Ukip

Douglas Carswell seems rather excited about the Spectator following him around as he campaigns in Clacton, but it’s not clear whether that’s just because our interview starts in McDonald’s. Tucking into a quarter pounder with cheese, the Ukip candidate seems on good form, expounding at length on the failure of mainstream politicians to connect with the electorate, and enthusing about his vision for the party in the future. But a little later, as we plod around the streets of the constituency, his mood changes. He’s getting a lot of messages and calls about a BBC foreign affairs debate that he has pulled out of at the last minute. With each

In today’s election podcast special, Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss David Cameron’s ramped up rhetoric on the SNP threat to the Union, the Tories’ promise to create 50,000 new apprenticeships from Libor fines and Labour’s latest attempts to talk about controlling immigration. We also briefly look at the Liberal Democrats ‘red lines’ for future coalition negotiations and Ukip’s attempts to woo voters in the north. You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer or iPhone every week, or you can use the player below:

Ukip is expected to do well in a handful of seats, but where? Lord Ashcroft has polled four marginal seats where he’s previously found the people’s army doing well. Two of the seats are top targets for Ukip — Castle Point and Great Yarmouth — but the Tory peer has found that the party has failed to move into first place with under two weeks to go. In Castle Point, where Ukip launched its election campaign earlier this year, Ashcroft has found the Tories are now ahead by five points. There has been a 17 per cent swing to Ukip but it’s not enough to put them into first place. Use the

It’s St George’s Day so to celebrate Ukip held a press conference where they gifted red and white jester hats adorned with St George’s flags to journalists. Talk soon turned to the real crux of the matter: as a foreigner of alleged Turkish descent, would Ukip have allowed St George entry into the country? Patrick O’Flynn was on hand to answer the pressing immigration query: ‘If Ukip were in power in the third century then yes I suppose St George would be allowed in the country. He is a skilled migrant, he could slay dragons.’ A Ukip party spokesman has since gone one step further and suggested that St George

The Ukip fox may have entered the Westminster henhouse but how many more chickens will it kill? ComRes has released a new poll revealing that Ukip is trailing in third place in ‘ten Conservative-held seats which Ukip have targeted’. Across the polled seats, the Tories are on 39 per cent, Labour on 28 and Ukip trailing on 21. While the latter party’s vote share has increased by 15 per cent since 2010, ComRes’s findings suggests they will struggle to win thanks to the collapse in the Liberal Democrat vote. According to the poll, a quarter of Lib Dem voters in these seats say they will now back Labour and 21 per

Nigel Farage may see himself as the quintessential British politician, but is he modelling himself on a national comedy treasure? Mr S’s colleague Sebastian Payne noted that in Lord Ashcroft’s latest focus groups, voters reckoned that the Ukip leader ‘would only watch British comedies’ in his spare time, such as Only Fools And Horses. One respondent even said ‘he models himself on Boycie’. Judge for yourself: But Boycie is not happy with the comparison. John Challis, who plays Boycie in the series, told SunNation ‘Farage sounds nothing like me; he’s going to have to try harder.’ But Challias did find one similarity. ‘I noticed he wears a warm, British coat

Nigel Farage tends to stick to one line on foreign affairs: no more foreign wars. On the Sunday Politics today, the Ukip leader claimed that the migrant crisis and tragedies in the Mediterranean are the fault of countries such as Britain and France who bombed Libya in 2011: ‘Actually, it was the European response that caused this problem in the first place — the fanaticism of Sarkozy and Cameron to bomb Libya and what they’ve done is to completely destabilize Libya; to turn it into a country with much savagery; to turn it into a place where for Christians the situation is now virtually impossible and we ought to be honest and say

If I had a spare £1 million swashing about in my bank account or down the back of the sofa, I am pretty sure I could come up with, give or take, a million different and better ways of spending it other than donating it to a political party. A children’s cancer charity, for instance. Or, if I’m feeling a little less altruistic, a nice yacht maybe. Clearly, Richard Desmond, the owner of Express newspapers, couldn’t think of any better way to spend his hard-earned dosh so he’s decided to give his spare £1.3million to Ukip to help fund their general election campaign. This comes on top of an earlier £300,000 donation. Cue