Flying Free (27 page)

In this instance, however, the McKenna judgment was set aside on the grounds that there was just so much information about the merits of the treaty to be disseminated whilst the ‘No’ case was, well, just ‘No’.

Opposition to the treaty was wiped out. When I returned to state the case, I discovered that I had become a villain.

The Irish government had played the same well-worn, dog-eared cards. I was no longer a passionate volunteer coming to Ireland free of charge and without prospect of personal benefit in order to advocate independence. I was rather a devious foreigner, an absentee landlord imposing his alien will upon the poor, foolish Irish people.

And yes, of course, I was a fascist as well, or, more precisely and cautiously, according to Europe Minister Dick Roche, I was ‘a modern imperialist … from the same gene-pool as the National Front’ and ‘an extreme nationalist’.

Once, believe it or not, this calumny – what Vladimir Bukovsky has called ‘the European gulag’ – hurt me. It is the most cowardly because the most unanswerable charge. This is the problem with making a crime of a purported character trait. You can refute a charge of a specific act, but not of a conjectured predisposition or sympathy.

If you try, even if you have half-German children, work daily with people of all nations and spend your life battling for freedom of speech and the self-determination of all peoples, they’ll only perform a semiotic analysis of your words and conclude that you are a genocidal sexist in your time off.

At length I recognised it for what it was – a cheap playground jibe for those so devoid of intellect as to be unable to confront you in debate, the equivalent of chiding someone for being fat or ginger-haired, an irrelevant taunt which by implication associates the speaker with an approved majority and casts you into the ideological gulag.

Over fifteen years, I had learned to shrug it off and get on with the business in hand, in part because that is all that you can do, in part because honest conviction and anger and care for people rather than principles will shine through. I was annoyed only for Ireland, which deserved much better.

That the people of Britain no longer believed this nonsense was demonstrated by the results of the European election of 2009. Hundreds of parties have come and gone in the past century. None has started with so little and gone on to achieve so much as has UKIP. I remembered that first election at Eastleigh, where I had barely squeezed ahead of Screaming Lord Sutch. Now I was leading the party which had come second in a national election.

We took 16.5 per cent of the votes cast, Labour 15.7 and the Lib Dems 13.7. The Conservatives came first with 27.7 per cent, which translated as twenty-five seats to our thirteen. The people had started to acknowledge what the fight was really about – their enfranchisement – and had recognised, I think, that we, fallible and sometimes amateur as we were, were not part of the self-serving, self-perpetuating cabal of professional politicians who scorned them.

The Irish campaign wore on – hopeless now, because the credit crunch had hit and Ireland naturally clung to what had once been the provider of
so much wealth. That the inability to set their own interest rates as members of the Eurozone will eventually cripple them was theoretical only. Once, briefly, the streets had seemed paved with gold, the Liffey had brimmed with rather revolting Chardonnay, property prices had made millionaires of smallholders and the Foxrock Fannies had exchanged their gold slingbacks for Jimmy Choos. If they obeyed the Commissioners, maybe they would once more be rewarded with wealth.

And indeed, Barroso visited Ireland on 19 September 2009 and announced a €14.8 million grant for former workers at Limerick’s Dell plant. I rummaged in my wallet and could find no more than the price of a few drinks with which to win over the voters of Ireland. The fact that Dell had moved the plant to Poland at a cost of 1,900 jobs to Limerick was only tenuously linked to EU membership. The EU was still Father Christmas.

Add this to the brazen lies circling – EU law would not supersede Irish law, vote ‘Yes’ for jobs, the treaty had no constitutional significance etc – and the sudden silence of many who had vociferously advocated a ‘No’, and it was a hopeless cause.

There were some entertaining moments. At the Reuters debate in Dublin, I managed to skewer Dick Roche, the man who had uttered that weary slander, and to expose a shill in the audience. For those who have led lives untainted by such things, a shill is a player at an open game of poker or chemmy who is covertly playing for the house, so substantially altering the odds. The EU has many thousands of shills scattered amongst the population, particularly where there are young, impressionable minds to be moulded.

