UKIP! It’s been quite a while since we’ve heard from them outside of an article on how they’ve elected ANOTHER new leader only months after the last one quit. They’ve had 10 leaders (both elected and interim) since Nigel Farage stood down from the role in 2016, just fresh off achieving his major victory in the master plan of leaving the EU. Most of his successors have barely lasted more than a few months. The shortest term of all was Diane James, the first post-Farage leader who resigned having lasted just 18 days in the role. Her resignation prompted another leadership election, just 2 months after the previous one, and is therefore in my books a by-election. That’s right, in today’s edition of By-election Bonanza we will explore the rocky history of UKIP in the autumn of 2016.
Nigel Farage had said in the 2015 General Election that if he didn’t win the seat of South Thanet then he would resign as leader, and with the declaration that he had lost out by 2,000 votes he did exactly that. Despite his desire to move on, the UKIP’s National Executive Committee which governs the party reinstated him as leader due to the 2015 election campaign having been a “great success”, as the party’s chairman put it. Already things were a bit shaky for UKIP as they attempted to paint their failure to gain any seats away but further division arrived when the MEP and campaign chief for the party, Patrick O’Flynn, further grew the rift within UKIP by calling out close advisors to Farage like Raheem Kassam (Farage’s chief of staff and editor of Breitbart London) and Matthew Richardson (Party Secretary). O'Flynn believed these two were forcing UKIP to become a "hard-right, ultra-aggressive American Tea Party-type movement". He instead believed that the party was there to have Britain leave the EU. O'Flynn subsequently resigned. His side was supported by the likes of Douglas Carswell, the party’s only MP. Farage, his advisors and Arron Banks were opposed to their view. In the end, Farage stayed on to try and steer the ship of UKIP back to stability but the more moderate wing of the party were getting fed up with him.
Farage finally resigned as UKIP leader on the 4th July 2016. This was on the back of the EU referendum victory for Leave. In his wake was the victory of Diane James as UKIP leader. An MEP for South East England and the UKIP candidate who came within 2000 votes of beating the Liberal Democrats in Eastleigh in 2013, she received 46.2% of the vote. She represented the continuation of the more right-wing side of UKIP compared to the so-called modernising crowd of O'Flynn and chief architect of UKIP’s 2015 manifesto, Suzanne Evans, who under the flagship of Lisa Duffy only received 25.1% of the vote. However, after 18 days as leader Diane James stood down due to her belief that she did not have "sufficient authority" to see through changes that she had planned. “In recent weeks, my relationship with the party has been increasingly difficult and I feel it is time to move on.”
Farage was called back to be interim leader, a role which he accepted, and a leadership election began on the 4th of October. Steven Woolfe and Raheem Kassam were first to announce their candidacy for leader on the 7th. Steven Woolfe was UKIP spokesperson for Immigration, MEP for North West England and had been barred from running in the September 2016 election after failing to submit paperwork 17 minutes late. He vowed to "stand up for the ignored working class and secure a radically different political landscape in Britain" along the lines of UKIP’s 2020 Plan, a plan to take UKIP to the north and challenge Labour in the close to 100 seats that they had achieved 2nd place in. However, 10 days later Woolfe withdrew from the contest and left the party, saying it was in a "death spiral". This also followed an event on the 6th October in which he had been hospitalized following a fight with fellow MEP Mike Hookem at the European Parliament.
As this YouGov poll of UKIP members indicates, Woolfe was immensely popular, even beating out Nigel Farage if he had decided to stand and so his resignation made the contest a whole lot more complicated.
Kassam presented himself as the candidate to end corruption within the party. He ran on an openly socially conservative platform and found major criticism for his Twitter account which contained transphobic bile and an aggression against those who disagreed with him. Despite not having a major public facing role, even during UKIP’s 2015 campaign, Arron Banks who was the party’s major donor backed Kassam.
