If chopping and changing leaders were a competition, UKIP would be running the Tories a close second, though the calibre of its candidates is even less savoury. Tony Peters charily inspects the vipers slithering in and out of the pit.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Searchlight

When the previous issue of Searchlight went to press, we were confidently predicting the victory of veteran UKIP member and ex-MEP Bill Etheridge in the party leadership election that had just taken place. So were most of the membership.

So it was dropped jaws all round, then, when it was announced that his only-recently-joined election rival Lois Perry had won. And not just won – but stormed it by taking not much short of 80% of the vote. It is fair to say that the bulk of the members, including Etheridge, were stunned.

Among the very few who appeared not to be surprised was UKIP chairman and returning officer, Ben “Rogue Builder” Walker, who has yet to publish the numbers of actual votes cast. This may be to conceal the parlous state of the party membership figures – but, whatever the turnout, Perry pulled off a bit of a coup. Etheridge was favoured by most other senior party veterans. Perry, on the other hand, is an anti‑net zero campaigner who presents as, well, a bit witless.

She may have shown other qualities, however, which would have endeared her to Walker, who was probably missing a female touch around the office. A number of charming, vivacious young females parachuted into HQ as the chairman’s appointments in the past couple of years have not lasted long.

Patrons Co-ordinator (and clairvoyant) Joanna Grzesiak and general secretary Treasure Okwu each survived only a few months before packing up and slipping quietly away. And, of course, there was Rebecca Jane, the former deputy leader, also appointed by Walker, and the most prominent departure, who used the election announcement as an opportunity to fire off a salvo of allegations about Walker’s alleged libidinousness and his less-than-honourable intentions towards her when he appointed her. She even suggested that Walker held a bit of a candle, so to speak, for Lois.

Politically, Perry’s election promised to drag UKIP further and faster down the conspiracy rabbit hole. Whereas Etheridge was an old school anti‑immigration, anti-Europe traditionalist, Perry is right up there with the climate-denying, anti-ULEZ, anti-15-minute cities, anti-net zero conspiracy-obsessed nut jobs. Up until now she has been running the pro-car lobby group Car26 and has said she is not that bothered by immigration.

In a previous incarnation, she was the South East representative of Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party and appeared regularly on GB News. She also claimed that she “had a moment” with Boris Johnson – “something could have happened, but it didn’t …”

Barnacles galore

Only a few days after Perry’s enthronement, Walker was discovered not to have been a Royal Navy Petty Officer, as has oft been reported. Searchlight revealed that “Barnacle” Ben’s Royal Navy discharge paperwork shows him as having left the service not as a PO, but at the (lower) rank of LSA.

Now, to be fair, we have yet to see any evidence that Walker has publicly described himself as a PO. But other people have made the inflated claim on his behalf. It was first spotted in September 2017 in “Team UKIP United” (TUU) press releases, where he was described as “Former Royal Navy Petty Officer Ben Walker”.

Team UKIP United was a “slate” of four UKIP members in the Autumn 2017 internal party elections. Although he was the slate’s putative UKIP chairman, Walker was very much the junior man in TUU. Jane Collins and David Coburn (the other half of the leader-deputy ticket) were both Members of the European Parliament.

So it is possible that the two officer grade candidates ran the whole show, while the other-ranks Walker was kept in the dark about matters such as press releases and did not know how he was being described. In the end, it probably did not matter very much. The slate picked up a little over 4% of the vote.

But just a week or so after that election, Barnacle Ben was quoted extensively by RT UK (often referred to as Russia Today) about his thoughts on the Royal Navy, which he compared unfavourably to “the fishing and rowing boats during our retreat from Dunkirk.” The Putin mouthpiece described Walker as “a petty officer who served in Afghanistan”.

This seemed, to us, to be pushing the envelope too far on two fronts. Walker was not a petty officer. He was also not in Afghanistan. While he was aboard (counting potatoes or whatever) his ship, the destroyer HMS Southampton, it was deployed in the Gulf screening the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious.

This certainly counts as being part of the Afghanistan Campaign – and probably entitles him to the Campaign Medal – but in Afghanistan kind of implies coming face to face with the Taliban, and he certainly did not do that. He cannot even claim to have been in Afghan territorial waters. Afghanistan is landlocked.

But while we have seen no evidence that Walker has actively claimed to have been a petty officer or to have been in Afghanistan, nor have we seen any evidence that he has ever tried to correct any of the references to him that he knows as well as we do to be utter … er … barnacles. Perhaps it is time for him to at least set the record straight.

Pointless posturing

Then came the general election. UKIP’s first intervention, under the new leadership of Perry, was to announce that it was withdrawing from seven seats to help out Nigel Farage and Reform. This was complete tosh: UKIP did not have candidates for most of these seats, was not going to find any candidates, and two of the seats no longer existed anyway.

But even the spirit of the undertaking lasted no longer than close of nominations four days later.

When the candidate lists were announced, it turned out that UKIP was now not only running against Farage himself in Clacton – where, to be fair, no undertaking had actually been given – but also in Barnsley North and Barnsley South, which last year replaced Barnsley Central and Barnsley East following boundary changes.

The latter two were on the UKIP withdrawal list, but UKIP pulled the crafty trick of outsourcing the successor seats to their allies in the English Democrats, with whom it was bound in an officially registered electoral partnership called the Patriots Alliance. And in both cases the opponents included Reform UK.

Then, bursting with excitement that “my friend” Nigel Farage was running after all, Perry announced that UKIP would be standing a candidate, in Clacton, against Farage himself.

