So, Lois Perry finally recovers her health sufficiently to appear on Andre Walker’s online TV chat show and “tell all” about her resignation as UKIP leader mid-election campaign, after only 34 days in the job. And, frankly, ‘delusional’ doesn’t remotely do it justice.
Firstly, she claims that the main reason she left was that there was something “sinister” going on, which she had not foreseen: certain elements in the leadership, whom she does not name, “wanted to go after quite an extreme viewpoint”. Specifically, people “at the very top of the party” who were anti-Muslim, homophobic, and anti-Semitic, wanted a tie-up with Tommy Robinson. This shocked her. Oh really? And she didn’t know that only the previous year UKIP had lifted its membership ban on former members of fascist and neo-Nazi groups?
Then she claims that she had personally brought in Nick Tenconi as her “brilliant” Deputy Leader who, she says, “doesn’t represent” that extremist tendency. Nor does Chairman Ben Walker, apparently. And yet, Tenconi, who on her sudden departure became Leader, is the man now driving UKIP in the direction of working together with, yes, Tommy Robinson, with whom he sat down very recently to discuss co-operation. And it was Ben Walker who described admitting fascists and neo-Nazis as members as a move to “attract like minded people”.
After that it all becomes even more absurd, narcissistic even. She says that when she took the job she believed (“not blowing my own trumpet”) that she could be the “female Farage…charismatic or whatever”, a fantasy shattered when Farage returned to active politics during the election, and she realised there wasn’t room for two Farages in British politics. Oh, dear…
Then she claims, mysteriously, that she was ‘the plaything for a group of very wealthy Brexit millionaires, who wanted to get a message across”. Sadly, her inept interrogator, the right-wing gobshite Andre Walker, failed to explore this intriguing claim. Or perhaps just decided it was imprudent to do so.
We are tempted to conclude by saying that Lois Perry gives every impression of being someone who doesn’t even know what day it is. Not just because she tweeted that this confessional interview would be on Thursday, and it then took place on Wednesday. No, it is the bizarre claim that she was at death’s door in hospital, with pneumonia, when “I’d been leader for a couple of days”. Now, it’s quite true she had been hospitalised with pneumonia; this was indeed the reason she gave when she announced she was quitting. But she was actually discharged from hospital a week before her leadership election victory was even announced.
Former UKIP deputy leader Rebecca Jane, who savaged UKIP and especially Ben Walker in a recent open letter to UKIP members published in Searchlight, put it succinctly:
“It’s just all so overly dramatic… and the line ‘female Farage’ – is honestly insanity.
“She really thinks a lot of herself. I’m all for confidence but this is narcissistic delusion!”