UKIP: fisticuffs in Strasbourg
“What an image of Britain in Europe,” said Juliet Samuel in The Sunday Telegraph. At a time when our currency is sliding and some EU leaders are seeking to portray Britain as an “irrational country run by maniacs, cruising towards destruction”, the UK Independence Party has helpfully provided the image of one of its MEPS “splatted” on the floor of the European Parliament following a “bout of fisticuffs”. Steven Woolfe, who has since recovered, collapsed unconscious a couple of hours after clashing with a colleague, Mike Hookem, during a “clear-the-air” meeting of UKIP representatives. Precisely what form the altercation took is still a matter of dispute. Woolfe says he was punched; Hookem, an ex-commando, insists it was just a short, undignified tussle – “handbags at dawn, girl-on-girl”. Either way, Britain could have done without this embarrassing episode.
The public always claim to want colourful, passionate politicians, said Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times, and UKIP certainly delivers on that front. There’s a bitter war under way between its “modernising wing”, to which Woolfe belongs, and “the Tory-ultra wing of Douglas Carswell and Neil Hamilton”. The party’s new leader, Diane James, resigned last week after just 18 days at the helm, having decided she couldn’t bridge the gap. It subsequently emerged that she had added the Latin term vi coactus (“under duress”) after her signature on the leadership registration form, suggesting her heart was never in it anyway. Woolfe – who was excluded from the last leadership contest because he lodged his application 17 minutes late – may now have another go.
There’s a farcical aspect to UKIP’S feuding, said Tim Montgomerie in The Times, but “many people have learnt it can be dangerous to laugh at the party that won four million votes at the last general election”. David Cameron, for instance, would still be in power if the people he once dismissed as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” hadn’t frightened him into calling an EU referendum. Labour has particular reason to fear Woolfe, said Benedict Spence in The Independent. A calm, personable politician of mixed-race parentage, who was brought up on a Manchester council estate and performs well on TV, he could be “the man to break Labour’s stranglehold on Northern constituencies that voted solidly for Brexit, as Labour digs itself ever deeper into self-indulgent student politics”.