Perry’s election and the controversy surrounding it then sparked a series of high-profile resignations and departures from senior posts in the party, the most notable, at that stage, being (retired) Squadron Leader Peter Richardson and Julie Carter, who both resigned as UKIP “spokespeople” and then from the party itself.

Carter, from a longstanding UKIP-supporting family and until November an NEC member and the party’s Education Spokesperson, was previously the UKIP election candidate in Ealing Central and Acton. Richardson was the party’s Defence and Veterans Spokesperson, and only last year its candidate in the Somerset and Frome by-election.

There are rumours that both were troubled by recent coverage of UKIP’s internal affairs, most notably in Searchlight, and that, when some dissident elements started circulating a dossier of revelatory articles, their thoughts and intentions crystallised and they decided to call it a day.

Gone so soon …

On 15 July, came the first bombshell: Perry, in a small-hours tweet, announced that she was resigning as Leader, citing health issues.

Although the timing was dramatic, in the middle of the election campaign, it was not altogether surprising. Recent events had betrayed a possible division of loyalties: only two days earlier Perry had a “lovely lunch” with Reform UK leader Farage, for whom she made no secret of her drooling admiration and whom she endorsed in the election, even though UKIP was standing in the same Clacton seat. Then she publicly endorsed renegade Tory MP Lee Anderson, also running for Reform UK.

It was also never clear, when she stood for the party leadership, that she fully understood the snake pit she was jumping into, not least of all:

• The increasing financial and organisational opacity of the party
• The allegations of libidinous behaviour swirling around Walker
• Walker’s sacking as a magistrate for misleading the Ministry of Justice about his previous convictions, and
• The criminal convictions of other party members such as Dan Morgan, convicted in a major fraud case for robbing vulnerable people of their savings, but still allowed to play a prominent role in the party in south Wales.

Then, the second bombshell: only days after Perry resigned, former deputy leader Rebecca Jane used the good offices of Searchlight to publish an open letter to the UKIP membership. It was an excoriating attack on Walker and the direction in which the party was heading. “UKIP is over” she said, “its members are simply lining one man’s pocket.

Anyone left?

For Etheridge, Perry’s defeated leadership election rival, it was also time to speak out. Having kept his counsel and remained loyally silent since the result was announced, he now let rip. Interviewed on the right-wing online Freeman Report, he poured scorn on the idea that Perry had been elected fairly.

“I’m prepared to believe that a large number of activists and people involved in the party appeared to have voted for me, yet the vote turned out to be about 80% to 20% to Lois …

“So I’m prepared to believe that a lot of people who aren’t actually active members must have voted, and all voted for Lois. I’m prepared to believe that …

“I believe, actually, that Father Christmas sometimes delivers my Xmas presents and that when kids lose a tooth, the tooth fairy puts a little penny under them …”

And when it was put to him by host James Freeman: “… it looks like Farage and Lee Anderson have managed to convince Lois that UKIP don’t stand a chance and so she should collapse the party and put the party into disarray, right before the general election”, Etheridge went full Francis Urquhart. “What an interesting theory. I couldn’t possibly comment on that theory, other than to say I find it fascinating …”

As the election results were counted, it became clear that UKIP had polled miserably: some 6,000 votes nationwide divided among 26 candidates.

The resignations continued: Pat Mountain, UKIP’s party director, resigned her party positions, then from the party, and then as a director of UKIP Ltd. Of all the recent departures, this was one of the most significant. Mountain had been a member of UKIP for more than a decade. She was interim leader during the 2019 general election and deputy leader for a period after that, and was a party candidate in local council, parliamentary and European elections on numerous occasions. Mountain was also one of the group of “plotters” who delivered the chairmanship to Walker in 2020.

Most recently UKIP has lost Home Affairs Spokesman Steve Unwin, who quit saying he does not have the time or the inclination to be involved any more, and Agriculture Spokesperson Pat Bryant, who died of lung cancer in July and whom they are struggling to replace.

These are significant losses. Bryant was a longstanding senior member, and for the most part blindly loyal. There were signs, however, that before she died the scales had fallen from her eyes and she made no secret of her loathing for Chairman Ben Walker.

Unwin was also a veteran of the party and is believed to have quit because, like so many others, he lost faith entirely in the leadership vote which led to the election of Perry.

Down in the gutter

So, as we approach the deadline for this issue, the party is shrivelling on the vine and members continue to leave in droves – some reports suggest they are now in the low hundreds.

Perry has been replaced by Nick Tenconi, brought over from Turning Point UK, who joined the party only weeks before his appointment first as deputy leader, then leader. That itself is a subject of much discontent among the remaining members.

A cunning and nasty piece of work by all accounts, Tenconi tweeted two years ago, describing himself as a “huge fan” of Kyle Rittenhouse, the US right-winger who shot dead two people at a demonstration, and who was acquitted of murder in 2021, and has been a darling of the extreme right ever since.

 As leader, Tenconi lost no time in sitting down with Tommy Robinson, Laurence Fox, Katie Hopkins and their ilk to discuss working together, in the process dragging UKIP even further down into the gutter.

It’s all such a far cry from forcing David Cameron to hold a referendum.

Caption

‘A lovely bunch’ Lois Perry (top) reigned over UKIP for even less time than Liz Truss was Conservative leader, to be replaced by blow‑in Nick Tenconi (right), but Ben Walker (bottom left) is the man with his hand on the tiller (and the bank accounts)