Scrapbook for November 2021

09.11.2021 – Cometh the hour, cometh the man

UKIP was always a poor picker of leaders. Those political nerds who can recall the names of the twelve mad and/or useless who took their turn as leaders of UKIP in recent years get the gold star – most people can't and will not find that blank a cause for worry, either.

At every one of the twelve UKIP coronations, neutral observers thought: 'This is the bottom, isn't it? It can't get worse, can it?'. With UKIP, it always gets worse. So that, just at the moment a new sleaze crisis hits the UK parliament, their current leader is… Neil Hamilton.

Neil Hamilton, the iconic Tory trougher from yesteryear. He could have gone quietly in 1994, but chose to launch a libel suit – which he lost. The inevitable result was that any media outlet could say more or less what it liked about him, and they did and still do.

'Cometh the hour, cometh the man', indeed.