Henry WHO? We all dived to web to find out...
MOMENTS before the Ukip leadership result was announced, one of the candidates, Peter Whittle, sat himself near me in the upstairs gallery of the Torquay conference centre.
He was either in tears or he had a runny nose. And he was scribbling on a script. I presumed he must have been told he had won the contest and was overcome by delighted emotion as he prepared his victor’s speech.
Presumptions are always dangerous. When party chairman Paul Oakden read the results from last to first, we learned poor Mr Whittle had come a long way down the batting list.
A big cheer greeted the news that Anne Marie Waters had come second. The activists seemed relieved to have dodged that bullet. Miss Waters is the one with fiery views about Islam. She would have won headlines but might have done Brexit no favours. And the winner was... er, Henry Bolton. Reporters around me expressed puzzlement. Henry Who? Journalistic fingers dived for the internet to try to discover something about the mystery man. Trim, bald, formal, ex-Army, Mr Bolton stepped on stage without histrionics and spoke a few crisp words, quoting the Sandhurst motto of ‘Serve to Lead’.
And that was about it, really. He will make a longer speech today but the initial impression was of a public-school bursar type, efficient, solidly heterosexual, who thinks in battlefield action points.
A subaltern in hock to procedure? Let’s see. His election runs counter to some of the wilder things that have been happening in British politics recently. He may prove an outbreak of sanity.
Nigel Farage, who is said to think well of Capt Bolton, was not in Torquay (he was at a funeral) and his absence left a pint-sized hole in the gathering. Activists had to make do with novelty Farage ballpoint pens which, when pressed, emitted a recording of some of his naughtiest speeches to the bozos in Brussels. Mr Farage’s former righthand man, Steve Crowther, Ukip’s interim leader, had earlier told the conference ‘if we can’t swim without Nigel we don’t deserve to call ourselves a political party’.
ACTIVISTS began the day by choosing their new logo. This showed a lion and it generated sentimental ‘ooohs’. We were assured that it was a ‘British lion, alert, watchful and ready to roar’ and not a rip-off of the Premier League’s emblem. Along with the lion there was a new catchline: