As UKIP founding member Godfrey Bloom MEP resigns in tandem with the BBC’s ‘The Farage Factor’ Panorama expose, we ask: “Has Brutus met his match?”
‘Caravan man’ Nigel Farage might have had a flush of successes last week but – just as we predicted might happen – it’s all going south again now. On Monday night, the UKIP leader was slated in a BBC Panorama documentary titled The Farage Factor and accompanying it came news that one of the most senior founding members of the party had sensationally quit.
Former MEP Godfrey Bloom – an eccentric favourite of The Steeple Times and one of our “What’s on your mantelpiece?” subjects – was once such a close friend of Nigel Farage that he shared a flat with him in Brussels. Yesterday, however, in declaring “it’s a very sad day for me” and that he had “lost contact completely” with the UKIP leader, Bloom summed up the views of many about what UKIP has become. He told the LBC radio station:
“I joined in the mid-1990s; I’m a very significant donor – hundreds of thousands of pounds I’ve donated over the years to UKIP – and then I find that instead of being the libertarian party or the party of common sense, I’ve been banned from speaking”.
Asked about the election of UKIP’s first MP, Bloom warned Douglas Carswell:
“Watch your back… there are dead bodies of UKIP all over the place with a knife quivering in their back. Douglas, make sure it’s not yours”.
Bloom’s views were echoed by a number of participants in Panorama’s documentary including Dr Richard North. The party’s former director of research stated “Brutus has got nothing on Farage” whilst it was also revealed that many others question where funds raised by UKIP actually end up.
Whilst Farage – a politician with one of the worst voting records in the European Parliament – casually dismissed The Farage Factor as a “tedious BBC hatchet job”, he will hardly be able to say the same of Godfrey Bloom’s comments. Brutus may just have met his match.
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