Flying Free (21 page)

For once it worked.

What she meant, of course, was that she was fed up with being a
‘non-inscrit’
member and would like to be accepted into our group. I had to explain that her policies were, um … slightly irreconcilable with ours and that it would not be possible until she too became a libertarian.

Anyhow, on that first day, Godfrey had somehow stolen all the headlines. Kilroy, whose big gesture was to rip up his ballot paper for the election of the new president, had been comprehensively upstaged.

Later, Godfrey expressed more lucidly and temperately what he really felt. MEPs with little or no understanding of business were enacting equal rights legislation whose effect was to put English women out of work, and it was ‘no place of Brussels or Strasbourg to come between an employer and an employee’.

Godfrey has since, incidentally, been an effective and conscientious MEP in the only way that we know – reporting back to his constituents on EU absurdities and waste and the erosion of their freedoms and speaking up in the parliament – for what little it is worth – for British small businesses against their unelected drivers as they steer them to their doom.

Kilroy declared his loyalty to Roger, stating, ‘I have no ambitions. I have no intentions. I have no desire to be the leader of UKIP’.

I grant it. We could have done more that summer.

I am not sure
how
we could have done more. We did not have a huge professional corps to work in our absence, and, from the MEPs to the stalwarts who manned the tea-urns and distributed leaflets, we were drained of resources and energy. I was leading a group in the European Parliament and had no official role in the UK. David Lott had resigned as party chairman. We were focused on formulating strategies, engaging staff and setting up our offices in Brussels, Strasbourg and London. Until Paul Sykes, who was impressed by Kilroy’s silky media skills, consented to reopen the coffers, we were all but skint.

Our more active followers were not so impressed. They had supported us through a great deal of thin and the odd notable instance of thick. They had been betrayed too often by self-seeking, rhinestone politicians. The fact that we were real, albeit rough, pebbles was important to them, yet here we were with a dirty great gleaming zircon in our midst. They eyed it with open suspicion.

I had hoped that, during his holiday in Spain, Kilroy might have researched UKIP, its history and the personal histories of its members so that he could more readily have fitted in and understood where they were coming from.

I still sincerely believed that he had the acumen and flair to become leader, if only he could forget the media persona and remember where
he
had come from and what had originally motivated him.

Our first engagement of the new campaign was the Hartlepool by-election. This had been called because Peter Mandelson was off to Brussels to be EU Commissioner for Trade.

This is one of the problems with the EU Commission (aside from its being unelected, unrepresentative, autocratic and all-powerful, I mean). When a government nominates a Commissioner, it cannot afford to lose a top man or woman and risk a by-election, so it sends unheard-of quangaroos like Lady Ashton who have never been elected to anything but are simply guaranteed to jump as bidden, or discredited or temporarily embarrassed former cabinet ministers, fretful and discontented on the back benches.

This is how we ended up with Barrot, an embezzler whom I was privileged to expose, and Mandelson, who needed no exposure, having already twice been forced to resign from Blair’s cabinet, first because of the minor matter of an undisclosed £373,000 mortgage, then because of the Hinduja passport affair.

‘Passport to Oblivion’ read the headline when Mandelson resigned for the second time, but that, of course, is not how things work any more. Mandelson’s disgrace was a passport from Hartlepool and an MP’s salary to
the Commission, £182,500 a year and sunshine holidays with some very interesting and influential company.

I always imagine Blair saying to Mandelson, like Lord Lundy’s grandfather,

Nowadays, an embarrassing colleague is told, ‘Go out and generate more than 70 per cent of our laws in Brussels.’

In 2008, Mandelson was back in Westminster, this time as First Secretary of State, Grand Panjandrum, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Lord High Executioner, President of the Board of Trade, Lord President of the Council and Lord Knows-What-Else, still on the same wage, with an EU pension of £31,000 assured – and still taking fascinating holidays.

Anyhow, for now he was off on to Brussels, which left Hartlepool unrepresented, so we asked Kilroy to stand. I believe that he could have won it too. He refused for his own obscure reasons.

Again, this did not endear him to our loyal members. He was also vociferous – and, worse, publicly vociferous – in his criticism of the leadership for its lack of proactive initiatives in his absence.

Kilroy had been cultivating Paul Sykes from the first, and it was surely to Sykes’s funding that he referred when, at a press lobby luncheon to which I had been invited by Julia Hartley-Brewer, political editor of the
Sunday
Express
, he started spritzing on a theme in the preferred key of ‘I’…

‘I have personally been promised all the money I need to fight every marginal seat in the country. We have the money to set up offices, agents, campaigns when I decide to press the button…’

He signed the visitors’ book that day ‘Robert Kilroy-Silk MEP, UKIP leader de facto’.

Now I knew that we were in trouble. We had a mini-Mosley on our hands.

By now, Roger Knapman’s dislike for Kilroy and everything that he represented had turned into a deep loathing. Jeffrey Titford and I laboured for days to broker a meeting between the two men in Brussels. Roger at last consented to give it a go. He waited in my office … and waited … and waited… When I went down the corridor (as ever crowded with television cameras) to summon Kilroy, he announced, ‘No, no. Knapman must come to me!’

