The Sun newspaper has published a new article on the future of the UK Independence Party, quoting former senior advisor to Brexit leader Nigel Farage:
UKIP’s never-ending soap opera stepped up a gear this week when leader Henry Bolton was forced to dump his 25-year-old glamour model girlfriend because she’d sent a string of racist and offensive messages.
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But more revealing is the way the party has disintegrated since Nigel Farage left the helm after the referendum.
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“If Ukip continues to be a party that operates mostly out of the self-interests of its higher-ups, and not in the interest of Brexit, then it’s fair to say it has become a greater impediment to Brexit than anything else,” Raheem Kassam, a former aide to Nigel Farage, told The Sun.
“It’s dying a slow and painful death, and its bringing the rest of us, the movement, down with them.”
Now working for Breitbart News but still mulling over exactly how to start a new UK movement, the ex-leader’s old right-hand man gives Ukip just two months to get themselves in order “or wind it up”.
Hitting out at the “useless” people on the NEC who “are not fit for purpose” and “don’t care” about the party, he said they’d become a “self-interested lobby group”.
He predicts it will get a “monumentally embarrassing clobbering” in May’s local elections, where they are to try and defend around 160 seats.
“There’s no one around who knows how to fight an election,” he insisted.
“There can be no excuses anymore. With the Brexit process where it is, Ukip should be polling at 15, 16, 17 per cent. They’re on three per cent.
“It makes me so angry.
“I can’t see a path forward for them… they are clinging onto the party for dear life.”