Brexfactor: Heavy petting and copy cats are dogging UKIP

When a UKIP supporter shouts for his bulldog to come, it doesn’t necessarily mean he wants the hound to move closer. A YouGov poll has found the party’s voters are the most likely to say bestiality should be legal. Some 12% of Kippers say sex with pets is OK, proving that among their ranks, it’s not just a hungover Nigel Farage who yearns to taste the hair of the dog.

Victoria Ayling (RE-ENTRY)

They say you’ve only truly established yourself as a political force once you’ve on the radar of UKIP’s spokesperson on tourism and heritage. So it was a proud moment at TNE HQ when Ms Ayling piped up to criticise our feature on Skegness in the last issue. ‘If they occasionally left London they might have been less surprised that… people voted for independence,’ she said of a newspaper edited in Norwich by a Scouser, abetted by a Norfolkian, a Yorkshireman and a Mancunian. Ayling last came to TNE’s attention when she exposed ‘metropolitan muselimunchers’ planned to outlaw bacon and increase taxes ‘to cover the shortfall’, two populist measures we expect to see on the statute books any day now.

Andrew Haigh (NEW ENTRY)

Remember the good old days when, if you wanted to clear a ticklish cough, you could gargle with drain cleaner without the namby-pamby politically correct health and safety brigade getting on your back? UKIP’s national organiser for Wales clearly does. His company Vitalox sells a health product called Aerobic Oxygen which buyers are instructed to use as mouthwash, toothpaste or to mix in drinks. If you were that way inclined you could also use Aerobic Oxygen to bleach paper, since a chemist has told BuzzFeed that it is ‘reasonable to say it’s sodium chlorite or something similar’ – a chemical which has described by the Food Standards Agency as ‘equivalent to industrial-strength bleach’.

Patrick o’Flynn (NEW ENTRY)

‘Becoming clear that there was an Islamist attempt to assassinate the entire Dortmund football squad,’ Tweeted the likeable UKIP East of England MEP on April 12. He’s yet to retract that, despite a right-wing group claiming responsibility for the attack in an anonymous email sent to Berlin’s Tagesspiegel paper and an investigator telling Bild: ‘The overall circumstances lead us to believe it’s most likely that the perpetrators have a rightwing background.’

Christopher Adams

The Buckinghamshire county councillor, who came second to Tory David Liddington in Aylesbury at the last general election, is unlikely to gain a seat this time around after being fined £994 for fraudulently using a family friend’s disabled blue parking badge. Prosecutors said the 50-year-old used the badge to park in Portsmouth city centre and told a warden he had been unable to find alternative parking, despite being round the corner from a multistorey. He then claimed the badge holder was waiting nearby to be picked up, but when the warden accompanied him to meet them, the friend was nowhere to be seen. Adams is then said to have told the warden: ‘I’ve been a naughty boy.’

Aaron Foot (NEW ENTRY)

UKIP’s candidate for West of England metro mayor produced a leaflet in a format remarkably similar to that used by the Green Party for all candidates. Caught out by Green campaigner Dan Johnston, who posted the images above on his @GreenDanJ Twitter account, the Kippers responded with a statement saying they were ‘horrified’ to be associated with a party ‘whose contribution to culture is the recipe for knitted yoghurt’. So, in effect, they were defending plagiarism of someone else’s design from 2017 with plagiarism of a joke first made by Alexei Sayle in 1982. D’oh!

Roger Helmer (RE-ENTRY)

The serially incorrect UKIP MEP, famously photographed ‘resting his eyes’ in the EU Parliament chamber (picture below), felt duty bound to respond when he spotted a Tweet depicting a Guardian column asking ‘Why should a heart surgeon earn more than a McDonald’s employee?’ Wrote Roger: ‘Availability. Scarcity. Years of training. Responsibility. Need I go on?’ Would that he had, because Roger was actually arguing with Godfrey Elfwick, who is a parody leftist but (last time we checked) is not an actual Guardian columnist.

Unnamed UKIP council hopeful (NEW ENTRY)

An electoral miracle in the west Suffolk town of Haverhill, which has become a happy hunting ground for UKIP in recent years. The party has five seats and looked set to retain one in Haverhill North at the upcoming council elections. The only opposition was set to come from Labour, holders of only two of 72 council seats in the whole of the region. Alas, the Kippers’ nameless candidate wrote ‘UKIP’ rather than ‘UK Independence Party’ on their nomination form and was immediately disqualified under Electoral Commission rules, meaning that on May 4 the seat will automatically go to Labour’s Liz Smith and be hailed by Jeremy Corbyn as a major breakthrough for real socialism. UKIP described the fiasco as a ‘minor clerical error’, and we look forward to many more creative excuses to come once the predicted 100-seat meltdown takes place.

Paul Dacre and Tony Gallagher (RE-ENTRIES)

Even before turning their fire on the ‘saboteurs’, the Mail and Sun were living down to their usual standards. Both tut-tutted over hooliganism before a Champions League clash, Dacre’s Mail noting ‘ugly scenes last night in Madrid as drunken Leicester City fans sang an obscene song claiming Gibraltar as British’ as Gallagher’s Sun reported that ‘footage has emerged showing some supporters chanting ‘you Spanish b*******, Gibraltar is ours’ while smoke bombs and flares were let off in a litter-strewn square’. Oddly enough neither story mentioned newspaper headlines – like the Mail’s ‘Next Time Send An Armada’ and the Sun’s ‘Up Yours Senors’ – which might just have helped embolden Leicester-supporting readers to behave in this way.

Theresa May (RE-ENTRY)

Senses that the nation is coming together behind Brexit, despite opinion polls (which don’t include pro-Remain Northern Ireland) showing little or no movement at all. Hints that the big man upstairs (God, not husband Philip) is a bit of a Leaver. Channels Emperor Palpatine by saying she needs our votes to ‘make me stronger’. Contradicts herself by calling an election when she said countless times that she wouldn’t. Blames Labour for her own cynical opportunism. Dislocates jaw on TV to eat live guinea pig (apologies – that’s now scheduled for NEXT week).