Arron Banks Sad Hillsborough Trolling

The question of why some members of society become wealthy, while others languish in poverty, has taxed writers and thinkers for many years. Following Charles Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species, William Sumner declared that “The millionaires are a product of natural selection ... the naturally selected agents of society for certain work. They get high wages and live in luxury, but the bargain is a good one for society”.

Throwing the kitchen sink at it isn't working

How Sumner would have explained Aaron Banks will forever be one of those great unanswered questions in the realm of Life, The Universe, And Everything. UKIP’s foremost paymaster may be unfeasibly rich, but his sense of self-awareness, and ability to know when to shut his North And South rather than verbally dig himself into an ever-deeper hole, somehow went missing in his ascent of the monetary greasy pole.

Are Arron's just shot me in the f***in' head

Banks embarrassed the Kippers’ new leader, “Bad Bootle Meff” Paul Nuttall, by calling the Hillsborough stadium disaster “an accident”. He was made aware that he was causing offence to the families of the victims, who have had to fight long and hard for that combination of truth and justice which the establishment fought equally long and hard to deny them. Banks now says, more or less, that he doesn’t care about such things.

Worse, he claims this is all a Labour Party smear campaign, which is at once untrue, malicious, and defamatory all in one. As Andy Burnham had to point out to Banks and his pal Nigel “Thirsty” Farage earlier this week, there was a conscious effort to set up an all-party group on Hillsborough and take the issue out of party politics. Labour has not been the source for the criticism raining down on Arron Banks.

David Conn of the Guardian, who knows a little about Hillsborough, described Banks’ behaviour as “sad trolling” and observed “Banks’s insensitivity, self-absorption and lack of empathy are now, lamentably, endemic features of Twitter as it turns from cool-seeming social media platform to an unsupervised playground for name-calling and bullying”. Brian Reade of the Mirror was rather more direct in his response.

“Only one 'politicising' Hillsborough is Nuttall. Now crawl back to your favourite tax haven and make an irrelevant noise there” he advised Banks. When The Great Man whined “What's deeply wrong is smearing someone, who was there, for your narrow political ends. People do realise there is an election this week”, Read snapped back “Nuttall tends to smear himself whenever he speaks - doesn't need me to help him”.

Liverpool’s Mayor Joe Anderson pointed out “At the end of the day he is someone who is ill-informed and not knowledgeable of the facts … This was the biggest miscarriage of justice that the British legal system has ever seen and only came to light because of the determination of the families … Maybe Arron Banks would feel quite differently if he had lost someone in the tragedy”. Banks’ sick selfishness blinds him to reality.

And that reality is Banks and his pal Farage may have helped Nuttall … to end up losing today’s Stoke Central by-election, and badly. But then, the democratic process is not about natural selection. And nor is the idiocy of Arron Banks.