Before last weekend’s UKIP conference began, Chairman Ben ‘Rogue Builder’ Walker issued strict instructions, especially to the chap filming proceedings: only the speeches were to be shown. Absolutely no audience shots.
And now we know why. For just a brief moment, the official camera forgot Walker’s injunction and panned round to welcome recent Reform defector Amelia Randall to the stage revealing that, if you discount the five speakers sitting in the audience waiting to be called, the attendance amounted to EIGHT people.
That’s right. just eight.
Ben Walker has just struck, we believe, another all-time UKIP record in his record-breaking stewardship of Britain’s fastest shrinking political party.
First he managed to achieve the lowest vote ever polled by a UKIP candidate (five in Stroud last June) and now he has gathered together what is certainly the smallest national conference the party has ever held.
Brave face
He did try to put something of a brave, if rather misleading, face on proceedings, using his introduction speech to claim that the attendance had “multiplied again” since the derisory attendance of last year. Well, multiplied by a fraction, perhaps: last year was humiliating enough with around 20 attendees, this is even more so.
Last year, of course, they held a joint conference with Robin Tilbrook’s English Democrats. This year Tibrook didn’t waste any more time or money on Walker’ merry little band: he popped off to London to attend the Traditional Britain Group conference instead.
But, an otherwise insignificant conference was interesting for a couple of things.
Firstly, UKIP has now adopted a new party logo. It’s not yet replaced the always-a-bit-ridiculous pound sign that has decorated their literature for quite a while, but it did adorn everything at the Gloucester conference.
It’s, well, depending on your interpretation, closest to either a knight’s templar cross, or a German iron cross. Take your pick. Either way, a curious selection.
Playmate of the year
And the conference did at least boast a new ‘star’ speaker – none other than Louise Glover.
“Who?” you ask.
Well, Ms Glover’s claim to fame is that she is a former Playboy Club, ‘Playmate of the Year’ who fell on hard times, had a heart attack, ended up sleeping in her car and blamed socialism.
Bemoaning her lot
In between, that is, a series of media appearances bemoaning her lot, which she now uses to justify her X bio where she claims to be a ‘media personality’.
Oh, and a ‘humanitarian volunteer’. UKIP is stuffed with them, of course.
Then she launched a crowd funder to buy a boat where she could live and restore her mental health to some kind of equilibrium.
How long she remains close to UKIP is open to question. Other attractive young women have departed in pretty short order when they realised what being around the likes of Ben Walker on a regular basis involved.
Into bed
Former Deputy Leader Rebecca Jane famously declared that he had only appointed her to the position because he wanted to “get me into bed”.
And Nick Tenconi’s inter-personal antics have been the subject of much speculation.
Another featured speaker at the conference was the batshit preacher himself, the ‘Reverend’ Calvin Robinson, beamed in by video link from the US.
Low key rant
Still billed as UKIP’s Lead Spokesman on Everything he delivered a low key rant on the need to shut down the left and preserve the Christian, British identity of the UK.
He would love, he told the assembly, to come back and stand for office for UKIP.
But he can’t yet. He’s been “called” you see, to his current cosy, fundamentalist billet in West Michigan.
As it happens, the second day of the conference was due to be devoted to ‘candidate training’
Really? By Ben ‘Five votes’ Walker? We would have loved to have been at that.
And, there’s this. The pre-conference publicity.
Burning crosses.
Now where have we seen those before..?
The only thing keeping UKIP alive in the public mind at the moment are the clownish demonstrations orchestrated by Tenconi, where (at most) a couple of hundred of his noisy supporters wander through a few streets of a town or city before claiming that they have ‘taken back’ the place from Islamists and the forces of darkness.
Whitechapel on 25 October is by far the most provocative of these; they plan to parade past the local mosque. They are likely to see opposition the like of which they have not experienced before.
