Inside Ukip's campaign: Farage surfaces

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/12/inside-ukips-campaign-farage-surfaces

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Nigel Farage’s absence from the election campaign so far has bemused commentators and relieved his rivals. This morning, however, the Ukip leader will get his party’s 2015 show on the road in a key target seat: Castle Point in south Essex.

Expectations are considerable. While the party may not win many seats, it is polling between 14% and 17%, and Farage needs to show that he remains the principal disruptor in the British political system.

Since the last election, Farage’s anti-EU, tough-on-immigration populist politics has won over supporters in their millions, and donors with serious money. Ukip is now able to pour more than £1m into 30 to 40 target seats, in the hope of adding to the two MPs it has already stolen off the Tories.

It hopes to overtake the Liberal Democrats, become the main challenger party in hundreds of English seats and win in at least four new constituencies – Thurrock, Boston, Great Yarmouth, and Farage’s own parliament target of Thanet South, where bookmakers have the party odds-on to win. The catch is that none of these parliamentary seats is an easy fight.

Related: How Tories could remain the largest party (part one): Ukip support drops

With this in mind, Farage has been relentlessly focusing on “Thanet, Thanet, Thanet” over the last month, according to Ukip insiders, who admit to some anxiety about their leader taking the seat in May.

Farage’s speech in Castle Point will set out the case that Ukip is a party speaking for the whole nation, making the point that Ukip is well placed to capitalise on the fact that Labour is no longer very competitive in much of the south and that the Tories’ influence in the north is weak.

After six unsuccessful attempts to enter parliament in the past, any failure to win over voters at the peak of Ukip’s momentum would deal a blow to Farage’s image as the leader of a people’s army who can rival David Cameron and Ed Miliband on the national stage. And according to one senior Ukip official, the party is currently more confident about winning Thurrock, meaning Farage has to concentrate on his local campaign.

“He will do some speeches, but in terms of going all round the country, absolutely not. Anyone who thinks we’re going to walk Thanet is in cloud cuckoo land. We will have to work bloody hard in that seat, even with the ‘Nigel factor’, to prove that he will make a good constituency MP.”

In a series of private ward meetings and leaflets, the Ukip leader has been portraying himself in the area as a family man with normal hobbies: angling, watching cricket, collecting war medals and going on coach trips to historical battlefields. Given that he does not live in the constituency, the fight is on to persuade residents of the Kent seaside town that he cares about the local airport, fishing rights and unwanted development, and that his insurgent party is on the brink of a political breakthrough.

Farage’s uncertain electoral prospects partly explain his low-key presence on the national stage since the beginning of the year, although the party argues that it has a clever strategy to let the Tories and Labour tear chunks out of each other until the electorate is bored of hearing that Cameron will destroy the NHS and Miliband will ruin the economy.

“Both parties are unleashing heavy artillery fire at each other, and what I’ve got to do is to rise above it all. Let them say what they damned well want, because our job is to tell people what we are for,” Farage told a private meeting last month.

With his attention split between the national picture and his local battle, Farage has had to build a reliable team around him to give the party the organisational muscle it lacked at the last election. Although Ukip is commonly portrayed as a one-man band, the party now believes it has the senior staff in place to orchestrate a successful campaign while its leader directs his efforts at getting the Westminster seat he has sought for so long.

However, the scale of the task has grown monumentally since Ukip gained just 3% of the national vote in 2010. Back then, Ukip estimates that its former leader Lord Pearson had less than 10 minutes of exposure on the airwaves, and it shied away from fielding candidates against traditional Tories. This time, Ukip is pretty sure to be classified as a major party, giving it hours of broadcast opportunities, and is gunning for every MP in the country.

It is keen to emphasise that its new range of spokesmen and women will be able to speak confidently on policy, in contrast to some of those who held senior roles in the past, such as the unpredictable mavericks Godfrey Bloom and Winston McKenzie.

Ukip’s campaign is being run from a small Mayfair office, lent to it by a donor, with room for just 50 staff. This will soon become a skeleton team, given the number running to be MPs. At the centre of this effort are Steve Crowther, the party chairman, who oversees the operation; Raheem Kassam, Farage’s trusted political aide; Paul “Gobby” Lambert, the former BBC producer turned communications director; and Chris Bruni-Lowe, a data expert who has worked for a number of Tory MPs and ran the People’s Pledge for an EU referendum campaign.

Donors also hold some sway over the party’s direction. These include Andrew Reid, Stuart Wheeler, Arron Banks and Paul Sykes, who has tended to provide non-cash donations of advertising with a big say over the content.

Kassam explains that the party has been boosted by a natural movement of “cyber-kippers” spreading the word online in a similar way to SNP activists during the independence referendum. That helps boost activist morale and win new recruits, but the party is also trying to use more traditional campaigning methods to win over swing voters in its target areas. This includes an attempt at message discipline previously unknown to its activists.

“We still think knocking on doors and leaflets are the best way to communicate,” Kassam says. “We are sending out infinitely more leaflets than last time. The organisation has professionalised to a point where all other campaigns before this one were beneath zero. This is campaign 1.0 because it is the first time we’re fighting like any other party would.”

A major difference compared with 2010 is that the party has now broadened its support to a wider range of candidates. Roger Arthur, a former Tory councillor standing in Horsham, explains that even in a non-target seat he has “more than enough money to make a significant impact”. “We’ve already delivered more than 20,000 leaflets, and the canvassing we’re doing is a technique based on proper sampling to give us a rough idea of our chances. We believe we will be within 5,000 votes,” he says.

