Lord Pearson and UKIP moderates

Lord Pearson's election as UKIP Leader has caused a stir. The media love factoids that can be lazily appended to stories - "first leader of a Party to sit in the Lords for a century".

The interesting thing about the UKIP leadership campaign was how hotly and bitterly it was conducted.  Accusations about the outgoing leader (the delightfully nutty Nigel Farage) giving unfair endorsement to his preferred successor, accusations of racism and the threat by party members (including a local councillor) to leave the Party if Lord Pearson was elected.

UKIP may have beaten Labour into third place in June's Europarl elections, but in terms of it being a proper national, broad-based political party in the common understanding of the term, the Party still languishes far behind even the LibDems. 

Bald men fighting over a comb comes to mind.

Be that as it may, the fact that mega-rich Lord Pearson becomes the poshest leader of a political party in quite some time has sent many commentators off into a frenzy about how this will potentially scupper Tory chances in marginal seats.

I will stick my neck out on this one and state that Pearson, as connected to the Tory establishment as he is, with as much success in the international insurance industry as he has, will go down like a lead balloon in Northern towns and cities - the teritory he is supposedly marking out as his own, with messages of anti-immigration and fear-mongering about "Sharia Law" high up on his agenda.

If UKIP become BNP-lite, then so much the better. I have long viewed UKIP as a release valve for the Tory Party...let the loons, racists and fruitcakes (to paraphrase Cameron's description of the UKIP party faithful) who are not happy with the Conservatives, go off to take their part in a fringe group. 

However, there are plenty of other people who joined UKIP as a genuine reaction to what they saw (sometimes rightly, other times wrongly) as the excesses of the "European Project" and their lack of faith in other parties on these issues. I think these people will be rightly disgusted if Pearson takes their party to the far-right and shares common platforms (if not vocabulary or indeed accent) with the BNP.

UKIP's message has always needed careful presentation lest their anti-EU stance gets mistaken for xenophobia. By moving onto the BNP's ground of whipping up tensions over the "Islamification" of the UK (which is total twaddle) this message will be lost in the hubub of reaction and internal dissent.

Long my Pearson reign over them.