From here Peter Whittle, John Rees-Evans, David Kurten, Bill Etheridge and Andrew Beadle all joined the show. Paul Nuttall and Suzanne Evans announced on the 23rd October, bringing the 2 real heavyweights of UKIP into the fight. Nuttall described himself as the "unity candidate" for the party, able to "bring the factions together." Nuttall's message was that UKIP could become the patriotic face of the working class, a believer in the 2020 Plan too. During the 2014 European Election, working as Deputy Leader of UKIP, he constantly pushed for UKIP to move from the southern Conservative shires and towards the northern Labour cities. Don't be too fooled by his unity branding, Nuttall was firmly on the right of an already right-wing party. Evans represented the people who wanted a realignment for UKIP towards the centre. Evans vowed to make the party less 'toxic' and wanted UKIP to 'break free of its hard-right image and set itself firmly in the common sense centre-ground'.
Once these two had entered the race, the arguably smaller candidates began to drop off. First went Etheridge, who endorsed Nuttall, and then Beadle who did the same. Kurten withdrew without endorsing anyone. Kassam went for Whittle before Whittle withdrew and endorsed Nuttall. In the end, it was just Nuttall, Evans and ex-soldier and homophobe Rees-Evans left. Nuttall really sweeped most of the support throughout the contest, having been endorsed by 12 MEPs, 2 Welsh AMs and the council groups on Thanet, Thurrock and Wyre Forest District Council. Evans only had the backing of Patrick O’Flynn and Lisa Duffy, but John Rees-Evans had the standout endorsement of Tyson Fury. Yes, that Tyson Fury.
In the end, the by-election for UKIP’s leadership was a fairly obvious one on who would win. ‘United with Paul’ as his campaign was named, accurately reflected his ability to bring together UKIP’s membership. He ended up receiving 62.6% of the vote, with Suzanne Evans on just 19.3% and John Rees-Evans on 18.1%.
After the leadership election Paul Nuttal oversaw UKIP losing its only MP, the loss of all 145 seats the party was defending in the 2017 local election and a rise in calls from high profile figures to disband the party. For example, UKIP's biggest donor Aaron Banks, called the party "finished as an electoral force." Nuttal was gone following the party's failure in the 2017 General Election having lasted less than a year in the role. His hope to continue to grow with left-behind communities which had been Labour for decades never materialised.
The by-election for UKIP's leadership was one of the major reasons to why the party declined heavily. With Farage gone, the major face of UKIP had left and large swathes of their membership and donors followed him. Their Presidential-style campaigns that put Farage at the centre of practically everything was being paid for harshly in the long term. No matter who followed him, the next UKIP leader would simply not be able to replicate what their previously leader had. The previous division of the hard-right faragists and the modernising classical liberals and conservatives soon developed into a fight between the hard-right and the far-right which would later go on to plague UKIP into irrelevance forever. The decline of their moderate wing, with key figures like Evans, O'Flynn and Carswell leaving, was likely already inevitable with Farage as leader but with him gone nothing was keeping them from sticking around and allowing the space to be filled with the likes of Anne Marie Waters or Tommy Robinson.
UKIP is now gone from British politics. It has been since 2016 at the latest and their constant shifting leadership is one of the few memories we have of it outside of their victory in taking the UK out of the EU (which to be fair is a pretty big deal that they played a somewhat substantial role in). The internal workings of UKIP is always fascinating to me and I hope this piece starts a journey into exploring exactly why the party was essentially dependent upon Farage.
A similar political party to UKIP arose under the leadership of Nigel Farage in 2019, the Brexit Party, and since Farage's departure from this political project it has too fallen into decline. With them announcing that they’ll be standing in the Old Bexley and Sidcup by-election, we shall once again see the painful realities for political parties that were once led by Nigel Farage: Once they've got their short-term goal done, nobody pays them any more attention.
Thank you so much for reading this weeks By-election Bonanza. This is a rather special one because it’s the very last bi-monthly article that I’ll be doing for quite a while. Instead, I’m replacing it with the weekly “A Week Is A Long Time In By-elections’ series that will run from this Friday until a couple of weeks late in December. It’ll be focused entirely on bringing a summary to the North Shropshire by-election, organising all the info that I could find into a nice email. Hope you enjoy this new content.
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