Floreat Salopia

But would that be best achieved by the return of Christopher Gill as UKIP MP for Ludlow, which he previously represented as a Conservative? Gill is a mainstay of the doolally Freedom Association, advocates of every economic policy that has now been spectacularly discredited, and historically funded by apartheid South Africa. Gill's adoption indicates that Lord Pearson's UKIP has nothing to offer that half of its vote for Strasbourg which is Old Labour or, especially in the West Country, Old Liberal rather than Old Tory.

Nor to offer the Old Tory half, come to that. Gill's and Pearson's position has nothing to do with that of those Tories who opposed first Thatcherism and then Maastricht. The economically populist and pro-manufacturing, morally and socially conservative, staunchly Unionist and pro-military, strongly church-based Toryism of the Wintertons. The unyieldingly constitutionalist and civil libertarian Toryism of Richard Shepherd. The Keynesian, pro-Commonwealth, anti-neoconservative Toryism of Sir Peter Tapsell. Or the conservationist, agrarian, anti-nuclear (indeed, Quaker) Toryism of Sir Richard Body, UKIP President, but for how much longer?