An unkempt, earnest, bespectacled questioner with a distinct resemblance to Worzel Gummidge arose from the audience and announced herself to be a professor at University College, Dublin. She started her question – or, rather, her speech, for I could detect not a single interrogatory in the entire thing – and I sat back and relaxed. It was like listening to a gruesome bedtime story for the hundredth time.

It went on and on…

…and on…

I knew at once what she was. Every one of the sentiments and phrases used was familiar to me. I suppose I should have interrupted her, but she was
giving me a breather from a torrid debate, and it is really quite instructive to see an expert tying a slipknot at her own throat.

When I was given to understand that she had finished, I simply said, ‘I assume that you are a Monnet professor?’

There was no reply. The good professor looked over her shoulder, then seemed to have noticed something interesting on her rump, then demonstrated a hitherto unsuspected concern for her coiffure and ran her fingers though it. Then she was ready for the inevitable. She gulped. She said, ‘What?’

‘I said, “I assume that you are a Monnet professor?”’

‘I have that honour—’ she started.

I just laughed.

Amidst her ramblings, this woman had advocated frankness and honesty. Yet she, purporting to be ‘a citizen and a voter’ had not deigned to tell the audience that she was handsomely paid by the EU to disseminate EU propaganda in the guise of learning, or, in the official version, ‘to stimulate universities throughout the world to explain the European Union model for peaceful coexistence and integration as well as European Union policies and external action.’

Just how great seats of learning – by definition impartial – can bring themselves to endorse such propaganda (just try substituting ‘USSR’ – or even ‘British government’ for ‘EU’ in the above mission statement and see how it reads), I fail to understand, but there are over 400 such professors in British universities, all paid by you to teach the party line.

I will search my wallet again, but I am pretty sure that I cannot manage anything similar for the alternative view.

I suggest that all Monnet professors should henceforth be compelled to preface lectures and publications with the words ‘The following cannot, alas, attain the high, dispassionate standards of academe because I must serve my paymasters, advocate the cause of European integration and side with all EU policies and external action. I apologise, but I have a mortgage to pay.’

Should they fail to do so, their lectures should be boycotted by all students who value honesty, freedom and the integrity of academe.

Having nodded to all the very familiar faces in the rent-a-mob crowd outside, I wandered through the corridors of Dublin Castle on the day
that the results came through. I looked at the portraits of the past British governors of Ireland and saw in my mind’s eye the smiling face of José Manuel Barroso at the end of the line. The Irish had fought so gallantly for freedom and autonomy. Today they gave it away again.

The Czechs now had no excuse not to ratify the Constitution – sorry, the treaty.

The Battle of Lisbon was over.

We had won many battles but we had lost the war.

Or had we? In the course of that campaign, we had demonstrated to millions their irrelevance to those advancing the EU project. We had exposed dishonesty and downright disregard for democracy. We had forced supposed leaders of member-states to show their true colours, and they were not those which the peoples of Europe wore on their shields. In defeat, our army had grown a thousandfold.

The war goes on. The people are now aware of its nature. It is not a war between left wing and right nor between nationalists and internationalists. It is far more fundamental than that. It is the struggle between a formerly sovereign people and a coterie of professional politicians who have claimed sovereignty for themselves and wrested it from them by deceit and bribery.

At the last, it goes still further. It is about the individual’s freedom no less than the individual nation’s to define and govern him or herself without intervention from a self-proclaimed and self-perpetuating mediocracy whose only excellence appears to lie in the prodigious ability to remember acronyms and whose only loyalty is to tidiness, homogeneity – and power.

Thanks to Lisbon, we are entering a second protectorate in which neighbour spies upon neighbour and nothing is immune from regulation. Political correctness and conformity in accordance with safety regulations and an apocryphal ecological gospel are the new puritanism. It is no less killjoy and intrusive than the original version.

