Don’t bet on Arron Banks surviving Ukip’s latest soap opera plotline

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/15/arron-banks-ukip-feuds-nigel-farage

Version 0 of 1.

The latest episode of the Ukip soap opera opened on Tuesday, as most of the party’s feuds now do, with shots fired on Twitter. Arron Banks, the party’s current millionaire bankroller, announced that his membership of the party had been suspended and promised “interesting times lie ahead”. This prompted speculation that he might found a new party, which he confirmed, describing the new project as “Ukip 2.0”.

Longtime party observers might be forgiven for a sense of deja vu. “Opinionated millionaire allies with Ukip, feuds, gets chucked out” is a plotline that has played out at least twice already in the party’s brief history.

The first Ukip hero-turned-villain was Michael Holmes, a self-made millionaire businessman who allied with Nigel Farage in 1997 to oust party founder Alan Sked, and took over as leader himself. Holmes and Farage were both elected to the European parliament two years later as two of Ukip’s first three MEPs. Soon after that the feuding began – as one veteran organiser told us in our book Revolt on the Right – “Nigel was at war with Holmes. [I]t looked … as though the party was going to collapse”.

Holmes fell out with a range of leading party figures, colourful accusations circulated, and the party’s ruling national executive split down the middle into pro- and anti-Holmes factions. Things came to a head at a now-infamous extraordinary general meeting of the party in January 2000, where after rows so heated that one member had a heart attack, the Ukip base resolved to remove their leader after just two years in office.

Five years later, with another European election approaching, a very similar story played out, this time with Robert Kilroy-Silk in the starring role. The former Labour MP and wealthy star of the Kilroy daytime TV chatshow unexpectedly joined Ukip after being dismissed by the BBC for making derogatory remarks about Arabs in his newspaper column. Kilroy was parachuted to the top of the Ukip candidate list in the East Midlands, and immediately became the public face of the party. Kilroy had the celebrity profile Ukip needed to secure attention, and his extensive TV experience helped popularise its message.

Like Holmes before him, Kilroy’s arrival was crucial to the party’s unexpected success in European elections – propelling it to third place ahead of the Liberal Democrats. And like Holmes before him, Kilroy began to feud with his new party from the day the 12 newly elected Ukip MEPs took their seats.

Kilroy decided there were serious problems with the party’s organisation and leadership. Conveniently, he also concluded that the only person equipped to solve these problems was Robert Kilroy-Silk. This was not a widely shared opinion. The result was a protracted civil war that Farage would later describe as “just a f***ing nightmare”. After months of acrimonious conflict in public and private, Kilroy left the party in January 2005, less than a year after he joined it. He then founded a new political party, Veritas (“the straight talking party”), which flopped at the 2005 general election, and limped on for a decade without ever gaining traction.

The Banks crisis is thus nothing new for a party that began life by ejecting its founder within three years and then ejecting his successor after another two. Just last year Ukip saw two leadership elections descend into chaos – the first when the victor resigned after 18 days and left the party, the second after the frontrunner was hospitalised following an altercation with a fellow MEP in the European parliament.

The complaints Banks makes about factionalism and dysfunction are also familiar to party stalwarts, who heard the same for years from a rotating cast of disgruntled senior figures. Ukip members love a good feud – and they particularly love the traditional finale, where the arrogant arriviste gets his comeuppance, and flounces off humiliated. Will the 2017 edition have a different ending?

Perhaps. For one thing, Banks has more organisational resources and campaigning experience than previous Ukip malcontents, thanks to his prominent role in the Brexit campaign as maestro of Leave.EU. For another, he has picked his fight at an opportune moment. The EU referendum victory has deprived Ukip of its founding goal, prompting an identity crisis and an electoral and polling slump. New leader Paul Nuttall’s authority has been damaged by his high-profile failure in the Stoke Central byelection. This could be a propitious moment to argue for a fresh start.

But the most important difference about this episode of Ukip feuding is the prominent figure missing from the starting cast. “Nigel always wins” has been an iron rule in past conflicts. But Farage is currently out of the political frontline, and has sympathies with both sides. He has formed a strong bond with Banks, and has echoed many of Banks’s criticisms – in particular those directed at Douglas Carswell, Ukip’s only MP (yet another unexpected recruit who has since fallen out with his new party). But the current leader is also a longstanding Farage ally and protege. The likeliest outcome is that Farage stays above the fray – which would still leave Banks in a better position than earlier feuders. But with Ukip you never know for sure. Britain’s most famous Brexiter turning against the party he built up over decades? Now there’s a plot twist I’d tune in for.