Flying Free (18 page)

For myself, I have no desire to drink tepid champagne with people with whom I have nothing in common. My colleagues and I drink at O’Farrells,
the nearest proper pub to the parliament. We have to buy our own drinks, and it is by certain standards a dive, but it is a congenial dive, we can smoke there and anyhow, Farage’s First Law states that the quality of a drinking establishment is inversely correlated to the refinement of its décor.

I regard my mission as telling the British people how they are being abused and their freedoms eroded. This involves driving thousands of miles and missing out on lots and lots of attendance allowances. Yes, I pay my wife a small income to handle my correspondence and diary, but she did the same work efficiently for several years unpaid, and would it somehow be preferable that I pay some mini-skirted intern instead?

I stayed in hotels and
pensions
in Brussels and Strasbourg for my first seven years as an MEP. It was only when I was leader of the group and compelled to spend six or seven nights a month in Brussels that it plainly became at once more agreeable and economical to have a reliable base with a change of clothes
in situ
. I very deliberately did not buy, but now rent a flat which I share with my colleague Godfrey Bloom.

When we took the flat, Bloom’s theory was that we would at last be able to get early nights. It hasn’t worked yet, but it sounds great.

In 2002, I realised that I could no longer responsibly run Farage Futures and fulfil my responsibilities as an MEP. I closed down the company in good health. I ensured that every employee found a job. I thus lost my personal income and missed out on the biggest commodities boom of all time.

I have spent my savings from the metals-trading days. I am now wholly dependent on my income as an MEP. My former colleagues in the City earn more in a month than I in a year.

I think that I can claim, Mr MacShane, that my eccentric passion for freedom, so far from ‘lining my pockets with gold’, has cost me millions.

I am not out to score political points, but would gently point out in the interests of justice that the Europhile Mr MacShane claimed £125,000 over the period 2001–2008 for the scruffy garage attached to his home which served, so he said, as his constituency office, a further £135,000 in second-home allowances and over £400,000 for staff salaries, as well as some £20,000 or so per annum in Incidental Expenses provision.

The taxpayer also bought him eight laptops in three years, five of them claimed for in November, December or January, a £212 Palm Pilot and three digital cameras worth up to £300 each, and paid more than £8,000 to MacShane’s brother’s company for ‘research and translation’.

I accept that the whole business of MPs’ pay is ridiculous. If we want the best candidates, we should pay a sum which reflects their excellence – but only in a parliament which has sovereign power. At present, a GP or a secondary school headmaster earns considerably more, and the member who votes himself or herself a rise commensurate with responsibility will be accused of greed and voted out of office. We have therefore ended up with a parliament of craven, talentless functionaries eager for power within the system and an unworkable fudge whereby expenses substitute for income.

I do not blame MacShane for making the most of a bad system. I would be grateful, however, if he were to acknowledge that I work in a far more corrupt system and have renounced far more in the cause of service to, not domination of, the British electorate, and I will wager that his expenses have been greater than mine with far less cause.

Being an MEP is the only job that I have ever encountered which pays you more the less you do. Thus the system stays intact.

Who wants to get up to do the brightwork, chart-plotting or maintenance when you might thus rock a boat so full of luxuries and privilege? Nah. Better, far better, to lie still in the sunshine, order another drink and not worry about the state of the keel or the course.

That, then, is the principle on which the European Parliament works.

It doesn’t.

Yes, we are amateurs and oddballs. We have to be, don’t we, to stand out from the crowd, to reject protection and the assurances afforded by the party system and to demand freedom to run our own lives?

It would have been so easy to accept Tory assurances that they were on the same side and that no further powers or freedoms would be surrendered.

I flatter myself that I might have done pretty well in the Conservative Party if only I had been willing to found my life upon a bedrock of bullshit.

I might have had the chance to prove it too. In early 2005, I was approached by a Tory Knight of the Shires and asked to attend a meeting at a private house. There, with a mutual guarantee of confidentiality, I was told that Michael Howard would look very favourably upon my application for the candidacy in the safe seat of Tunbridge Wells at the forthcoming general election.

Archie Norman was standing down, and this was my sort of seat. It was close to my home. There were lots of business people, lots of fishing people here… As for Euroscepticism – well, why not? The Conservative Party was a broad church. The leader himself was anti-federalist, as I knew…

I knew where this was going. Just what, I wanted to know, did tolerable Euroscepticism mean? If it merely meant impotent expostulation against EU excesses to keep the voters happy, Michael Howard could go hang.
Would I be permitted to continue to press for a referendum on membership of the EU, so giving the British people the chance to decide for themselves, for the first time in history, whether they wanted to be ruled by anyone but themselves in the Mother of Parliaments?

Er…

…well…

…obviously actual
withdrawal
from the EU wasn’t on the agenda and mustn’t be mentioned.

Why not? Were the British people unfit to decide their own destiny?

Well, no. Of course not. Not exactly. But that debate was over, wasn’t it? Withdrawal was not feasible. Negotiation in order to reform the EU, of course, was splendid.

But the debate was never held! The people were led by the nose into subservience and lied to by Tory politicians. As for negotiation, how can you negotiate without sanction, and what sanction did we possess save the threat of withdrawal?

Oh, come now, old boy. That’s all in the past. Can’t turn the clock back, can we? And all this withdrawal stuff is really impractical, but you know, we could really use you, and I think that I can assure you…

The tyranny of the status quo.

I drained the whisky, which was far too good to be wasted in a cliché, and brought the meeting to a mildly uncomfortable close.

Although this was the first attempt to single me out from the herd, it was far from the first time that the Conservatives had offered a deal. In 2000 our media officer, novelist Mark Daniel, arranged a meeting at the East India Club with their member for Teignbridge, Patrick Nicholls, in order to discuss our standing down the UKIP candidate in his constituency at the forthcoming election.

Patrick was sturdily Eurosceptic in outlook. He had voted against all integrationist measures (save Maastricht). He was a natural ally. His majority in his lovely Devon constituency was just 281. He sorely needed a clear run if he were to stand a chance. If he signed a pledge that he would vote against every measure which increased the powers of Brussels, we were willing in principle to withdraw our candidate.

Of course, Patrick could make no such undertaking autonomously. He had consulted Central Office. The whips had supplied him with a list of ‘Eurosceptic’ sitting Tories against whom we should also withdraw our candidates. If we agreed to do so – well, who knew what they would do for us?

I took one look at the list and I’m afraid that I started laughing. All the usual suspects were there – the men and women who made impressive noises in Parliament and on the stump in order to win the support of the overwhelmingly Eurosceptic majority of Tory voters but then voted, once in power, for the European project. Even Patrick had to admit rather shamefacedly that the whole proposed deal was based on a fiction. He looked very sad as he left.

He believed, like us, that we should withdraw from the EU, but could not express that view. When we suggested that in that case he should join us (and, with his experience, he would surely have been an MEP in short order), he mentioned that he had been given reason to suppose that there might be ‘a red seat’ for him if he stayed where he was, and that he could do more good in the Lords than in Brussels. Of course, Patrick lost his green seat, there was no red one and another loyal Tory who had sought to express a valid and sincere view was prevented from doing so.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, Patrick and Mark had independently anticipated a deal which the Conservatives had already initiated the previous month in Scotland. Lord Neidpath, a UKIP supporter, had been stalking with our new leader, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, then a Tory. They had concocted a plot. Jamie Neidpath knew that UKIP needed money. Malcolm Pearson knew that the Tories needed all the help that they could get.

In December, therefore, I received a call from Malcolm, whom I had known for some years thanks to our membership of the Bruges Group. We arranged a meeting at which he handed me precisely the same list as Patrick Nicholls, with the same proposal – that we withdraw our candidates in their constituencies. My reaction was exactly the same.

This time, however, I was invited to amend the list, removing the obvious frauds. I did so. It left a very short list. Malcolm thought, however, that the leadership might still be interested. I was asked what the price
would be. I replied, laughing and fully aware that even the Tories could not muster such sums nor explain a sudden deficit of this size in their fighting fund, ‘Well, a million pounds would be a good start.’

And that was as far as it went. It was all purely speculative and an interesting opportunity for us to gauge the extent of Tory fears. William Hague got to hear of the whole business and squelched it at once.

The Times
got hold of the story. It read as though we were Just William or something, strutting with our toy guns up to the local banker and saying ‘Giss a million pounds or else’. I was by now becoming immune to implications and was only glad that Tory desperation was being publicly acknowledged. I went off to an Old Boys Golf Society Dinner at the East India Club and of course switched off my mobile phone. When I stepped back onto the street in the early hours, I found that I had received fifty-one voice messages.

Aha.

OK, so, when playing this sort of game, don’t disappear. A fairly obvious lesson, I suppose, but a valuable one for all that. For better or, as my family would maintain, for worse, I have made it a rule to be as accessible as possible.

As a matter of fact, we had a healthy fighting-fund for that 2001 general election thanks to Paul Sykes, who financed leaflets, full-page newspaper advertising, billboards and, where necessary, candidates.

I stood in Bexhill & Battle. Some suggested that, as a sitting MEP, I should sit this one out, but you know what I think of some. I love electioneering. Besides, the retiring Tory MP, Charles Wardle, had declared his intention to support me. Charles and his wife Lesley frequently joined me as I campaigned from an open-topped double-decker until it was sabotaged by the addition of sugar to the fuel-tank.

I won 3,474 votes, 7.8 per cent of the total.

We had only won 390,000 votes nationwide, but we had caused a stir and the Tories were thoroughly trounced. They mistakenly attributed this to the European question, which they have in consequence avoided ever since. In fact, William Hague had run with ‘Keep the £’ – which had addressed only part of the question – and Labour had promptly trumped
that card with a promise – never to be kept – of a referendum. The Tories now elected a thoroughgoing Eurosceptic and Maastricht bastard, Iain Duncan Smith, to replace William Hague as their leader.

