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08-04-2016, 04:25 AM
By Asa Bennett
Nigel Farage had his enemies, but even they wouldn’t deny he gave Ukip a sense of direction. He k**cked heads together. He kept a lid on tensions within the party, even if this meant driving out critics and those who stood in his way. So who can fill his shoes?
Steven Woolfe was the future of Ukip once. His supporters pinned their hopes on “Ukip’s Barack Obama” and hoped that he would take the reins from Farage as its next party leader.
But the last week has seen his campaign come a cropper. He has only himself to blame though for these errors though, as his past has come back to haunt him.
Ukip’s migration spokesman apparently “forgot” to declare a criminal conviction for drink driving when he stood as a Police and Crime Commissioner in 2012, meaning he broke electoral law.
A failure to keep up his membership nearly put him at risk of being disqualified from the race, were it **t for Ukip’s chairman throwing himself - and his fellow officials - under a bus for him. The MEP wasn’t to blame for failing to keep his membership updated, Steve Crowther insisted in an e-mail which I have seen from last week, telling senior members:
“This is an indictment of our administration”.
Crowther wouldn’t make such an admission lightly, as he has served as chairman since 2010. After running the party machine for six years, Ukip still struggles to keep track of whether its MEPs are members or **t.Just when Ukip should be ready to hold Theresa May’s feet to the fire over Brexit, it is **w at daggers drawn over how eligible one of its leadership candidates is.
The internal fault lines in the party have opened up again over Woolfe’s future, with Faragists threatening “full scale war” against the party’s National Executive Committee for keeping him off the ballot.
Nigel Farage has led the charge against the NEC, describing these senior Ukippers as “among the lowest grade of people I have ever met”.
Woolfe’s critics are dismissive of such threats, with one saying to me that Ukip is only braced for an “internet uprising”. “Three-quarters of the party will shrug their shoulders I suspect,” he told me. “The split will be far smaller than Nigel’s people make out”.
That may be so, but infighting still tends to overshadow any work a party tries to do in the meantime, as Labour is finding out to its cost under Jeremy Corbyn.
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Nigel Farage had his enemies, but even they wouldn’t deny he gave Ukip a sense of direction. He k**cked heads together. He kept a lid on tensions within the party, even if this meant driving out critics and those who stood in his way. So who can fill his shoes?
Steven Woolfe was the future of Ukip once. His supporters pinned their hopes on “Ukip’s Barack Obama” and hoped that he would take the reins from Farage as its next party leader.
But the last week has seen his campaign come a cropper. He has only himself to blame though for these errors though, as his past has come back to haunt him.
Ukip’s migration spokesman apparently “forgot” to declare a criminal conviction for drink driving when he stood as a Police and Crime Commissioner in 2012, meaning he broke electoral law.
A failure to keep up his membership nearly put him at risk of being disqualified from the race, were it **t for Ukip’s chairman throwing himself - and his fellow officials - under a bus for him. The MEP wasn’t to blame for failing to keep his membership updated, Steve Crowther insisted in an e-mail which I have seen from last week, telling senior members:
“This is an indictment of our administration”.
Crowther wouldn’t make such an admission lightly, as he has served as chairman since 2010. After running the party machine for six years, Ukip still struggles to keep track of whether its MEPs are members or **t.Just when Ukip should be ready to hold Theresa May’s feet to the fire over Brexit, it is **w at daggers drawn over how eligible one of its leadership candidates is.
The internal fault lines in the party have opened up again over Woolfe’s future, with Faragists threatening “full scale war” against the party’s National Executive Committee for keeping him off the ballot.
Nigel Farage has led the charge against the NEC, describing these senior Ukippers as “among the lowest grade of people I have ever met”.
Woolfe’s critics are dismissive of such threats, with one saying to me that Ukip is only braced for an “internet uprising”. “Three-quarters of the party will shrug their shoulders I suspect,” he told me. “The split will be far smaller than Nigel’s people make out”.
That may be so, but infighting still tends to overshadow any work a party tries to do in the meantime, as Labour is finding out to its cost under Jeremy Corbyn.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/World-TheNewsInternational/~4/qHOBsxGUIsk
أكثر... (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/World-TheNewsInternational/~3/qHOBsxGUIsk/139977-Ukip-cant-cope-without-Farage)