As with the protectorate, the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, the Yugoslav union and many others, it will not survive without the wholehearted consent of its constituents. It has not that consent. It cannot hold.

I only pray that we can break it up intelligently and calmly now rather than wait until our children must once more fight for freedom at terrible cost.

The battle goes on, and we all have our parts to play.

In November 2009, I resigned the leadership of the party to fight the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, for his Buckingham seat in the 2010 general election.

That, at least, is the official version. It's true in part.

I was persuaded that Bercow's seat was there for the taking. Although he was nominally a Conservative, the huge majority of Conservative activists disliked him. After his prolonged flirtation with New-but-shop-soiled-Labour, they thought him a turncoat.

Following his weevilling for the Speaker's job over many years, it is generally thought that only three Tories actually voted for him. The rest of his support came from Labour.

Between 2002 and 2007, he claimed more expenses than any other MP (save for a brief lapse in 2003, when he only struggled in third). In 2008–2009, after an Information Tribunal granted permission for MPs' expenses to be published, he suffered an inexplicable loss of form and came in 631st out of 645.

But class will out. Within weeks of his election to office, he was up to his old tricks and troubling – or rather, not – the stewards, because touts reported a triumphant return to mid-season form, with £45,581 claimed for new televisions, DVD players and the like at his flat in the Palace of Westminster.

He was a home-flipper. He had once been a hang-'em-high, send-'em-back-where-they-came-from member of the Monday Club. Norman Tebbit thought him too right wing.

A man for all seasons then, but not, I thought, the unimpeachable, inspiring, model – well, anything – that Buckingham deserved.

It is the supposed convention that the Speaker, in that he is a de facto Independent, is not opposed at elections. Bercow, however, had played one party off against the other and had lobbied and intrigued for his appointment like a
Big Brother
contestant (like his delightful, lofty, Labour wife who was subjected to real democracy on the show and therefore kicked out at the first opportunity). He had, to my mind, forfeited his immunity.

He was unopposed by the three principal parties. Given, then, that his Conservative
bona fides
were generally considered dubious, it was not just anti-federalists but also true conservatives who were to be left without a voice in this poll.

I could certainly not fight such a campaign whilst running the entire party in Britain and the party and group in Brussels, so it was with a sigh of relief that I resigned the leadership.

This was not a straightforward procedure. I intended to make the announcement at Conference in Southport and told only a few trusted people of my intention. Nonetheless, the papers got hold of it. By the time I announced it on the Conference stage it was already well-known. Lord Pearson made it still harder by declaring it a disaster and demanding a show of hands from those who wanted me to stay on.

All very flattering but I was, for once in my life, exhausted. No other party leader has had to perform such a dual role. There just were not enough hours in a day to deal with the media, admin and relations with the membership in Britain and with meetings, speeches, discipline, protocol and strategy in the Parliament.

I also wanted, for once, to get out at the top.

When I had taken on the leadership, polls showed us at less than 1 per cent in general election voting intentions. Now we had just come second in a national election. All those who loved me had doubted my ability to play the sober, responsible leader, but, like a natural stroke-player settling
down to construct an innings, I had contained my natural impatience and done the job. I was proud of that.

As a trader it is all too rare that you have the chance to get out of a commitment before it starts to decline. Here was my chance.

There was a leadership election. My colleagues in the EU Parliament – UKIP veterans all: Mike Nattrass, Nikki Sinclaire and Gerard Batten – stood. So did Malcolm, Lord Pearson of Rannoch.

And I, of course, found it impossible to remain neutral.

On the BBC's
Daily Politics
show I gave my honest view, to whit:

Not tactful perhaps, but yes, I was concerned for the growing party's future as I passed it into new hands, and I was deeply concerned lest it should be tainted by special interests.

