Nigel Farage finally reaches his ‘breaking point’ with Ukip

‘Obsessed with Islam and Tommy Robinson.’ This is how Nigel Farage describes a cohort of Ukip activists he encountered at the party’s Birmingham conference earlier this year. Gerard Batten, the tenth leader of Ukip, has openly courted such elements in his calculated lurch to the farther-right. He has recruited as an adviser Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson or St Tommy of the Uncollapsed Trials, the free speech martyr vilified by the establishment purely because he keeps imperilling court proceedings against Pakistani grooming gangs. Batten has called Islam a ‘death cult’ in which ‘they believe in propagating their religion by killing other people and martyring themselves and going and getting their 72 virgins’.

Now Farage has quit the party that he made a household name and took to the pinnacle of its electoral performance. His decision was spurred by a picture of Batten and Yaxley-Lennon in a planning meeting for a pro-Brexit rally this weekend.