With nominations now closed for local elections in England, and with UKIP promising that it is going to win the 2029 General Election, you might assume the party would be fielding a raft of candidates across the UK both as a declaration of intent and as a warm-up for the looming ascent to government.
You might also assume Elvis is lining up a comeback tour.
In fact, the party appears to have achieved the remarkable organisational feat of fielding precisly zero candidates across England. That’s zero as in not a single one that we can find.
Leader goes AWOL
This is all the more peculiar not only because the party is busy soliciting funds for the election onslaught three years hence, but bacause when he was (s)elected as leader, Nick Tenconi pledged to run personally in elections.
And yet, so far, whilst others have been racking up embarrassing, derisory votes in by elections, he has been completely AWOL.
This is why they call him TACO.
He did, however, before quickly scooting back down south, film a campaign video recently outside Holyrood in Edinburgh, in support of 15 candidates the party is fielding in elections for the Scottish Parliament.
But “Scottish”, in this context, is doing a certain amount of heavy lifting.
Of those fifteen, only four appear to have any meaningful connection to Scotland, including the party’s Scottish leader, Donald Mackay, and his wife, NEC member Janice Mackay.
Geriatric roadshow
The rest form a sort of travelling roadshow, featuring geriatrics drafted in from elsewhere, including party treasurer Ian ‘Gullible’ Garbutt and long-standing Brighton activist Steve Sullivan, alongside a Tamworth-based husband-and-wife pairing with a formidable record of electoral defeat.
The husband is Robert Bilcliff who, in 2014, was ‘investigated’ by UKIP for posting homophobic remarks online. Needless to say, he survived.
The Glasgow list includes Donald Mackay alongside candidates brought in from over 300 miles away, including Garbutt and Laurence ‘Smelly’ Keeley, a former butcher whose past notoriety once extended well beyond the ballot box.
He was jailed for 31 days in 2003 after burning pigs’ heads, cows’ lungs and spinal cords at a beauty spot, and then dumping the remains.
He told the Brighton Argus that he was not ashamed; he could not afford to pay the £3000 fine the court had imposed so a month behind bars was a “bargain”.
South Scotland offers a similarly eclectic mix, with Janice Mackay the only locally connected candidate of the five UKIP contestants, who include Bilcliff, Sullivan, and Coventry-based Laurie Steele.
Elsewhere, things do not markedly improve.
In Central Scotland and the Lothians, one candidate is Steve Hollis, a Parish Councillor from South Staffordshire, best remembered for being the last elected UKIP councillor before the party’s effective disappearance from local government representation.
West Scotland, meanwhile, features a slate of interlopers which includes Bristol-based UKIP party Chairman Ben ‘Rogue Builder’ Walker, the man who till recently held the record for the lowest vote (five) ever polled by a UKIP candidate.
Risks humiliation
At least it can be said of him that he is prepared to put his head above the parapet and risk humiliation at the hands of the voters.
Unlike, of course, his ‘Leader’ Taco Tenconi.
Britain’s fastest shrinking party, now more a pensioners’ outing with a donation button attached.
And a leader too frit to stand.
Peak UKIP.
