Farage wants to learn American campaigning techniques — just weeks after lambasting them

Was Nigel Farage ‘absent on the job’ this week, addressing a conference in America instead of focusing on the immigration figures and Ukip’s spring conference? He defended the trip on the Sunday Politics today, arguing that he recorded plenty of radio and TV interviews from Washington.

‘I did quite honestly as much media from Washington as I would have done had I been in Westminster,’ he said. When pushed again by Andrew Neil on whether he’d have better served Ukip by staying at home, Farage responded ‘with all due respect, I can’t see the difference’ between doing the interviews in Washington and Westminster.

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Although Farage has a point — a TV camera is a TV camera both sides of the Atlantic — some senior kippers aren’t so sure and have questioned why he went, given the need for Ukip to make a bang after a quiet January. Farage said he thought the trip was worth it because there is plenty for Ukip to learn from conservatives in the US:

‘Every single year, there is this big conservative conference and a leading figure from the UK Conservative Party gets invited and for the first time ever, someone from Ukip got invited and that meant the opportunity to sit down and meet some of the big think tanks in America but perhaps more importantly for me in the short term, it was the chance to meet some of the really really top class campaigners in America, where their methods of data profiling and campaigning in individual constituencies is way ahead of anything we’ve got in this country.’

This is the same Nigel Farage who wrote in the Independent a few weeks ago that he was unhappy at the thought this could be one the of ‘dirtiest general election campaign in British history’ — thanks to techniques adapted from those...