Although open discussion of EU membership was proscribed, one wing of the party continued to flirt with us. They still wanted to know my price for bringing the Eurosceptic strays back into their fold. My answer was ‘a commitment to a referendum on continued membership of the European Union’. Of course, any such deal would have alienated the Europhiliac big hitters such as Clarke and Heseltine. IDS’s position was not sufficiently assured for that.

We had acquired our very own ‘bastard’ in the form of Roger Knapman, a former Tory whip who stood for UKIP in North Devon. He was a very grown-up sort of candidate for us, far more politically astute than anyone else in the party. Plenty of ex-MPs had supported us once they no longer had to conceal their views, but Roger was the first former full-time professional who wanted not only to join the party but to play an active part.

I grew fond of him and his wife Carolyn, and many a plot was hatched in their Devon manor. He was astute, urbane and thoroughly clubbable. I was, frankly, enormously relieved at his arrival. Jeffrey was nearing seventy, his health was suffering and had done the job for which he had been elected.

He had brought peace and some sort of respectability to the party. Membership had risen to over 8,000. He was tired, and had already made it plain that he did not want to remain leader after the 2004 election, nor subject the party to the possibly destructive effects of a leadership battle just before it.

There was no other obvious candidate for the post given that I had no desire for it. I wanted a free hand to prepare for the 2004 Euro-elections and was acutely mindful of William Hague’s fate. I was still under forty at the time. Roger seemed a gift from the gods.

He was, too. He was a quiet, self-effacing, self-deprecating leader. He asked for nothing from UKIP. He offered his services and gave them freely. He stood for election to the NEC like any other party member. He stood as leader only after a great deal of coercion and special pleading from me and others. He won unopposed.

Under his leadership, David Lott and I were given a free hand. The
number of branches grew exponentially and membership swelled to over 20,000. Much-needed revenue started to flow into the coffers. Roger was unflappable back then and a genuinely nice guy, wholly committed to the cause.

Of course, no man became a Tory whip without the ability to keep his ear to the ground and the will to exert pressure where necessary, and Roger had both.

He is a devious man. I use the word as a compliment. I have a bad habit of letting people know what I think of their views. Roger always listened to them sympathetically and responded politely, but his eyes and ears were always picking up ‘tells’, and he would be plotting a future use – or occasionally the downfall – of his interlocutor even as he was owlishly smiling and nodding. He was a politician through and through.

On the other hand, unlike so many of that time-serving fraternity, he was outstandingly loyal. He did not pick people up and drop them. He was like certain dogs or children who subject you to lengthy, uncomfortable appraisal before affording you their total trust. The person who rendered service to Roger could rely on him to the bitter end.

It was this unquestionable virtue which in time, I think, became a fetish and was to occasion a rift between us. I too am loyal, and, despite occasional fierce, private arguments over policy, always did Roger’s bidding. His loyalty, however, was particular and personal like that of a dog who will serve his chosen favourites even when they go mad and burn down the family home. I was more like the guard-dog who will protect the home – even against its residents.

A certain tension existed even in those early days because of one of the injustices of modern life – image. Roger’s slow, pensive manner and his owlish appearance did not play well on television.

I am no Kilroy – in fact, the
Daily Mail
insists that I most closely resemble Mr Bean, and they do not, alas, refer to Sean – but I suppose that the quality sometimes characterised as ‘fiery’ plays well on camera. No matter that I may suffer
l’esprit de
Jacob’s
escalier
on the way home and curse myself for shooting my mouth off when righteous anger or a good joke possesses me. It makes for good television.

Roger felt this injustice keenly. In the Tory party and in UKIP, his contributions had been considerably greater than his public recognition. He wanted to appear on
Question Time
and quite reasonably could not understand why I was repeatedly asked back whilst he was never invited.

He had formerly seemed to understand, however unhappily, that some of us, for no obvious reason, are cursed or blessed with a certain facility or glibness denied to others.

It clearly preyed on his mind. ‘But I should be in the news!’ he would tell me plaintively.

‘Well, do something or say something,’ I replied. ‘Journalists can’t do all the work alone. There has to be a hook.’

One day in 2005 when I was yet again to appear on
Question Time
, Roger rang our Press Office and for a while insisted that, as leader, it should be he who appeared. If he were not allowed, no one from UKIP would turn up. It was at that point that I started to worry.

I would no doubt have felt something of the same had I been in his shoes. He had a lot to say and he wanted the chance to say it.

It was not this, however – or not only this – which in the end caused us to become regrettably estranged. It was that admirable loyalty which at last became an end in itself. He protested that Tom Wise was a colleague and that we should stand by him. I thought it better to stand by the thousands who had trusted Wise – and us – to expose corruption in the EU, not to go native so soon as we reached the interior.

In 2009, Roger even appeared as a character witness for Wise’s defence. I had agreed to appear for the prosecution. By then, he had even left our group in the parliament so that he could keep his own allowances for his preferred lieutenants rather than pool them like the rest of us.

It was not a clash of personalities (well, maybe, in that I can be domineering where Roger was increasingly bumbling and pacific, but the double-act had worked before) so much as a divergence of priorities. My eyes were firmly fixed upon the party’s success, to which personal loyalty and cohesion were certainly essential. As time went by, he focused only on the latter.