It’s day three of Ukip’s latest leadership contest and the party has found itself splashed across the front pages of today’s papers for all the wrong reasons. Following the bust-up in the European Parliament which left Steven Woolfe in hospital, Nigel Farage has promised to launch a Ukip investigation into what happened.
That hasn’t stopped the debacle from playing out on the airwaves. Mike Hookem, the MEP who was alleged to have hit Woolfe, denied doing so in an interview with the BBC. He said that he had acted in self-defence and did his best to downplay the row, joshing that it was just ‘handbags at dawn’:
‘There was a tussle between an elderly grandfather and a 40-year-old MEP, quite silly, quite embarrassing, handbags at dawn, girl on girl. It was embarrassing, it lasted seconds.’
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For his part, Woolfe – who will spend a further two days in hospital recovering (where his colleague Nathan Gill said he was ‘sick of [eating] croissants’) – has apparently extended the ‘hand of friendship’ to Hookem.
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