WHEN scrappy Ukip leadership contender Steven Woolfe walked away from the “ungovernable” party on Monday night he left the contest to replace Nigel Farage wide open.
Of course, the first thing The National did was to phone Ukip’s man in Scotland David Coburn.
“Will you go for the leadership, David?” we asked at about 6.40pm
“It’s a bit too soon to talk about these things,” he replied.
The very next morning he was on BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland admitting that he was ready to “do his best” if asked to serve.
“Can I lead the party? If I were asked by colleagues then of course I would do my best, but it’s not about who is governing, it’s to do with getting a group of people together, a collegiate group of people who are going to run the thing. That’s much more important.”
Ukip are in a mess. Woolfe in his parting statement talked about a “death spiral” saying the party had lost its way without Farage and without the cause of Brexit.
Coburn admitted as much to GMS yesterday morning: “We had a charismatic leader for many years who has kept the lid on things and now what you’ve got is you have lifted the lid off things a bit and it bubbles over.
“We’re a libertarian party, which means we can’t be told what to do. People have to govern their own emotions and govern their own behaviour and that is never an easy thing to do.”
So, is Coburn the man to save Ukip? He is arguably one of the party’s highest profile politicians with a sizeable media presence.
But he’s also a little gaffe prone, and, as far as we’re aware, the only politician in the country to have been banned from Wikipedia after editing his own entry 69 times. He was accused of removing a passage claiming he could never remember the name of SNP MP Tasmina Ahmed Sheikh during the 2014 European parliament campaign.
Coburn probably isn’t the man to save Ukip. In Scotland, as it has elsewhere, the party has faced split after split after split. He’s called colleagues “tossers” and blamed “careerists” for the party’s woeful showing in May’s election where they polled around two per cent of the vote in each area losing all eight of their £500 deposits.
If not Coburn, who else then?
Suzanne Evans: Ukip’s former deputy chairwoman was barred from standing in the summer’s leadership contest as a result of her suspension from the party, but will be eligible this time. Farage loyalists don’t like her after she called their man “divisive”.
Paul Nuttall was Farage’s deputy, though a fan of the death penalty and privatisation of the NHS, is pretty confident his party could steal some of the disaffected Labour voters who backed Leave.
Raheem Kassam is a former aide to Nigel Farage, and the editor of the ludicrously right wing reactionary news website Breitbart.
The party’s NEC met on Monday to discuss the contest. It’s not going to be a quick process. It could be 2017 before we learn who wins.
Tory MP Alberto Costa opposes Scottish flagship news show as it would boost SNP independence efforts
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