Nigel Farage must take a front seat in the EU referendum — a response to Stuart Wheeler

How very tiresome it already is to hear arguments over the European Referendum campaign based not on numbers and facts, but on emotion, intuition, and partisanship. I would have thought that after Dan Hodges’s worst nightmare, politicos would be a bit more cautious about their predictions. Ukip’s former treasurer, Stuart Wheeler, doesn’t seem to have received the memo.

I’m not Wheeler-bashing. He has done a great number of things for Ukip and the Eurosceptic movement over his career. But in his piece entitled, ‘Nigel Farage cannot lead the Out campaign‘, he makes a very dangerous intervention — one that is also championed by Ukip’s turbulent priest Douglas Carswell and his puppet master Daniel Hannan.

Wheeler makes a number of misguided claims to initially back up his contention that not only should Nigel not lead the ‘Out’ campaign, but that he should stand down as Ukip leader altogether. The one that really reveals the lack of research is the idea that Nigel didn’t get elected in South Thanet, while Ukip got the council vote.