I have no idea the degree to which, or if any of
this is true, but it was long clear that Breitbart was in the bag for UKIP, probably as much if not more so than the Express.
What’s happened to poor Ukip? Not so long ago, they seemed unstoppable. They were revolting on the right, terrifying the left and shaking up Westminster. The established parties tried sneering at them, smearing them, even copying them. Nothing worked. Then came the general election, the centre held, and Ukip seemed to fall apart. Farage failed to win his target seat in South Thanet, the focus of his whole campaign. He resigned, then farcically unresigned, three days later.
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Here’s the strange thing, though: the election was not a disaster for Ukip. It was a triumph. They won 3.9 million votes — 3 million more than in 2010, and 1.5 million more than the Liberal Democrats. If that rate of growth, or anything like it, were to continue, by 2020 Nigel Farage could well be prime minister. So why has the party sabotaged itself?
To begin to understand, it helps to cross the Atlantic and meet Stephen Bannon, executive chairman of a mysteriously rich right-wing website called Breitbart....
The company Bannon runs is one of a large number of media organisations that exploit what Richard Hofstadter called the ‘paranoid style’ in US politics. Breitbart specialises in stoking up Middle American rage at big government and the liberal elite. Its founder, Andrew Breitbart, was a charismatic muckraker who worked with Matt Drudge, author of the Drudge Report and probably the most influential right-winger of the internet age. Breitbart’s site was generating huge amounts of online traffic when suddenly, at the age of 43, he dropped dead. (The coroner said heart failure; some of Breitbart’s keenest admirers say that he was poisoned by Barack Obama’s secret agents, which says something about them.) People expected Breitbart’s website to die with him but, under Bannon’s stewardship, it just got bigger. It is today a profitable company — though its press office refuses to say where the profit comes from.
The rise of Breitbart on the new media scene chimed nicely with the rise of the Tea Party, the amorphous movement within American conservatism that rose to prominence after the election of Barack Obama and the financial crash. Breitbart became essential reading for embittered American right-wingers, of whom there is no shortage.
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A spokesman for Breitbart insisted that the London office was not established to support any political party. Nevertheless, it didn’t take long for Breitbart London to become a Ukip cheerleader....
Breitbart staff were alarmed at the lack of editorial independence. ‘We effectively became the Ukip comms office,’ says one employee. ‘Any criticism of the sainted Farage was completely banned,’ says another. It’s understood that Delingpole and Kassam fell out over the site’s pro-Ukip line.
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British politicians are easily seduced by American money and power, and it seems Farage, for all his anti-elitism, was no exception. In The Purple Revolution, he positively gushes about his four days in September in the land of the free. He describes a friendly meeting with Rupert Murdoch (‘We are both outsiders who despise the establishment’), an equally amicable encounter with presidential hopeful Rand Paul (‘my political doppelgänger’) and a dinner, hosted by Breitbart in their Washington office overlooking Capitol Hill, in which he sat next to Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a Tea Party darling, and the popular talk-radio host Laura Ingraham.
It must have felt like the beginnings of a special relationship. By learning from American experts, Farage believed he could turn Ukip into a more professional outfit. Kassam and Richardson put him in touch with strategists and activists who specialised in ‘micro-campaigning’ and social media. At the same time, Breitbart and the Tea Party’s leadership saw in Farage a man with whom they could do business — a conservative quite unlike David Cameron, who had spent so long toadying up to Obama. Moreover, the Americans wanted to learn from Ukip how a new party could rattle the established order — since the Tea Party, for all its noise, had never broken out on its own, or caused any meaningful shift in the Grand Old Party.
Back home, Ukip staff quickly got fed up with what they called the ‘Tea Party tendency’ and Farage’s ‘mad love affair’ with the American right. In February, Farage annoyed his followers by missing the first day of Ukip’s spring conference in Margate because he was giving a speech to a half-empty room at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. ‘The party was seething and baffled,’ says one insider. ‘It was a major moment for Ukip and the leader wasn’t there.’
There were also growing concerns about a change in Ukip’s ‘messaging’. Farage is said to have developed a ‘shock and awe’ strategy, which involved making deliberately outrageous statements to arouse the ire of the despised political and media class. For instance, in a television debate, Farage suggested that the NHS should not treat foreigners with Aids. That prompted fury from politically correct commentators, as expected, but it also disturbed quite a few natural conservatives. ‘Shock and awful,’ said a senior Ukip source.
In an interview with Trevor Phillips, Farage also referred to a ‘fifth column’ of Muslims in this country — which led to rumours that, rather than running an election campaign, he was aiming for a well-paid gig on Fox News.
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Ukip seemed to be waging an American-style culture war — but the British didn’t appear to be interested. From October to election day, the party’s standing in the polls fell from 18 to 13 per cent. The dip can’t all be pinned on Ukip’s drift towards Tea Party politics, but a number of Kippers feel that Farage’s infatuation with America distracted him from his mission at a crucial moment, and unbalanced the delicate ecosystem that had allowed the party to flourish.
Which might explain why, after the election, Ukip’s leadership turned on itself so viciously....
I never imagined they were so explicitly inter-connected however.
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