Bzzzzt! The Kippers dropped an electric prong into the bidet
GOOD old Ukip once again, heroically, without a thought for its own safety, set about cheering us all up. Just when January was reaching its bleakest, when the nation was about to give up on politics what with Corbyn’s Labour being so nasty and May’s Government so prosaic, the Kippers dropped an electric prong in the bidet.
Brzzzzzzt! Madness. But terrifically enlivening.
Henry Bolton, 54, the sometime Lib Dem ex-Army captain who is the party’s latest leader, stood outside the Grand Hotel, Folkestone, and said he was not resigning. No way.
The party’s national executive committee may all, bar one, have voted in protest at his four-month-old leadership (and in case you were wondering who that sole loyalist was, it was Capt Bolton himself). They may have said they had ‘no confidence’ in him. Well, he had ‘ no confidence’ in them! As the late Arthur Marshall said: ‘The French hate us – and we hate them right back.’
Two can play at this no-confidence game, y’know. Let’s see how they like it.
Mr Bolton’s position, if we can call it that, has been imperilled by the fact he has been doing some horizontal jogging with a 25-yearold ‘glamour model’ with an uncertain gift for diplomacy.
Among other things, she tweeted horrible things about Meghan Markle. The Grand Hotel, where Mr Bolton maintains an apartment, has a history of high-profile legover artistes. Edward VII danced there with both his Queen and with his popsy Mrs Keppel, on the same night. Edward VIII stayed there when he was courting Mrs Simpson. The captain may not be in quite their league but his little cameo yesterday will have earned its place in the Grand’s archives.
In the Salon de Thé, where patrons were at that very hour partaking of their dribbly-buttered crumpets (dread word), the conversation, my dears, will have burned as hot as a cup of fresh-brewed Tung Ting Oolong. That funny little man in the tan macintosh? A sex maniac and the leader of a national political party? Nooooo!
Mr Bolton made his appearance just after 4pm, a few moments later than expected. There was a suggestion that he had taken a wrong turn on the hotel’s ground floor. His military service was in the Royal Hussars, not the Reconnaissance Corps.
Having eventually found the waiting television news crews, the captain repeated his assertion that he would not be resigning his leadership. Why not? Because, he said, he ‘respected the next steps in the constitutional process’ of Ukip’s procedures.
He intended to scrap the national executive committee and set up another. He said he was not the first Ukip leader to have had trouble with that committee. They were a blasted nuisance and they should be concentrating on the next set of local elections and on making sure Britain secures proper independence once we leave the European Union.
He would be ‘devoting all of my energies in the coming weeks’ to this agenda. Well that’s a relief. When a vigorous swordsman starts talking about ‘his energies’, all sorts of frightful images can flicker through one’s mind.
The insouciance of it was worthy of the one man who turns up at an evening party in black tie and tells the rest of the throng that they mustn’t be embarrassed if they feel under-dressed.
Blissfully impervious to the fact that he was so outnumbered in the Ukip hierarchy, Mr Bolton declared that he was going to be calling for the ‘coordination and mobilisation of all Leave campaigns’.
EISENHOWERassembling his commanders before D-Day could scarcely have sounded so emphatic. He was going to ‘drain the swamp’ – shades of Donald Trump taking on the bien-pensants in Washington DC.
And that was it. With a scrunchy aboutturn, Capt Bolton pumped those slightly chapped-looking lips, aimed for an expression of narrow-eyed gravitas and marched back into the Grand Hotel, in search, we can but speculate, of a warm crumpet.