For all the ferocity of the battle currently consuming the Labour party, there is another major British party arguably in the grip of a more chaotic leadership election – Ukip.
The turmoil is less obvious than the daily and public exchange of insults between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith. The five Ukip candidates hoping to succeed Nigel Farage are battling it out in a seemingly polite exchange, before the start of voting on 1 September.
A day after Farage spoke at a Donald Trump rally in Mississippi, the final official hustings to replace him took place at a much more low-key event last Thursday. It is a fraught and pivotal moment for the UK’s third-biggest political party by vote-count in last year’s general election, with a series of ideological and personal undercurrents threatening to send it off course.
The more obvious faultline is the ideological future of an organisation which, as of the EU referendum two months ago, has seen its primary founding goal achieved.
While much of the talk is about expanding Ukip’s base and reaching out to economically disenfranchised former Labour voters, some candidates are still discussing issues such as restrictions on Muslim women wearing veils in public, described disparagingly by one party insider as the “Geert Wilders, BNP-light, anti-Islam line” – a reference to the far-right Dutch political leader who is calling for the complete “de-Islamification” of the Netherlands.
Perhaps more damaging is the lineup on offer – in which only one person, Diane James, the party’s deputy chair, has anything resembling a national profile, mainly based on her confident performance in the 2013 Eastleigh byelection, where she came within 1,800 votes of becoming the first person to be elected on a Ukip ticket.
The other candidates are Lisa Duffy, a local councillor in Cambridgeshire; West Midlands MEP Bill Etheridge; and former parliamentary candidates Elizabeth Jones and Philip Broughton.
Among the absentees are three leading figures who decided not to stand: Paul Nuttall, Farage’s media-friendly deputy; Douglas Carswell, the party’s Tory-defecting sole MP; and Nathan Gill, the MEP who leads Ukip in Wales.
On top of that are two forced absences. Suzanne Evans wrote the party’s 2015 manifesto and was seen as a likely successor to Farage, but was suspended by the party before the election for alleged disloyalty. In her absence the initial favourite was Steven Woolfe, a former barrister and City lawyer with a modernising agenda for Ukip, who was controversially excluded from the ballot after his application was submitted 17 minutes late.
The Ukip insider said this had left the field somewhat thin. “Suzanne Evans and Steven Woolfe can’t run, and Paul Nuttall isn’t running – they’re basically the three faces, other than Nigel, that any normal person will know,” the source said.
Adding further to the confusion is the fact that James, the bookies’ clear favourite to become new leader at the Ukip conference on 15 September, has decided to boycott the official leadership hustings, instead running her own series of events.
Interviewed by BBC Radio 4’s Today programme last week, James argued there was “no need to debate with my rivals”. She said: “What I’m doing is appealing direct to the members and activists.”
It remains to be seen if this apparent attempt to rise above the fray will set her out from the rest or cost her votes. At the penultimate hustings on Wednesday night in the Ukip stronghold of Clacton-on-Sea in Essex, several among the near-100 attending said they were baffled. “It’s a bit disrespectful,” said one man. “Why should we be forced to travel to two events?”
James has similarly declined to outline any policies beyond a plan to swiftly rejig the party’s 2015 manifesto ahead of a possible early general election, arguing that policymaking “on the hoof” was not a good idea.
While none of the other four candidates seem likely to win – Duffy is a distant second favourite – their stances highlight the choice faced by the party: how to expand its reach without upsetting the base.
One of the centrepieces of Duffy’s appeal to members at Clacton was what she called a “positive vision for British Islam”, a slightly retro-Ukip programme including a restriction on wearing a veil in public places.
Etheridge remains similarly in tune with such sentiments, calling at the hustings for the privatisation of the “shoddy, leftwing” BBC and for a low-tax, private sector-based economy.
In contrast, Broughton, who at the 2015 election came within 3,000 votes of defeating Labour in Hartlepool, told the Clacton audience he wants Ukip to “broaden our message and change our tone”. The self-styled “young, passionate, northern, working class guy” is unlikely to win but is a distinctive figure in the party, not least given his brief career in wrestling, where he grappled under the title The One and Only Phillip Alexander alongside more snappily named opponents such as Disco Wes.
James similarly raised some eyebrows by suggesting that heavily multicultural Newham in east London could prove a future Ukip stronghold, given its relatively high leave vote in the Brexit referendum.
Amid all this there is inevitable, if so far private, talk that even a James leadership could be temporary, with either Woolfe or even Farage returning to the fray within a year or so. Farage, a man of several interrupted retirements, has so far said he would only come back if there was a long delay in triggering article 50, which sets in motion EU departure. Woolfe has remained silent since his exclusion, beyond accepting the party’s ruling.
The loss of Woolfe is seen by his allies as the product of a wider power struggle within the party, in which a national executive committee hostile to Farage is seeking to exclude his favourites.
Carswell, who represents Clacton in parliament, dismissed this. “We’re not big enough to have wings,” he told the Guardian at the hustings. “We’re an anti-establishment movement. We need to grow up and become a party that’s bigger than one person. And I hope we manage it.”
He is not endorsing any of the candidates, saying this was in part to ensure he had a better relationship with the new leader than he did with Farage: “I didn’t always particularly get on with the previous leader, so I think it’s all the more important that I make every effort to get on with the new leader.”
