The Kippers are clustered outside Sidcup railway station, leafleting on two fronts. One message urges an exit from the EU, the other the entry of Ukip candidates to London’s City Hall. The half dozen Faragistas seem optimistic on both scores. Yes, polls and turf accountants expect Remain to prevail and, yes, it is most unlikely that Ukip’s mayor contender Peter Whittle will succeed Boris Johnson on 5 May. But they still think they’re on the up, even in the cosmopolitan capital where their advance has been less pronounced than elsewhere.
“People are always saying that London is not Ukip, but that is changing and this could be the main breakthrough for us,” Whittle says over coffee in a cafe round the corner. He might be right, though let’s place his confidence in context. The most recent mayoral opinion poll put Whittle in a distant third place behind Labour frontrunner Sadiq Khan and second placed Conservative Zac Goldsmith with just 7% of first preference votes under the supplementary vote system, followed closely by Sian Berry of the Greens on 6% and Liberal Democrat Caroline Pidgeon on 5%.
This down-the-order trio has been swapping places in the polls all year, the differences between them covered by the usual 3% margin for error. Whittle would love to snatch the bronze medal in the mayoral race and that would be a big step up - last time, the Ukip candidate finished sixth. However, his realistic hope of a triumph on 5 May lies in the parallel race for places on the London Assembly.
Fourteen of the scrutiny body’s 25 seats are for members representing constituencies - sometime called “super constituencies” - comprising two or three of London’s local authority areas. These are dominated by the two biggest parties. The other 11 seats are assigned through a form of proportional representation that helps the smaller parties get a look in. That’s where Whittle might well win.
To be in with a shout you need to cross an entry threshold of 5% of the vote in that “Londonwide list” part of the Assembly election. After that, it’s down to the mysteries of a formula called modified D’Hondt. In 2012, Labour won four of these 11 additional seats and Conservatives won three. Yet the Liberal Democrats and the Greens each took two with shares of 6.8% and 8.5% respectively. Ukip fell just short of the 5% threshold. This time, they look on course to do better.
Whittle is also quick to mention his party’s showing in the capital in last year’s general election. Ukip got 286,946 votes across London’s 73 parliamentary constituencies, representing 8.1% of the total cast. Though lower than their vote share in Britain as a whole, this still enabled them to edge past the Liberal Democrats into third place by that measure. Unlike the Lib Dems they didn’t win a London seat, but finished second in five: to Labour in Dagenham and Rainham and Barking; to Tories in Hornchurch and Upminster, Orpington and Romford.
As Whittle points out, he’s been helped by receiving far more broadcast coverage than his 2012 predecessor: “People are hearing and seeing what I have to say right across London.” But the key to his party’s hopes lies with voters in those Outer London areas where anxiety about immigration and growing ethnic diversity tends to be highest or where local newspapers still carry debates about whether their readers consider themselves to live in London or in Kent. Ukip has its 12 London borough councillors in these parts too: three in Bexley, two in Bromley and seven in Havering.
Those are the maths. What about the men leading the Ukip push? Whittle is accompanied in Sidcup by fellow Assembly candidate David Kurten, 45, who is number two on the Ukip list. Depending on how other parties do, 7% of the “list” vote might get both of them a place round the City Hall debating horseshoe.
Just as London as a whole isn’t really Kipper country, neither Whittle nor Kurten quite conform to Kipper cliche. Whittle is gay, a fact he revealed to the voting public with a winning flourish at the end of the first hustings of the mayoral campaign, held at the London School of Economics in January. Kurten, a peripatetic chemistry teacher who has described himself as being “blessed with melanin,” has said he addresses accusations of racism in Ukip by quipping that he loves white people.
These nonconformities mingle with the familiar Ukip blend of populist patriotism, anti-“PC” libertarianism, selective stateism and lamentation for bygone days. I ask Whittle if he thinks the soul of Ukip is more left or more right. “I genuinely think it’s hard to answer that,” he replies. “It is a mixture, definitely.”
Whittle says he joined the party because of the EU and the level of foreign migration. His party’s spokesman on culture, he founded and still heads a think tank called the New Culture Forum. This proclaims that it’s been “challenging the cultural orthodoxies dominant in the media, academia, education and British culture in its widest sense.” Its website lists as members of its advisory committee leading Brexiter Michael Gove, Matthew Elliott of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, novelist Lionel Shriver, Times columnist and co-founder of the Conservative Home website Tim Montgomerie and former Boris Johnson adviser (and Observer journalist) Anthony Browne.
