UKIP election official: I spend half my time weeding out the lunatics
UKIP’s long-suffering elections official has complained that he spends half his time trying to make sure ‘lunatics’ aren’t running as candidates.
One of the party’s PPCs, Kerry Smith, quit as a candidate yesterday, after being caught on tape ranting about disgusting “poofters” and “shooting peasants”.
Audio recording was released by the Mail on Sunday of Mr Smith – a senior UKIP member who was the party’s candidate in key seat South Basildon and East Thurrock – making a series of seriously offensive comments.
It was the latest in a very, very long string of homophobic comments from UKIP officials. The party’s former deputy leader ‘Lord’ Christopher Monckton claimed last month that gay people sleep with up to 20,000 people in their “short miserable lives”.
Spare a thought for David Soutter – the man charged with vetting UKIP’s election candidates.
According to the Times, the official complained in a speech: “One of the things that UKIP has lacked as a party — and looking at it the way I’ve been able to from the outside — discipline is one of the things that’s really been missing.
“Half my job is spent not finding good candidates to stand, it is weeding out the lunatics, the people who shouldn’t be there.”
The party’s only out MEP, David Coburn, claimed Mr Soutter had even resorted to giving people psychological “tests” to make sure they are sane and don’t hold bigoted views.
He said that one one trip to Scotland, Mr Soutter was “doing tests to make sure people were vaguely sane and that they could string their words together more or less”.
