Farage Stella Drinking Claim Shock

Less than a year after getting no new MPs at all in the General Election - and losing one of those they already had - Nigel “Thirsty” Farage and his fellow saloon bar propper-uppers at UKIP are enduring the bar-room brawl to end all bar-room brawls. Farage and those prepared to continue the one-man personality cult are gradually losing their grip on the party as Douglas “Kamikaze” Carswell and his allies continue to destabilise him.

Squeaky party split finger up the bum time

Matters came to a head this week when it became clear that the Farage faction was seeking to suspend UKIP’s former deputy chair Suzanne Evans for alleged disloyalty. Ms Evans mounted a High Court challenge to the move, but failed: this means she will be unable to have her name on the candidates’ list for London Assembly elections in May. The timing of the suspension is believed not to be an accident.

Then came an extraordinary leak to the press, just before Ms Evans was to appear before the inquisition of Iain Dale on LBC: her lawyer stood accused of making a threat that her witness statement for the court case would accuse Farage of wife-beating. Richard Hendron was, it seems, recorded by a party to the discussion.

He allegedly said “I can tell you this, between you and me, Suzanne is doing her witness statement, which is to become a public document and it is explosive. It has bits about Nigel beating his wife and stuff. Either you are willing for that to happen and that to come out this week, as a court document, which journalists will report on, with no fear of being sued for libel, if you’re willing to let that happen then fine go ahead”.

There was, of course, only one other party to the conversation, and although the report by the Farage cheerleaders at Breitbart London does not name him, the Mail had no such compunctions: step forward UKIP’s General Secretary Matthew Richardson, himself a lawyer and another of those connected to the Young Britons’ Foundation. And if it was Richardson who recorded the conversation, he could be in big trouble.

As Ms Evans has Tweeted, “I've checked the @UKIP party rule book. The word 'disloyalty' doesn't appear anywhere … In fact @ukip illegally recorded counsel-to-counsel conversations & I agree. I'll be complaining to @thebarcouncil”. She might have added that it was eyebrow raising that whoever recorded that conversation - and Richardson appears to have been the one doing the recording - then ran straight to Breitbart.

Nigel Farage is in trouble: not only is a faction coalescing around Ms Evans, Carswell and former hack Patrick “Lunchtime” O’Flynn, they are now firmly allied with Vote Leave, while Mr Thirsty and his pals are backing the rival Grassroots Out campaign. Only one of those groups can hope to secure official designation in the upcoming EU Referendum campaign, and it’s looking increasingly like Vote Leave will get the nod.

The longer Farage clings on, the worse the damage will be. And if the Referendum battle is lost, he will be toast. Whether or not he’s partial to a few cans of Stella.