Golding and crew before the result sank in

Having polled just 477 votes, a paltry 1.6%, Britain First’s crestfallen leader Paul Golding went online this morning to observe that this was “a disappointing result”. For him maybe; not for us.

He had his excuses oven ready, the main one being that, after all, “Wellingborough is a leftie stronghold.” Let’s run that again: “Wellingborough is a leftie stronghold”. This is the constituency which in the last election returned the hardline Tory, Peter Bone, with 62% of the vote. Even Golding’s most committed supporters must be wondering what goes on the man’s head.

“You win some, you lose some”, says Golding, but in his case, it’s always a loss. Golding is more interested in money and lifestyle than politics and it’s going to become increasingly difficult to explain defeat after defeat to supporters when he keeps claiming that victory is just around the corner. And they will be wondering just how long they are prepared to hand over their hard-earned dues for such absurd ventures, especially when they missed the opportunity to run a candidate in the much more promising constituency of Rochdale because of Golding’s incompetence and when his polling day message to the troops involved him going full-on Captain Mainwaring complete with WW2 tin hat.

The elephant in the room, of course, is the Homeland Party, recently registered with the Electoral Commission. Although Homeland didn’t have time to run a candidate in Wellingborough, Kenny Smith and his merry men nevertheless turned up campaigning in the constituency, parking their tanks well and truly on Golding’s lawn. Pointedly, they didn’t call for a vote for Britain First but for electors to vote “with immigration in mind”. In other words, vote for Reform, the biggest and best placed anti-immigration party in the race.

On the face of it Reform appears to have done well, polling 3919 votes (13%). However, this fell well below their expectations and in a situation where the Conservative party is so universally loathed and given the circumstances which gave rise to the by election, a significant haemorrhage to the right was always going to happen. In the Bristol Kingswood by election Reform took 2578 votes (10.4%).

UKIP, running only in Kingswood, was as expected, annihilated, coming bottom of the poll with 129 votes, a risible 0.5%. As we have said before, it is a party only being kept alive because of the legacies its leadership is anticipating, bequeathed to it in its anti-EU glory days.