As well as drawing on the expertise of Kassam and Bruni-Lowe, Farage has been shopping for ideas abroad. Two weeks ago, he and an aide flew to Milan to meet the digital team of Beppe Grillo, leader of Italy’s Five Star political party, with whom Ukip is in alliance in the European parliament.

Although unconvinced by Grillo’s methods of direct democracy, whereby members are asked to vote on every policy, he is understood to feel similarities with the Italian movement’s philosophy that for most of the population, politics has been lost to big business, lobbying interests and trade unions.

On the substance of policy, Farage has a number of speeches scheduled for the coming weeks, designed to address criticism that Ukip has previously offered little in the way of a coherent manifesto beyond wanting to leave Europe and reduce immigration. The writing of this document has not gone entirely smoothly, after it had to be handed over to a new policy chief, the deputy chairman Suzanne Evans, amid rumours it was still a series of “bullet points”.

More recently, it is understood there has been internal debate about whether it is wise for the Ukip leader to personally get involved in announcing the ins and outs of specific policy detail. The most likely solution is that Farage will give general introductions, while his spokesmen and women fill in the nitty-gritty. “Can you really imagine Nigel giving a 25-minute policy speech? It’s not his style,” a senior party source says. “He’ll do broad-stroke stuff.”

Clues about the direction of travel on policy can be found in tapes of Farage’s recent town hall meetings, obtained by the Guardian through the Thanet Watch satirical magazine. At these small gatherings, he disclosed that he believes the election will be fought and won on three issues: the NHS, the economy, and immigration. He also emphasised the billions a Ukip government could have in its coffers if the country withdrew from the EU, slashed international aid and cancelled HS2. By taking about £10bn out of the aid budget, Ukip would “rebuild the destruction that’s been caused to our air force, navy and army so we can defend our own island”.

The party also says £3bn from the EU pot would go towards the NHS, but Farage adds that while it would would remain free, he would like a “big shake-up in the bureaucracy” of the health service, including “putting in some sharp-minded businesspeople to get better bang for our buck”.

On immigration, his offering is an Australian-style points system allowing in skilled workers, and stopping people coming in if they have “life-threatening diseases or criminal records”. Despite the rightwing tone of many of these trailed policies, Ukip still insists there will be a “high, high emphasis” on winning some of the Labour-facing seats, including Great Grimsby, in Lincolnshire. Other targets are known to be Rotherham and Rother Valley, where the Labour administrations have been under fire for their failure to deal with child sexual grooming by gangs of mainly Pakistani origin.

In some areas of South Yorkshire, Ukip has already been accused of exploiting the scandal for political aims, with Farage forced to abandon a visit to Rotherham last week in the face of protests. The party dismisses these as trade union-funded troublemakers, but as in Thanet, the pursuit of Ukip by demonstrators is increasing in the runup to May.

Overall, the seats most likely to turn purple are still likely to have been blue before: Thanet, Thurrock, Boston and Great Yarmouth. But the game plan, according to Rob Ford, who co-wrote the prize-winning book Revolt on the Right about Ukip, is for the party to get “a decent foothold in parliament with four, five, six seats and a swath of others where they are in a solid second place and they can go back in the council elections of 2016 and build on that, and again in another general election that may be even sooner than 2020”.

In a way, this election is still something of a rehearsal for the new Ukip, giving it a solid springboard from which to be viewed as an equal with the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems next time round. Ford says: “From second place, they can then argue against the incumbent MP in Labour and Tory seats next time. In both cases they will have a chance potentially to go from 30% and 20 points behind to No 1.”

Ukip donors

Andrew Reid Founder of the law firm RMPI

Stuart Wheeler Spread-betting tycoon and former Tory donor

Arron Banks Another former Conservative supporter and businessman

Paul Sykes Built the Meadowhall shopping centre in Sheffield and is a third ex-Tory donor who has supported Ukip for many years

Key party figures

Raheem Kassam, adviser to Nigel Farage

Kassam is a former managing editor of the right-wing news website Breitbart, who was poached by Ukip in October last year. He is one of Farage’s most trusted advisers and is among the few who is able to speak for the leader personally.

Chris Bruni-Lowe, data and campaigns expert

Bruni-Lowe was recruited by Ukip to bring some campaigning expertise to the party. He co-founded the People’s Pledge campaign gathering support for an EU referendum and worked for several Conservatives before joining Ukip.

Steve Crowther, party chairman

The chairman of the party is the main man organising the party behind the scenes, and takes on an enforcer role for Farage. Born in Devon, he spent 30 years in London working as a journalist and businessman before returning out west.

Patrick O’Flynn, economics spokesman

The former political journalist for the Daily Express joined Ukip as its communications director. However, he was undermined by his suggestion that the party could bring in a tax on luxury goods, which was later disowned by Farage. He is an MEP and standing for the party in Cambridge.

Paul Nuttall, deputy leader of Ukip

Nuttall is the party’s main man in the north, and is tipped to be a potential successor to Nigel Farage. Has given a good account of himself in his appearances on BBC’s Question Time.

Suzanne Evans, head of policy and deputy chairman

Evans is a former Conservative councillor who has taken charge of the party’s manifesto following the resignation of Tim Aker. Aker isfighting the winnable seat of Thurrock for Ukip, while she is contesting much harder territory in Shrewsbury.

Paul Lambert, director of communications

The former BBC producer is an institution in Westminster, having covered UK politics for years, and has built up excellent relationships with journalists, particularly the broadcasters.

Gawain Towler, head of press

Towler is a well-liked figure who has played a key part in Ukip’s communications for many years.