What Future For UKIP?

Farewell to Lord Pearson, High Priest of the cult of the fictional Margaret Thatcher, a figure who no more signed the Single European Act or joined the ERM than she signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, replaced O-levels with GCSEs, closed so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled, sat in the Cabinet that abolished the historic counties, arrogated to herself the monarchical and royal roles on the national and international stages, or gave the grateful nation the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the Children Act, and abortion up to birth. All eyes are now on the pro-drugs Nigel Farage.

At Ludlow this year, UKIP put up the former Conservative MP there, Christopher Gill. 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 indicated that Pearson's UKIP had 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 had 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. Or the unyieldingly constitutionalist and civil libertarian Toryism of Richard Shepherd. Or the Keynesian, pro-Commonwealth, anti-neoconservative Toryism of Sir Peter Tapsell. Or the conservationist, agrarian, anti-nuclear (indeed, Quaker) Toryism of UKIP's President, Sir Richard Body.