Latest News

Latest

• UKIP unveils another Mayor!
• Fight for the right to be insulting!
• Marta on The Record Europe
• Laughter at our expense
• When a wine is not a wine
• London Assembly Results
• Latest Super Constituency results
• Sanjay's first Sovereign Draw winner!
• Legal query on minimum pricing

Devon village welcomes the Earl of UKIP

Thursday, 21st May 2009

Lord Dartmouth, grandson of the writer Barbara Cartland, gets a positive response while out canvassing in the West Country. This article appears in The Times today...

At the age of 59, William, the 10th Earl of Dartmouth, is looking forward to the most important month of his life.

 On June 4 as a candidate for the UK Independence Party, he is standing for election to the European Parliament, an institution he loathes. Just under three weeks later the Earl, previously described as one of Britain’s most eligible bachelors, will be entering another institution for the first time, when he marries Fiona Campbell, a former model, at a castle near his Devon country home. The Earl is the grandson of the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland and the son, from her first marriage, of Raine Spencer, stepmother of Diana, Princess of Wales.

A career in finance and chartered accountancy has not precluded regular appearances in the gossip columns. Not that potential voters in Chudleigh, a Devon village where he was delivering leaflets yesterday, had any idea of the identity of the diffident, middle-aged man in a blue suit, and he was too polite to tell them.

“You cannot force people to stop for a conversation,” cautioned Lord Dartmouth, “That is why it is good to have a handful of leaflets.” He even took off his yellow and purple UKIP rosette before entering the local pub.

He need not have worried. And outside, the response from the harried mothers collecting their children from school and office workers returning home was overwhelmingly positive. Only one middle-aged, unshaven man in a scruffy anorak waved away the proffered leaflet while loudly complaining: “I am fed up with the lot of you and your fiddles. I’m voting BNP.” The Earl found something positive in the encounter. “You know, that’s the first BNP voter I have met,” he said.

The scandal over MPs’ expenses may benefit smaller parties but it has not been discussed at the hustings, according to Lord Dartmouth. “I have been to four public meetings and to my surprise it has not been raised once,” he said. David Porteous, a publisher who stopped for a chat, told him: “I have a lot of European friends and we all hate the EU. I was an old Labour supporter but I will be voting UKIP in this election.”

Siobhan Lane, an office manager, said: “I am concerned at the huge cost of the EU. I don’t think we should pull out completely but I don’t like the idea of our laws being dictated from Brussels.”

The South West, which for the purposes of the European election stretches from Gloucestershire to the Scilly Isles, is fertile ground for UKIP as well as the Liberal Democrats.

The disastrous impact on farming of the Common Agricultural Policy and the virtual collapse of the fishing industry under the weight of EU quotas may be two reasons for the success of UKIP. Lord Dartmouth, who dislikes the description of UKIP as a “fringe party”, stands a good chance of winning one of the region’s six European seats. One of the party’s two sitting MEPs is not standing for re-election, putting him into No 2 position.

His UKIP biography records that as an unsuccessful Conservative parliamentary candidate and former Tory member of the House of Lords, he defected to the party after David Cameron denounced it as “a bunch of . . . fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists”. But politics rather than personalities count in an election under a “list” system where electors vote for parties, not individuals. Which can lead to surprises.

Trevor Colman, a retired veteran of Devon & Cornwall Constabulary, found himself elevated to the role of MEP after standing unsuccessfully in 2004. Last October the UKIP MEP Graham Booth unexpectedly stood down over ill health and Mr Colman, as next in line, inherited his job. Seeing the EU at work from the inside increased his dislike of the institution.

“It is unreformed and unreformable. We have to get out.” he said. “I am there because it is important that people in this country know what it is up to, and we are not being told.”

There are enough sharpened wooden stakes stacked in the lobby of UKIP’s headquarters in Devon to account for all 27 EU Commissioners, as well as Gordon Brown and most of his Cabinet. Disappointingly, perhaps, for some of the party’s more rabidly anti-EU activists, the stakes are not for killing blood-suckers but for the giant UKIP billboards sprouting in fields across the West Country. Over the past decade UKIP may have suffered more schisms than the early Church, but if enough lapsed and disillusioned followers of other faiths join forces with its true believers it may no longer be right to call it a “fringe party”.

Back to Latest News