Only Disconnect

The Rise and Fall of Robert Kilroy-Silk
Twelve years ago, by virtue of winning a local government by-election, one Derek Beackon threw all of righteous Britain into paroxysms of angst about the moral health of the nation. One BNP councillor was the source of a pseudo-panic about a non-party with non-existant to negligible support that took nearly a decade to die down. The odd thing, certainly the odd thing compared to the media and political reaction to Derek Beackon, was the utter lack of reaction to last year's Strasbourg elections. For in 2004 the BNP achieved an astonishing 4.9% of the national vote. Which is quite as bad as the nationalist/racialist tally in countries such as Germany or Holland, even if some distance off what the FN get in France. I mention all of this not to smear Robert Kilroy-Silk by any form of association, but because of exactly the reverse suspicion: a large part of the reason why UKIP’s stunning 2004 success (16.1%, pushing the Liberals into a miserable fourth place) was so welcome to so many people was that it could be used to distract our attention from the awful reality of that BNP vote. Fully 800,000 people voted for them. If ever there had been a need for a national scourging, this was it, and instead, nothing. Hardly a sausage of 'why oh why' self-analysis was broadcast or printed, and the world went on turning. Yet while the neglect of quite what the BNP vote meant was a disgrace even by the standards of the British press, the destruction of UKIP that followed was down solely to Robert Kilroy-Silk's vanity and ineptitude.

The process whereby UKIP stumbled and fell away from being a serious threat to the Tories (outside of a few pockets, principally the south-west) didn't start last October though. UKIP, even with their then star name, were never going to win the Hartlepool by-election, and thus were right not to run Kilroy-Silk. The humiliating fourth place they pushed the Tories into at the start of the conference season was an ideal platform, and gave them what they momentarily deserved, considerable attention, and even some small measure of respect and credibility. It's tempting to think that where things went wrong was the failure by the UKIP leadership to handle Kilroy-Silk properly, but how was he to be handled? As Veritas has shown, a party built round the former television presenter, rather than one harnessed to him, was never going to be a runner, so every which way the Knapman/Farage faction who run UKIP were right to deny him the leadership.

What became so painfully unpleasant for UKIP was the small matter that, after twenty years in the artificial and cocooned world of television, Robert Kilroy-Silk had lost all the skills he had once had as a serious Labour MP. Simply put, he had stopped being a politician and instead was merely a personality. One thing this meant was that he (and his wife Jan, whose extraordinary influence on the man plays a dominant part in this debacle) couldn't merely bide his time, lead the UKIP challenge for seats at Westminster, and then move onto the overall leadership from the platform of the Westminster leadership his highly probable election to the Commons under UKIP colours would have meant. Instead UKIP's party conference in 2004 descended into farce as Kilroy's ambitions were being given full, near Portillo-like vent, and, at the same time (and utterly destroying his hopes of securing the support of his MEP peers) Kilroy alienated UKIP’s sugar daddy, Paul Sykes. Without Sykes' money UKIP have been crippled, but what did it for Sykes was that Kilroy-Silk advocated a genuine if incoherent populism, whereas what Sykes backed was the anti-Majorite Conservatism of Farage, Knapman and most other leading figures in UKIP.

Had Kilroy-Silk still had the pre-television temper any politician would have had, if he had been able to look forward to this summer from last summer, UKIP would now be major, national players in this election campaign. They would either have dragged the Tory party to a considerably more concrete Euroscepticism, or, if Michael Howard had resisted this (as he would have done) they would have helped magnify Labour's victory, and help set up a civil war in the Conservative party thereafter. None of that has come to pass of course, but then none of the problems that led to the existence of UKIP, the broiling, barely concealed nature of Tory unhappiness, or the fundamental fact that even a pro-European like Tony Blair consistently finds himself leading the state which adopts the least communitaire stances in Brussels, have altered either. And these tensions aren't going to be resolved until at least one major party reflects and represents the volume of voters sceptical about British membership of even a reformed EU.

For the duration of the campaign, the Social Affairs Unit will be publishing regular commentaries on the progress of the UK election. These commentaries represent the views of the anonymous commentator, not those of the Social Affairs Unit, its Trustees, Advisors or Director.