Any political party attracts all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. Labour has loads of chippy, snarling members who harbour resentments and just want to do down the privileged, loads of arrested-development student Marxians who got laid in their gurdledum days and have never moved on, a vast number of pesto-and-Prosecco ‘working-class' Islingtonians and their ilk who claim to be spiritually working-class and many who vote as they go to Church at Christmas, because their parents did and it's sort of consoling.

The Tories have their religious and tribal adherents too, together with estate-agents, racists, social aspirants,
Archers
fans and the many
Mail
readers who know where they stand about absolutely everything unconventional.

And the Lib Dems? God knows. Chapel, of course, and nice people who cannot bear to be seen in the staff common room to vote for either of the other two, just as they don't quite like to wear suits or strip off, espouse their own generation's music, or their children's, and wouldn't like to be thought to have firm opinions on anything much except cardigans, Birkenstocks with socks and all-embracing niceness.

Many Lib Dems that I meet actually believe their party to be committed to liberalism and democracy. In fact, they are resolved to resisting the views of the electorate as expressed through referendums and wholly wedded to the EU, which is reconcilable with neither.

I hope that I have adequately explained how and why I came to be a UKIP activist. It sprang from bloody-mindedness, independence, libertarianism, a knowledge of history and a deep love for Britain – by which I certainly mean stereotypical symbols like cricket, warm beer, village churches and crumpets, but rather more importantly democracy, the rule of law by means of common sense, common law (evolution!), skilful fudge and good humour.

But above all, I am motivated by an ardent belief in self-determination, self-definition and the inalienable freedom to go to hell on one's own chosen path without intervention by self-appointed mentors.

There is nothing wrong with being a UKIP member because you love Gentleman's Relish and
Land of Hope and Glory,
because you hate Ted Heath or love stories of sturdy little Britain, because you think that the French are conspiring to ruin the recipes for English sausages or because you believe that the Nazis (or Bonapartists or intergalactic aliens) plotted the entire EU as a rather more tactful way of ensuring German/French/ Martian world supremacy.

A party is a broad church and must be able to accommodate eccentrics, obsessives, romantics and downright nutters.

It is my experience, however, that the UKIP members who endure and can best explain the cause to others are principally motivated by libertarianism and therefore accept that even opponents of English sausages have a right to be heard.

They will fight with the same ferocity and commitment for flat-Earth geeks, vegetarians, Trotskyites and other ‘deviants' to be heard as for their own causes. They will not allow their own tastes prior claim over others.

It is a sad reflection of what remains of our culture that a sort of aesthetic ‘genetic fallacy' makes certain subjects taboo even for discussion – so I am not permitted to discuss the undoubted virtues of tobacco or the liberties of smokers because I am one myself, and only immigrants are permitted to have views on immigration.

You will frequently hear people (not generally Jews, who have a sense of humour and know the value of liberty) declaring that only Jews may tell Jewish jokes, whilst women exclude men from any discussion of abortion.

Hunting is perhaps the classic subject that can barely be discussed because people ‘get emotional' about it. The fact that ‘getting emotional' in argument about a serious subject to the point where you cannot consider the opposing view is grossly irresponsible and self-indulgent and should be a cause for shame does not seem to occur to them.

For myself, I have participated in hundreds of arguments about hunting and considered both sides but, ultimately, as with smoking, buggery or taste in food, it all comes down to the same thing: What the £$^&*%+ business is it of mine or the government's how people spend their leisure hours or manage their lands provided that they hurt no one else?

If we are to defer to popular tastes and squeamishness, Hitler might also claim a mandate for his crimes. This is not democracy. It is mob-rule.

And this above all is what I meant about Malcolm Pearson when I described him as ‘the only serious, credible candidate'. He had no personal axes to grind, just as a good ecologist is not emotionally committed to one species or another. His concern is for balance and, ultimately, to accept that there is a greater force – be it nature or history – which we may influence but can never ordain.

