Rachel Johnson meets Ukip’s pin-up boy and finds to her horror that she likes him
In order to interview Robert Kilroy-Silk, the orthodontically perfect public face of Ukip, it is first necessary to talk to his people. But his people, it turns out, are his wife Jan. ‘So,’ Jan growls in what the BBC calls a lovely regional accent (though I am not good on accents, I know the Kilroy clan hails from Birmingham, where his grandfather was a roadsweeper, and his grandmother cleaned pub floors). ‘You want to write one of those fluffy articles, do you, about his orange face?’
I am already beginning to be a little scared of Jan, who is, I am told by several people — including Kilroy himself — ‘the brains behind the throne’. But I tell Jan honestly that I do not know what sort of article I shall write, because I haven’t spoken to my people yet, nor have I met her husband.
When I do, it is clear that what my editors want — and I should remind you that Kilroy’s lot are making life even more desperate for the Conservatives in the marginals, in the suburbs and, yes, even in true blue strongholds by offering a clear anti-European choice — is an unbiased report.
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