Reform UK has dropped its candidate for Derbyshire Dales, Edward Oakenfull (above) for derogatory comments about sub-Saharan Africans and Muslims – a mere 11 days after they were reported by the BBC.

Also dropped is Barnsley North candidate Robert Lomas (below) who said that black people should “get off [their] lazy arses” and stop acting “like savages”. Those remarks were reported in the Times three weeks ago.

Leslie Lilley (below) the candidate for Southend East and Rochford, illustrates that three’s the charm by being dropped after saying of migrants arriving on small boats that they were ”scumbags” and that ”I’ll slaughter them then have their family taken out.”

Jaw-droppingly, Reform is still asking the electorate to vote for these supposed outcasts regardless, as a gesture of support for the Reform ”policy platform” not the candidates themselves. Which is very much a case of having your fruit-and-nutcake and eating it.

So, in just what sense are these bigots suspended? According to a party spokesman they would have to sit as independent MPs. Their election being a prospect up there alongside Nigel Farage’s chances of winning a mixed martial artists’ beauty pageant.

Rebecca Jane, UKIP’s former Deputy Leader whose salvo of allegations published in Searchlight last week precipitated a further crisis and exodus of members, has not finished with UKIP yet.

She has now written to party treasurer Ian Garbutt (below) reminding him that in this role he is the officer principally responsible to the Electoral Commission for ensuring that the party meets its legal and financial obligations.

She says that when she left the party in January, she raised concerns with the NEC about how the time that Chairman Ben Walker works for and is paid for by UKIP is audited and suggested there should be an investigation. She is now asking Garbutt, before she takes the matter to the Electoral Commission, whether this was done.

She also claims that she is owed thousands of pounds in expenses from her term as Deputy Leader and is asking for them to be reimbursed forthwith. This might prove difficult: she says the debt amounts to several thousand pounds but this would, according to accounts filed at Companies House, be considerably more than normally resides in the party’s bank account.

Bill Etheridge’s dramatic online resignation from the party has also had serious repercussions. The only other candidate against Lois Perry in the leadership election, Etheridge (below) was a UKIP veteran of many years standing, formerly a UKIP MEP. Not only he, but the vast majority of party activists (and indeed Searchlight) expected him to cruise home against a rival who had only joined the party a few weeks earlier in order to stand for leader.

In the event, Perry won with almost 80% of the vote and then, a few weeks later, after warmly endorsing Nigel Farage and Reform, suddenly announced her resignation on health grounds.

Etheridge bottled up his anger for a while but in the end, couldn’t resist firing off against Walker, the election returning officer and then quitting the party.

Almost immediately, he was followed by Retired Squadron Leader Peter Richardson, till very recently the party’s Defence and Veterans spokesperson and highly respected by the membership. Contacted by Walker to establish, presumably, if he would remain loyal, Richardson replied by resigning immediately from the party. Revelations about Walker’s claims regarding his own military record are said to have weighed in Richardson’s decision.

Etheridge accompanied his online resignation announcement by saying he would not be joining or support Reform. That was taken to refer to his barely disguised endorsement of a theory put to him on a radio show that Perry’s resignation was part of a Reform-engineered plot to destroy UKIP.

This was not the only factor weighing against him joining Reform: Etheridge left UKIP temporarily back in 2018 and a year later approached Reform’s predecessor, the Brexit Party, only to be turned away. Even they, presumably, could see the PR downside of his earlier antics with golliwogs in defence of ‘free speech’. Meanwhile, Etheridge is the subject of truly epic effusions of bile on the leading UKIP activists WhatsApp Group, oddly called ‘Smoked Haddock Banter’.

UKIP is now being led, on an interim basis, by Deputy Leader Nick Tenconi, formerly of Turning Point UK. This creates the bizarre situation of a political party being led by someone elected by nobody, who only joined the party some two months ago precisely in order to be parachuted in as Deputy Leader. No wonder increasing numbers of members are just jumping ship.

Pictures: Rebecca Jane (top); Bill Etheridge (below, left); Ian Garbutt (below right).

Read Rebecca Jane’s open letter to UKIP members here: https://t.co/IcfGHraGOM

New alliances on the British far right are shaping up in advance of polling day.

The Social Democratic Party – not the 1980s “Gang of Four” but anti-immigration populists who have tried to resist the “right-wing” label – has an alliance with Reform UK (though far from a complete one). This is why Reform UK has stood aside in all five Sheffield constituencies and at least two other Yorkshire seats.

It’s difficult to see how this alliance will survive if one or the other party has Westminster seats and has to agree a party line. The SDP claims to adopt some “Old Labour” economic policies, while Reform UK are hardline neo-Thatcherites, and in some cases American-style libertarians.

An even broader alliance involves the English Democrats, UKIP, and Patriotic Alternative. This is complicated by PA also choosing also to work with the other main British fascist party, the British Democrats. Yorkshire PA members have been out leafleting with Brit Dem candidate Frank Calladine in Yorkshire, but they have been conspicuously absent from the campaigns of their English Democrat allies in Barnsley.

Cynics might imagine this is because one of the Barnsley ED candidates is of partly Caribbean origin.

Another complication is that Collett’s bitter enemies in Kenny Smith’s Homeland Party also try to be friendly with the EDs.

The third far right grouping contains two other breakaway factions from PA, the mainly Midlands and East Anglia based “Independent Nationalists”, and Alek Yerbury’s military-style National Rebirth Party, which so far as we can tell has its main strength in Yorkshire.

Whereas PA and Homeland cosy up to the EDs, and debate the pros and cons of voting for Reform in the vast majority of constituencies where there is no ED or Brit Dem candidate, Yerbury takes a more purist line.

He rejects Reform, UKIP and the EDs as multiracialist. For Yerbury, the whole point of racist politics is to stick to your principles.

It remains to be seen whether Mr Yerbury’s principles will stretch to an alliance with Nick Griffin. The former BNP Führer is sniffing around for allies, thinking he can market his last remaining dregs of credibility.

Are we going to see a Griffin-Yerbury alliance competing with the Brit Dem geriatrics, the Homeland opportunists, and those PA activists who can stay out of jail?

And if so, who will recruit the small army of racists and nutters who have been found too extreme (or too candid) for Reform UK.

Such people might not have much ability or credibility, but they do have cheque books, which perhaps explains Nick Griffin’s sudden reappearance with the dramatic allegation yesterday claim that Nigel Farage was once a member of the National Front. Griffin is clearly trying to elbow himself back into relevance. As yet, there has been no response from Farage.

Picture: North West Patriotic Alternative activists campaign for PA member standing as ‘English Democrat’ candidate.