Farage, having betrayed British eurosceptics is unfit to lead UKIP

Stephan Shakespeare in a column in CityAM this morning had a line that rubbed plenty of salt into the still smarting wounds of last week. So stung did I feel, it put me off posting any blog on here right up to this late hour of the day.The very true but striking words on the Eastleigh by-election, were these:

Ukip came in second, but as the only credible anti-establishment party,
they might have been expected to win (and surely would have done so had
Nigel Farage been bolder and stood himself).

Farage was much to be seen on TV all day yesterday. Nothing he had to say offered any rational explanation for his refusal to run at Eastleigh, another than the greed to take the obscene amount of pay, pension and perks he has been pointlessly accruing for what now seems like decades.

All those fighting words and ringing statements of his quite clearly really stand NOW for NOWT!

I feel betrayed, even though I for one have long had and often expressed such doubts. I feel betrayed, how must ordinary members of UKIP feel who have put in the hard slog for zero returns year, after year after year.

When else will there be a chance such as that offered by the fates in Eastleigh this February ever again?

I was going to turn to other topics this morning, such as the hope offered to all European democrats by the words and actions of Beppe Grillo in Italy over the weekend, but I have been thrown off-track by this deep betrayal on the part of UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage, and the YouGov executives pithy reminder of the circumstances.

How ironic it will be if Senor Grillo succeds in bringing the rotten EU to its end, the European Parliament is thus dissolved and Farage is left seatless and pensionless. What a missed chance he would then have had to guide events and play a part in restoring Westminster’s Parliament to its proper place in our nation’s affairs. All that opportunity, pride and integrity has been lost; for he lacked the courage and political nous (in spite of my repeatedly urging) to grab the huge prize which Eastleigh, as all can now see, quite clearly offered, preferring instead to stick within the corrupt bounds and pampered privilege of Brussels.