Nigel Farage is worried: He doesn’t think UKIP is spending enough time talking about immigration and fears new leader Paul Nuttall could miss out on a new wave of popularity by toning down the party’s anti-migrant rhetoric.
“I don’t think the debate about immigration has even begun,” Farage said at UKIP’s spring conference, held at Bolton Wanderers' stadium in Greater Manchester. “The identity issue, the immigration issue is going to get bigger not smaller.”
Farage, who has no formal role within UKIP, was nonetheless the star attraction at the event. He told BuzzFeed News that he is battling against a faction within the party, allegedly centred around its only MP, Douglas Carswell, which he believes is wrongly trying to convince Nuttall to take the party in a more mainstream direction and focus on cost-of-living issues rather than migration.
“Ultimately it comes down to the leader to make a big decision. And I am ultimately pretty confident that Paul will come down on my side of the argument.”
“I’m not putting any pressure on behind the scenes,” he said. “I’m not lobbying, I’m doing it on a public platform!”
Farage, who led the party through the Brexit referendum before eventually stepping aside in September, is now spending more time building his media profile with a radio show on LBC. But his friendship with the US president – and apparently growing belief that Donald Trump is the model for UKIP to follow – is causing consternation with the team around Nuttall.
"Talking about things in a Donald Trump way is not going to win over voters,” said UKIP MEP Patrick O’Flynn, a former Daily Express columnist who is now working as Nuttall’s main political adviser. Among other issues, he said this approach would not solve the party’s unpopularity with women.
“In 2015 we got 15% of male voters but 11% of women. If we'd have won 15% of women voters then Nigel Farage would now be MP for Thanet South.”
The event highlighted the extent to which UKIP enjoys both an enormous national profile but is still a relatively small, occasionally unprofessional campaigning organisation that is still struggling to work out what role it will play after Brexit.
Nuttall himself was bundled out of the hall after his speech to avoid reporters asking questions about false claims he lost "close personal friends" in the Hillsborough disaster. However, he used his speech to announce policies designed to appeal to traditional Labour voters such as additional council housing and a cut in VAT on energy bills, rather than focusing on immigration.
Farage singled out Suzanne Evans, a longterm internal rival who is close to the new leadership team, as the sort of individual who wants to shift the party's tone on immigration and say “the right thing” in order to “get invited to parties in London”.
Evans told BuzzFeed News this was not true: "Nigel does tend to put ideas in my head that are not there. Unfortunately, as much as I respect and admire him, he does seem to have an inability to stop telling me what I think."
She said that under Nuttall’s leadership UKIP could learn to discuss "radical" issues about immigration in a more measured manner: “You can be radical but you don’t need to keep screaming ‘immigration’ every five minutes to be radical. What I’m proudest about are some of the things I’ve been most radical about, is standing up for women in ethnic-minority communities.”
Neil Hamilton, UKIP’s leader in Wales, said the party needed to professionalise if it wanted to survive as “after Brexit we will be fighting purely in a domestic context”. He also cast doubt on the former leader’s relationship with the US president: “I don’t know how close he is to Trump; I’ve seen a photograph of him in a lift. Donald Trump as president of the US is not going to have much time for minor political figures from abroad.”
Evans, who pointedly left the hall for Farage's speech, was even more caustic about the former leader's role: “It’s quite sad, he’s obviously in the process of leaving UKIP and he’s got his radio show. If he doesn’t want to be part of the party any more that’s fine, but don’t turn around and abuse those of us who are still in it.”