New Culture Forum publications include polemics you might expect against “BBC bias” and “Groupthink” but also a report by Julie Bindel into the lack of prosecutions for female genital mutilation in the UK. Whittle’s books published under the Forum’s imprint include a polemic against contemporary attention-seeking (modestly praised by Melanie Phillips), another called Monarchy Matters and one called Being British with the rhetorical sub-title “What’s Wrong With It?” He’s been known to bash “our liberal elites” in the Daily Mail.
Whittle says the think tank is where his political interests and his work in television and other media overlap. He describes his pedigree as including working on the The South Bank Show including during a five-year spell in Los Angeles from 1999, where he made programmes for Channel 5, a documentary about the paparazzi, a biography of Elizabeth I and a history of leading men in the movies entitled “Shirtless.” He’s also been a film critic. Naturally, I asked him to list some favourites.
“One which had an enormous impact on me was The Hours,” he says after a little thought. The screenplay for this was by that pinko David Hare. It won Nicole Kidman an Oscar. “Going back, my favourite films have always been ones that have meant something to me personally. For example Thelma and Louise. I was leaving one career, in the City, and hating every minute of it, trying to get into the media. It came out about that time and it had this enormous effect on me in terms of people making a jump for freedom. I loved that movie.”
Like Khan, Whittle likes to emphasise his humble London roots. His parents were from Peckham and moved to Shooters Hill when Whittle was still a baby. He names the neighbourhoods he knew when growing up as Eltham, Bexleyheath and Woolwich, where he now lives. His father was “a driver for Smithfield meat market” before becoming “a chauffeur.” His mother, he says, was a civil servant at the Ministry of Defence and later ran a Help The Aged shop.
Whittle, who’s in his mid-fifties - “Joan Rivers said, ‘You know you’re getting old when the judges start to look young’” - went to a grammar school in Blackheath. Grammars are another of his big themes. “I’m a grammar school boy from, basically, a working class background. What I’ve seen over the past 10, 15 years is a total halt in social mobility.” To him, it’s obvious that these things are related. He’s unimpressed by the counter-argument that upward mobility before the comprehensive age was due more to a boom in low entry level white collar jobs than the existence of the 11-plus. “There isn’t that sense among working class and lower middle class people that you can actually get on. And there was when I was growing up.”
While warning against viewing life through rose-tinted specs, Whittle does complain that some things aint wot they used to be. At the LSE hustings, Whittle had said he’d like it if police officers came from the areas they patrolled. “What I was trying to say there, in a cack handed way, was that what has been quite remarkable about Britain compared with many European countries is that there’s no a sense of them being the oppressors.” His worry is that in today’s London, there is “a sense that the police are absent. They are far way.” Trust and familiarity leads to intelligence being gathered, he reasoned, suddenly sounding even more like Sadiq Khan and not unlike Ken Livingstone on this theme. “They should be there, like a lollipop lady might be there.”
He’s a defender of council housing too, bemoaning the demise of Southwark’s Heygate estate like a leftie activist and complaining that too much housing termed “affordable” is nothing of the kind. He’d make estate demolition subject to borough-wide referenda, binding on the mayor. He isn’t happy about stacks of luxury flats. He doesn’t like the Garden Bridge either, with its proposed restrictions on public use. “You’re sounding like Naomi Klein,” his press officer teases from off stage.
Whittle offers the great Uber dispute as good test case of the tension between Ukip’s reverence for certain UK traditions and its libertarianism - a tension also found among Conservatives: “A libertarian, or an economic libertarian, would have no problem saying, ‘the future is private hire vehicles: it’s Uber, you can’t buck the market etc.’ That, I fundamentally disagree with. If you were building a city now, that’s the black cab service is the one you would have - highly regulated, one that took wheelchairs and has all the checks they go through. And culturally they are so significant in that they are part of the landscape. All of those things are just as important as whether something is cheaper to get you from A to B. Institutions like that are terribly important to people. Don’t get rid of good things.”
Ukip have had London Assembly members before. Two were elected in 2004 (with 8.2% of the vote), though they didn’t stay Ukip for long, defecting to Robert Kilroy-Silk’s Veritas after a split in 2005 before becoming a two-person party for the remainder of their four-year terms. Ukip looks a more durable entity now and uncompromising with it. Even though Goldsmith wants to leave the EU, neither Whittle nor Kurten intend to cast any second preference vote for mayor and doubt if most Ukip members will either.
How would they perform as Assembly members? Compared with Berry and Pidgeon and Labour and conservative Londonwide candidates, they have nothing like the knowledge or experience of bread and butter policy stuff like housing and transport. There is a strong tendency to revert to their home ground issues - Europe, immigration and also the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which particularly exercises Kurten - none of which the London mayor or Assembly members can control or directly influence. If they secure the results they want on 5 May, they’ll need to get up to speed sharpish if they’re going to make serious impact. It might be educational watching them try.
