Nigel farage

The other darling of the CLA Game Fair — alongside former Environment Secretary Owen Paterson — was Charlie Brooks (aka Mr Rebekah Wade), who appears to be back on the country scene in a big way. ‘I’m a big fan of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage’, the former litigant tells me. ‘I’ve always been a convert to be honest, which tells you what I make of politicians these days’. Curiously, it turns out Farage’s pub landlord was a juror in the Brooks’ recent trial, a fact that only came to light when the Ukip leader met Brooks for the first time on Friday. ‘You talked all sorts of nonsense, but you seem to have got away with it,’ joked one well wisher to Brooks over lunch.

Talk radio station LBC are coy about the prospect of a Michael Gove phone-in show, mooted by Mr S yesterday. When asked if such a show is on the cards, a spokesman said: 'We enjoy Michael Gove appearing on LBC, as we do the many other politicians who also enjoy getting the opportunity to talk to LBC’s listeners.' That’s diplomatic. But, when it comes to election season LBC will be bound by Ofcom rules on impartiality to balance out coverage. We already have Call Clegg and Phone Farage. Someone call for the Minister for Broadcasting...

Vote Farage, get Miliband might not have quite as much resonance with voters as the Tories would like. But it is certainly effective with donors. If Ukip is seen as Ed Miliband’s passport to Number 10, it will be far harder for it to raise the money it needs to fight a successful general election campaign. So when Nigel Farage spoke to the Midlands Industrial Council—a group of right-wing business people who have in the past donated substantial sums to the Tories—after the European Elections, most of the questions were about how to avoid a split on the right letting Labour back into government.

Will he or won't he stand in Thanet South? Nigel Farage's name has been circulating in connection with this constituency for months, after the sitting Tory MP Laura Sandys announced she was standing down. But it's all grown a whole lot more complicated in the past few days because a former Ukip member, Craig Mackinlay, has been selected to stand for the Conservatives. Now, the Ukip leader must decide whether standing against a former comrade will weaken his appeal in the seat. But how strong is that appeal anyway? The following data allows the households within Thanet South constituency to be segmented into 69 distinct demographic groups, and the chart below shows the demographic profile of Thanet South.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_26_June_2014_v4.mp3" title="Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hardman discuss whether Labour should let Miliband be Miliband" startat=934] Listen [/audioplayer]That bacon bap earlier this month was not the cause of Ed Miliband’s unpopularity. Ed Miliband’s unpopularity was the cause of the bacon bap. Scant comfort this will give the Labour leader and his fabled ‘advisers’, but they can stop worrying about food-related photographic gaffes because once the world is out to get you, the world will get you, and if they don’t get you one way they’ll get you another. Sooner or later Mr Miliband will have to eat, and sooner or later a shutter will click as he opens his mouth.

So, the Tories have managed to hold onto Newark with a surprising 7,000 majority. For Ukip, it was a disappointing evening as they failed to come close to taking the seat. Despite adding 22 points to their 2010 vote share, the march of the People’s Army has encountered some unexpectedly difficult terrain. There were some interesting signs about the state of the parties and some hints as to what we might see in the general election next year. Here are six things that we’ve learnt from Newark: 1. Ukip are far from a Westminster breakthrough Despite picking a local candidate in Roger Helmer and putting in a significant amount of effort (for them), Ukip’s dreams of returning their first MP have not come to fruition.

A battle cry has gone out for more troops, and the UKIP faithful have responded. Newark, packed with Tory spinners and regularly visited by David Cameron and assorted Tory grandees, has now attracted hundreds of purple campaigners for this week’s by-election. From all corners of the UK – from Scotland to Cornwall, the Eastern counties to Wales, the most fervent UKIP believers gathered yesterday for a public meeting near Newark, and a chance to see their chief protagonist, Nigel Farage. 'After the European elections, we can smell blood,' said a cheerful UKIP activist, Scott Cross, from Hampshire. Former Tory activist Steve Stanbury, who defected to UKIP a few years ago, felt 'exhilarated and invigorated for the first time in ages.

Following last week’s Purple Revolution in which the pro-democracy Faragist rebels liberated Britain from the hated pro-EUSSR LibLabCon stooges (at least this is the version I’m telling my kids to repeat to their teachers), a number of people have written about what appears to be the opening of a ‘culture war’ in Britain. Andrew Sullivan talks about ‘blue Europe and red Europe’ in the sense of America’s blue and red states, and sees Ukip as representing the latter just as the Republican Party does conservative, left-behind America. I think there’s some truth in that.

Your enemy's enemy is not necessarily your friend. That is something forgotten too easily. Nevertheless, though he may not be your friend he may, for a time at least, be your ally. And so it came to pass that Nigel Farage is, for the time being, Labour's new best chum. In Scotland, that is. The Tories are quite pleased with him too and, if anyone could find them, perhaps the Liberal Democrats would be too. Of course, officially, there is much tut-tutting and hand-wringing over Ukip's success in Scotland. We're all supposed to be simply appalled that these fruitcakes have won a seat in the European parliament. Terrible stuff. Come off it. These are the lamentations of a crocodile. Secretly - and sometimes not so secretly - Unionists are delighted by Farage's success in Scotland.

The self-styled anti-establishment ‘People’s Army’ chose the most expensive hotel in Westminster to announce the professionalisation of their party machine. Nigel Farage’s post-European election press conference was completely stage managed — from the security on the door to the lack of questions from the floor, right down to the moment he was whisked away from the InterContinental Westminster in a blacked out Land Rover with his key donor Paul Sykes. But Ukip were not done yet, Farage presumably just drove round the block a few times because he was soon back sinking a vat of merlot at his victory party — which your correspondent attempted to crashed with various degrees of success.