We who witnessed the scene were astounded. We were rumbustious amateurs who had looked to these two experienced professional politicians to teach us a thing or two. Instead, we felt like kindergarten assistants. ‘Now, Roger, play nicely with Robert… No, Robert, it was at least half your fault and this is Roger’s party, so come along and let’s be nice… You’re both ruining it for everyone else…’

Throughout that meeting, Roger was unable to look at Kilroy. He sat with his right shoulder turned towards him and his left foot nervously jiggling. Kilroy gazed at a peculiarly fascinating spot on the floor between them.

Kilroy did not want to play pass the parcel or musical chairs. He was not going to share. That was how the meeting ended, with Kilroy and Jan tutting and flouncing out and Roger still pouting at the wall.

I don’t think that Roger ever recovered from the Kilroy experience.

He had never before been leader of anything. Whilst he was steadfast in face of attacks from outside the camp, fighting those within it totally unnerved him.

If the virtuous tend not to thrive, it is not because their virtues inhibit them but because they judge others by their own standards. Roger had done nothing but good service. Being loyal and just, he could not conceive that one of his own was now approaching him, dayglo fangs flashing, spit slobbering from his copper-toned dewlaps, eyes greedily fixed upon his basket and his store of bones. It is a rare politician who understands and anticipates the vices of others yet does not share them.

Virtue, of course, is on display where vices are disguised, and even the most flawed pretend to, or aspire to it. It is just as rare, however, for
one with pervasive faults truly to understand it. Kilroy did not understand UKIP’s loyalty and common sense.  

It was not his fault. He had spent twenty years in the spotlight, from which viewpoint it is nigh impossible to see into the shadows where the researchers and technicians labour to make you shine. Worse still in Kilroy’s case, he had had daily contact with common people – common people on camera, under lights, clinging to him as the one recognisable beacon amidst chaos.  

Contentious libertarian columnist Nick Cohen wrote perceptively:  

Only twelve years earlier, another singularly pretty television presenter, David Icke, resolved on very little evidence that he was the son of God whilst Her Majesty, the Rothschilds and, for some reason, Kris Kristofferson were reptiles from the constellation Draco. He has, unsurprisingly, made quite a name for himself in the society in which such things are routinely discussed.

For a long time, I had believed that Kilroy had been diverted by his celebrity but was bright enough to return to reality, to study UKIP and its members and to serve the cause. He had never hobnobbed with us, still less with the party faithful, and it was now clear that he and Jan were determined to follow their own path no matter how far it diverged from ours.

I had created the monster. It was for me to kill it.

I have been accused of briefing against him. I had no need to. I simply let it be known that, if he made a bid for the leadership, I would reluctantly stand against him – and fight to the bitter end.

I was forty, Kilroy sixty-two. I was known to the party. Kilroy had remained aloof from everyone. And, as I say, ours is a party peculiarly unimpressed by surface glitter.

It was not necessary. Now forewarned, Kilroy might still have responded intelligently and become a team-player. And who knows? Within a year or two, with his gifts, he might have ousted me and led the party to great things. This, it seemed, was no longer an option for the Kilroys. They were being cheated of the position which was theirs of right. They must strike now.

It was time for our triumphant conference, this year in Bristol’s Colston Hall.

This extraordinary event – the failed Kilroy putsch – has been well chronicled elsewhere. Two days before it opened, we had another triumph which enormously boosted our mood. At Hartlepool, our candidate Stephen Allison took third place, forcing the Conservatives into fourth (‘a fucking awful result’ said Nicholas Soames). A Labour majority of 14,571 was cut to 2,033.

The Kilroys arrived late. Their big, chauffeur-driven Jaguar purred up to the foot of the steps and they stepped out, for all the world as though they were stars at a premiere. The cameras flashed. The microphones nuzzled up to them. They swept past Roger and other lowly MEPs and led their media-train upstairs to the bar where Kilroy held court.

I have never been so proud of my beloved party of cranks and gadflies as at this conference. The members observed the travelling circus, sniffed and continued about their business. I was on stage mere minutes later, welcoming them whilst Kilroy kept the media occupied.

There was to be an important debate later in the day. For years now, I had been unhappy about our candidates standing against the very few Labour and Conservative candidates who very genuinely and demonstrably opposed the EU and favoured Britain’s withdrawal. We had no desire to be responsible for the loss of allies of either party. Our members, however, were quite reasonably mistrustful. They had heard too many protestations of Euroscepticism, particularly, but not exclusively, from Tories, which were followed by abject submission and, on occasion, pathetic and slavish devotion to the Eurosoviet.

We had therefore drawn up a motion which would, we hoped, satisfy honour on all sides. The other MEPs and Paul Sykes and Alan Bown had all given it their approval. ‘This Conference resolves to fight the general election in every constituency in the United Kingdom, but should reserve the right, subject only to the approval of the constituency association in question, to reach an accommodation with the sitting Member of Parliament of another party on receipt of an irrevocable undertaking that he/she will oppose further EU integration and will support Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union.’

This was plainly pretty much a pointless gesture since no major political party as currently constituted would permit a candidate to sign any such undertaking, but we did not want to be the ones to hinder genuine Eurosceptics, and could truthfully point at the other parties and argue that, if they really meant what they said about opposing further integration, they were at liberty to put their money where their outspoken mouths were.

Kilroy stepped out onto that conference stage – essentially to introduce himself. He was unknown save by repute to most of the people in that hall.