Things will change. We must roll with the punches, accept evolution and keep fighting.

Malcolm Pearson is a scrapper. He reminds me of some Border terriers – equable, determined, playful, not overtly belligerent – but woe betide those who pick a fight with him.

He was first spotted by Jonathan Aitken on his first day at Eton. It was Michaelmas Term. There was a game of rugby in progress. Big boys who have felled a smaller opponent expect submission and a certain deference. Aitken noticed, however, a fierce melée from which several large boys were retreating, sporting injuries and looking affronted. When the pile of bodies was disentangled, Malcolm was found, still struggling, at its base.

Since then he has demonstrated the same equable ferocity and a rare combination of spirituality and spiritedness – in international insurance,
where he made a sizeable fortune, in supporting dissidents in the Cold War and those with mental disabilities and in fighting the EU. He is, in short, a doughty champion of democracy and fairness.

As party leader, he was as valiant and honest as ever. He raised money for our campaign, he applied balm where there was inflammation and ginger beneath the tails of those behind the bit. He was a much cooler administrator than I.

He was wrongfooted just once, when John Sopel questioned him about our manifesto – a rambling, 486-page document submitted very late in the day by my garrulous former colleague David Bannerman.

Anyone, possibly barring Bannerman himself, would have been stumped, but modern politicians are not expected to be honest. They are expected to pretend to know everything.

Malcolm would never dream of glibly pretending to knowledge which he did not possess. He simply admitted that he had not a clue about this or that paragraph. That sort of honesty meant that the media were able to rag him where they should have been grateful.

Malcolm also made one tactical error. I had established the policy that we would not oppose candidates who had signed up to Freedom Association's ‘Better Off Out' campaign. I had too much experience of firm pledges, mostly but not exclusively from Tories, which had proved soluble in the warm water of office. Unless there was a signature committing a candidate to the cause, we would fight him.

Malcolm, however, counted certain Tories among his trusted friends and, rightly or wrongly, believed that we should not stand against Jacob and Annunziata Rees-Mogg and David Heathcoat-Amery – all good sorts, all prominent Eurosceptics, but all non-signatories. The party rank and file, who shared my scepticism, regarded this as particularity towards friends.

I sympathise with Malcolm. I can't count the number of nice chaps and sterling women – going right back to Patrick Nichols – who have begged us not to stand against them because they were with us in spirit, but spirits falter all too easily when surrounded by party whips, hail-fellow-well-met chums in the club and prospects of advancement. We have had to become absolutist.

It is a sad indictment of our politics that, throughout that summer,
Malcolm came under a great deal of attack from the media and the party just for being Malcolm – honest and proportionately trusting.

He was not the only one to make mistakes.

With all my energies now freed to one short-term end, I flung myself into that Buckingham campaign. I vowed that I would try to have a drink in every pub in the constituency and oh, I tried. I did not quite accomplish it.

I spoke at meetings. I am enormously grateful to Simon Heffer, Christopher Booker, Tory ex-Foreign Minister Sir Nicholas Bonsor and former Labour MP John Lee for their active support on the stump and off.

I was back in my element. I liked the people of Buckingham. I think that in general they – particularly in the working-class areas – liked me and our policies. I had, however, made a few grave miscalculations.

One of these was a certain speech I made in the European Parliament on 24 February 2010.

Herman Van Rompuy owes me big-time.

Before that day, everyone in the world barring Van Rompuy's immediate family was asking the question I wanted to ask as I stood up that day: ‘Who the hell is this man?'

After 24 February 2010, the answer was – and remains – ‘Isn't he that chap Farage called a dishcloth?'

International branding like that is expensive.

He has yet to thank me, which is strange.

Van Rompuy was appointed President of the European Council precisely because he was a nobody from nowhere with no perceptible allegiance which meant anything to anyone. He would never overshadow the
all-important
national leaders – Merkel and Sarkozy – but had proved himself a fanatical EU federalist.