“Every metric at UKIP is being smashed. New members are joining in healthy amounts, our candidates list is steadily growing, investment is being sought at every opportunity, and our support base is not only growing but pro-actively asking how they can help develop and campaign for the party’s purple wave now sweeping the United Kingdom”.
Thus opens UKIP Leader Nick Tenconi’s latest mailing to his members, triggering the thought that the man is either seriously delusional or emerging as a particularly cheeky contender in the densely-populated and highly-competitive world of far-right grifters.
In fact, he’s just terrified that his party’s current risible performance will see ‘Tommy Robinson’ dump him and link up with one of his far right rivals.
Giving the game away
Tenconi does give the game away when he goes on to write: “For those asking we are proudly standing candidates in the May local elections where possible…”
“Where possible…” A giveaway phrase. With no mention of exactly how many places this has actually proved possible.
This ‘purple wave sweeping the UK’ is running candidates in only 17 of more than 1600 seats in contention on 1 May. Only 17 local council wards across the entire country where it is ‘possible’ for UKIP to find and run a candidate.
No wonder, when you consider that this ‘steadily growing’ political party, this ‘purple wave sweeping the UK’ is running candidates in only 17 of more than 1600 seats in contention on 1 May. Only 17 local council wards across the entire country where it is ‘possible’ for UKIP to find and run a candidate.
For the truth of the matter is that a political party which can only contest such a negligible number of seats is firmly bogged down way out on the fringes of the political wilderness.
Bizarre antics
In the case of UKIP, which once had a formidable nationwide structure and could contest hundreds or indeed thousands of council seats, this is due in no small measure to the bizarre antics of Tenconi himself, suspicions about the real motives of party Chairman Ben ‘Rogue Builder’ Walker and the way in which Tenconi’s elevation to the leadership was engineered, and the party’s shift towards a hysterical, far-right, evangelical form of Christianity.
Between them, Tenconi and Walker have been responsible for shedding thousands of members, but also the departure of much of its core cadre of seasoned NEC members and local activists, exactly the sort of people you need to be able to call upon to run a successful election intervention.
Further to the fringes
Their replacement with a much smaller number of coarse, racist Tommy Robinson supporters and ‘Christ is King’ religious zealots – who can only be mobilised for Tenconi’s noisy street demos in their dozens, not even hundreds – has only pushed it further to the fringes.
But Tenconi has to talk big: he’s still desperate for the hook-up with ‘Tommy Robinson’ that the jailbird proposed before he was banged up, and which Tenconi and Walker see as their potential salvation bringing an influx of both members and, more importantly, cash.
Marriage made in Valhalla
They know that, banged up in what is laughingly described by his supporters as ‘solitary confinement’, Robinson may well look at their increasingly puny efforts on the political front and conclude that a tie-up with UKIP is not quite the marriage made in Valhalla that he had in mind, and look elsewhere for a political party partner for his ‘cultural movement’.
Robinson may be vile, but he is not stupid, and is unlikely to be impressed by their desperate efforts to big up a party which is going nowhere except backwards.
