Arron Banks interview: ‘Nigel is part of it but he’s not the only game in town’

Arron Banks is the man of the moment in Doncaster: Nigel Farage said in his speech he was ‘massively impressed’ with his efforts to bring the different Eurosceptic camps together. I caught up with the Ukip donor and founder of the Leave.EU campaign to chat about the referendum and what he hopes his new group will achieve — you can watch the interview above. Banks explained what his umbrella group is about:

‘We’ve been out to all the leading Eurosceptic campaigns – they haven’t always been the best of friends. There’s seven of them, including Ukip, Bruges Group, Democracy Movement, all different groupings and effectively we’re trying to bring them together under one umbrella to support what we’re doing, which is a non-political campaign.’

Given that Farage and Banks are close, it might look as if Leave.EU is just a front for Ukip’s referendum campaign. Banks denies they are one and the same thing:

‘We are different from Ukip, we’ve got 60 people working in an office out of Bristol, we’ve got a big social media operation, we’ve got different people coming onto the campaign — businessmen, sportsmen, all sorts of different people.