmes as it has turned so many others. On 3 September 1999, he turned up at an NEC meeting wearing his EU Parliament badge, identifying him as an MEP.

This should surely have been a joyous meeting and a time for thanks. Entirely thanks to volunteers, we had three members in the European Parliament and were an acknowledged force in the land. Graham Booth, who had not only worked so hard in the south-west but had stood aside to make way for Holmes, was looking forward to a celebratory meeting. Holmes, however, wasted no time in such frivolity but attacked the entire committee for ‘leaking’ privileged information.

Craig Mackinlay, his deputy, suggested that perhaps Holmes was taking these ‘leaks’ somewhat too seriously. Holmes drew an envelope out of his pocket and flicked it across the table at Craig. It contained his summary dismissal, which, considering that he was an unpaid volunteer, argued a shaky grip on reality.

Nonetheless, Craig got up and stalked with considerable dignity from the room. Party secretary Tony Scholefield, who had supplied the party with its Regent Street offices, remonstrated with Holmes and informed him that he had committed effective suicide in the party. Holmes had another
pre-prepared
envelope ready for him too.

This was the tough, go-getting, feverishly authoritarian tycoon at work, only he seemed to have forgotten that he was exercising his authority over a group of mild-mannered supporters to whom he owed a huge debt but who owed him nothing.

To his astonishment and outrage, a vote of no confidence in his leadership was proposed then and there. Of the seventeen people present, nine felt that they had no choice but to vote for Holmes’s removal. 

Three others, Holmes loyalists, actually voted for his retention. I was livid, but Titford and I, terrified of such mess so soon after our triumph, felt in duty bound, albeit reluctantly, to vote with our leader. No one in the party believed that we supported him.

Holmes was out. The sense of relief was overwhelming, but the embarrassment for the party promised to be hugely destructive.

We hammered out a face-saving deal. Citing whatever excuse he chose, Holmes would resign with his dignity intact at the party conference a month hence. He would not then stand for re-election. The entire NEC would also step down and would not campaign for re-election until conference was done. Holmes signed an undertaking drawn up by lawyer Hugh Meechan to this effect.

I breathed another sigh of relief. We still had the small problem of getting Holmes to knuckle down as an MEP under another leader or resign his seat, but we were confident that good sense and the interests of the party would prevail.

UKIP’s conference opened at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham on 1 October 1999. Here at least, there was a celebratory mood. This motley gang of rebels from the shires assembled to hobnob and congratulate one another and themselves on an enormous achievement. After just seven years in existence, we were the fourth political party in the land.

The first day of conference is the one intended for public consumption. The media and the provincial members with no interest in internal politics are there in force. Richard, Earl of Bradford, who had lately defected to us from the Tories, made a memorable speech. He compared himself with Michael Portillo, declaring, ‘After all these years, I am coming out! Ladies and Gentlemen, I am UKIP!’ Jeffrey and I also rallied the troops and thanked them for their efforts.

Amazingly, we enjoyed one minute fifty-two seconds of coverage on the national evening news. That was another watershed.

Holmes’s announcement would come on the morrow, when crowds were smaller and party business and specific policy would be dealt with. The media headed back home that night, duty done. So did all the loyal members who had just come along for the day to lend their support.

The following morning, Holmes struck.

We had never thought that he would go back on his word. We were totally unprepared. He, however, had carefully prepared his ground.

He swept aside the entire day’s agenda and insisted that the conference be deemed an EG M. This was promptly agreed with a lot of bemused shrugging and a show of hands.

I was in the chair but, as one of the three MEPs – and one with strong views on the subject – I at once surrendered it. Hugh Meechan volunteered to take it in my stead.

Holmes told the assembled faithful that yes, he had agreed to resign, but only under undue psychological pressure. He therefore proposed a vote of no confidence in the NEC, insisting that he had been illegally usurped and was still the constitutional leader.

Here Holmes pulled a distinctly fast one. At the time of the European elections, he had asked that NEC members should stay in office rather than standing for re-election for fear that the instability and possible controversy surrounding an internal election might adversely affect our prospects in the broader poll. Now he claimed that, in consequence, they no longer had voting rights and had no right to oust their duly elected leader. Oh, and by the way, the NEC had been infiltrated, root and branch, by the BNP – a claim subsequently proved to be wholly without foundation, but hey, what attack upon UKIP would be complete without that weary lie?

By now, the heckling was so loud that Hugh Meechan was shouting to be heard. Holmes, whose supporters had been forewarned, was confirmed as leader by 236 votes to 35 with fifty-five members, including myself, abstaining. The fact that Holmes’s supporters were there in force whilst most other members had happily gone home or were still enjoying black pudding or one another in their Travelodges meant that this was anything but an EGM.

Publicly I kept my head down. This was partly a politician’s self-interest, partly a recognition that self-interest and the interests of the party were, in this instance, one and the same. Unity was paramount. When Sked was driven out, it had still been possible to consider the formation of the New Alliance party. Now we had gone too far and achieved too much to have
the party riven from top to bottom. UKIP must be preserved, and, whoever won this unseemly tussle, I wanted Jeffrey, David Lott and myself to be there to lead it onward and the bulk of our loyal supporters with us on the journey.

Holmes had behaved shoddily, but we were colleagues for now and, though I was aware that he must not continue as leader and I was in daily – often hourly – contact with the ‘rebels’, I could not declare for them without forcing every member of the party into one camp or another. UKIP must go on unified, and I was confident that the all-important rank and file of the party-branches would at length withdraw their support from Holmes without prompting.

