AN OPPORTUNITY IS ARISING FOR A NEW PRO-BREXIT PARTY

THERESA MAY is not the only party leader with the threat of a no-confidence vote hanging over her head.

At a meeting of Ukip’s national executive committee tomorrow, a call for the ejection of Gerard Batten as the head of the dwindling anti-Brussels party is expected to be raised.

Mr Batten has fallen out with his predecessor Nigel Farage and other veteran Ukippers over his close links with the far-Right activist Tommy Robinson. If Mr Batten survives tomorrow’s showdown, his opponents suggest the party is heading for a wilderness at the extreme end of the political spectrum. For years, the shambolic and frequently hilarious antics of Ukip have contributed much to the gaiety of the nation’s political life.

Now the party appears to be heading for a suitably farcical finale, ending up as a real-life version of Roderick Spode and his gang of Blackshorts from PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster novels.

“I’m a bit too much of a pinko for them nowadays,” Mr Farage joked to friends this week about the party he used to lead.

Ever since the days of Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, there has been a space on the fringe of British politics for a party of the far-Right.

Thankfully, none of them has ever come anywhere near to becoming a serious electoral force.

Yet the absence of any unequivocally effective pro-Brexit party must be a factor in the political crisis over the departure from the EU currently gripping Westminster.

Under David Cameron’s premiership, the electoral threat from Ukip terrified both the Tory establishment and the Labour leadership.

Ukip gave a voice to millions of voters who were previously ignored by the Westminster elite. When MPs debate the Prime Minister’s Brexit deal in the Commons next week, there is a danger that voice will not be heard.

Many MPs in firmly-Leave voting areas assume hard-line Brexit voters have no obvious alternative to the establishment parties.

No one at Westminster can safely predict how the crisis over Mrs May’s Brexit deal will play out.

But MPs who have already forgotten to pay heed to the Ukip threat may well be creating a gap in the market for a successor to the party. SENIOR Tory backbencher

Sir Nicholas Soames was reported to be displeased to discover a painting by his grandfather Winston Churchill in the Government art collection had been relegated to the corner of an anteroom in Downing Street. The landscape, depicting a lake in south-west France, has since been moved to pride of place in Chief Whip Julian Smith’s office after a blast of Churchillian rhetoric from Sir Nicholas, according to a source.