The rebel faction, though justified, was for now anarchic and uncontrolled. My first fear was that the party’s database might be abused, in which case members would be betrayed and would never vote for UKIP again. Back in London the following morning, I sent someone round to Regent Street to secure the computers and filing-cabinets. Tony Scholefield had already been there, using his authority as party secretary, to have the locks changed. As party chairman, I outranked him. I had the doors forced and the locks changed again, and all the sensitive files shifted down to Salisbury where Holmes guarded them.

Holmes branded everyone in the party who questioned his actions an ‘extremist’. He conducted a postal poll which, he claimed, showed 90 per cent support for him – not exactly surprising since no one who did not support him would pay for an envelope and a stamp. Craig Mackinlay had Holmes’s bank account frozen. Holmes retaliated by attempting to bring an injunction against the NEC claiming that they were ‘time-barred’ and giving them just twenty-four hours to prepare a defence.

Although Holmes engaged a QC, the judge-in-chambers decided that the punitive emergency suit, of a type commonly used to prevent gross abuse of copyright, was wholly inappropriate to these complex circumstances. He made it clear that he was displeased with such abuse of process. Craig demanded costs for the defence of a frivolous suit. Holmes, at last getting the message, settled out of court before the claim could go further.

Now was the time for us to move.

Jeffrey and I nailed our colours to the mast by writing a letter in which we stated that we had no faith in Holmes and demanded that he step down. David Lott, John Harvey and I gave the go-ahead to the required twenty-five branch chairmen and women to call a genuine EGM to sort out the unholy mess.

It was held at Westminster Central Hall on 22 January 2000. Some 900 members attended. Norris McWhirter vainly attempted to maintain control.

The crowd roared and wept and shook fists and sheaves of papers. Every speaker was shouted down. I have never, before or since, attended a meeting so constantly close to eruption into violence. One member of the audience suffered a fatal heart attack.

A splinter group under the influence of Rowan Atkinson’s brother Rodney – a man obsessed with the notion of the EU as a Nazi plot who had many avid followers in Newcastle and in Oxford – made most of the noise. Poor Norris, himself heavily under Atkinson’s influence, nonetheless called for order. Disgusted members were standing, many of them in tears at seeing all their hard work undone by this battle, and storming out.

I too was by now close to tears. Everything for which I had fought and worked was being ripped apart by self-seeking factionalism and idiotic pride. The people now walking out, maybe forever, they mattered. The ordinary advocates of decency and freedom who had sacrificed a precious day off to come up here from Suffolk, Devon, Yorkshire … they mattered, not the vainglorious morons up there squabbling for position and power.

I felt guilty too. Maybe I could have intervened sooner and prevented this. Maybe I had tried to be too clever in my bid to force Holmes and Atkinson to show their hands against the will of the members so that UKIP would not drift asunder. Because now UKIP was falling to pieces before my eyes.

It has entered UKIP legend – the way that I leaped up onto the stage and imperiously took control. Hmm.

I leaped onto that stage in desperation. If I commanded attention, it was because I howled for calm as if I had seen my own children preoccupied by squabbling as the car rolled towards the cliff-edge rather than grabbing for the handbrake. It was not the light of authority in my eyes as I yelled ‘Enough!’ and ‘Stop!’ It was the glint of fury from behind a film of tears.

It worked.

Maybe it was because so many of them knew me from my travels. Maybe it was because they were curious as to what the weird, flashy ‘boy’ who had been silent for so long actually thought of the betrayal. I like to think that it was because they had been longing to hear a voice as sincere as theirs and that sheer passion carried the day.

I cannot say that silence fell. Silence lurched at first. Silence staggered. Silence slumped as I spoke. Then silence fell and I spoke into echoes.

Holmes was overwhelmingly ordered by the party to stand down.

Under the list system, an MEP who changes allegiance cannot be removed, even though it was his party not he who was elected. We begged then tried to bully Holmes to do the honourable thing and to leave the seat in Brussels for one who represented the views of those who had elected him. He refused.

He did not need the money and it afforded him no real power, but he had known what it is to be an MEP. He did not wish to lose it. He remained there, sitting on his own amongst the unattached, until at last, in 2002, after a heart attack and a stroke, he yielded his seat to Graham Booth, the man who had won it for him.

In retrospect, I regret my provident temporising. I should, I think, have taken a stand and given a lead sooner. At the time, all that mattered to me was the unity and so the survival of the party.

Whatever my feelings towards Holmes and his towards me at the time and since, he has never once spoken out against Jeffrey, me or UKIP. Temperaments may have clashed and personal loyalties foundered, but, in our very different ways, we have remained united in the cause.

Of course it was not all over. It never is. Even in a work of fiction, those two words, ‘The End’, are the biggest lie of all.

There had to be a leadership election. I think that I really might have won that one, but now was a time for healing, and Jeffrey was emollient where I was abrasive.

Although Jeffrey too had openly demanded Holmes’s removal, I was perceived with some justice as the man who had brought him down.

I was also aware that, after being leader, there was nowhere to go save
down. William Hague, the best speaker and the most gifted man in his party, was then leading the Tories. He was just three years my senior, and his destiny was already obvious to me.

So Jeffrey stood and, after a fierce competition with Rodney Atkinson and the timely release of a letter written by Christopher Booker of the
Sunday Telegraph
and his colleague Bill Jamieson, now executive editor of the
Scotsman,
in which they declared that they could not support the party under Atkinson, won the day by a mere 0.4 per cent.