Paul Nuttall's troubled relationship with the truth finally catches up with him

In 1999 David Renton, a history lecturer at Edge Hill college in Lancashire, asked his undergraduates to write an essay about the causes of the Holocaust.

Renton recalls how one of his students – a bright and outspoken man who, at 23, was older than others in the class, handed in an essay in which he suggested there was an argument to be made that Jewish people had brought it upon themselves.

According to Renton, to justify this argument, the student cited the notorious Holocaust denier David Irving. This was a time when Irving was regularly in the news as he prepared to embark upon the doomed libel action now being depicted in Denial, a film written by David Hare and starring Rachel Weisz.

“It was really quite extraordinary,” Renton says. “It seemed like the only reason he’d managed to shoehorn this reference to David Irving in was in order to put in something which was saying in effect that there had been lots of Jewish people in Germany, and somehow they’d brought the Holocaust on themselves.”

Renton believed the student was testing the acceptable limits of free speech. On the advice of colleagues, he had a long conversation with the student, explaining why it was really not appropriate to cite Irving. At this point, Renton says, the student said something that completely took him aback. He said that he was not responsible for the citations: his girlfriend had found them on the internet.

Over the years that followed, the student forged an interesting political career while also developing a relationship with the truth that might be described as somewhat troubled. But there has often been a useful girlfriend figure to hand, whenever he was ensnared in one falsehood or another.

On Thursday that relationship with the truth appeared to have caught up with Paul Nuttall – and left a question mark over the future of Ukip, the party he leads – after the voters of Stoke-on-Trent Central rejected his bid to become their member of parliament.

Labour’s Gareth Snell won 7,853 votes to Nuttall’s 5,233, as Ukip failed to capitalise on the area’s overwhelming support for Brexit.

After the count, Nuttall insisted that he and Ukip would bounce back. He pointed out that he had been party leader for just 12 weeks. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “We move on and our time will come.”

The party’s current electoral strategy is founded upon Nuttall’s belief that there is latent sympathy for Ukip’s politics within Old Labour’s traditional base.

But its bid for northern working class votes appears to have become wrapped around Nuttall’s persona. And that began to fall apart during the election campaign once the salt-of-the-earth working man began to resemble a Walter Mitty-type character.

First there had been the claim, repeated time and again on his website, that he had been a professional footballer at Tranmere Rovers. That was his press officer’s error, he said.

Then there was the false claim on his LinkedIn profile that he had a PhD. The page “wasn’t put up by us, and we don’t know where it’s come from,” he said. The page was subsequently edited to remove any reference to a PhD.

Then Nuttall claimed on his election nomination paper that he lived at a property in the constituency, only to later admit he had never set foot inside it. Ukip insists he did nothing wrong, but an allegation of election fraud is being investigated by Staffordshire police.

And then there were questions about Nuttall’s claim to have been present during the 1989 Hillsborough football disaster, in which 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death.

His former history lecturer David Renton, who is now a barrister, says most students in Nuttall’s class were football fans, and the subject of Hillsborough came up from time to time. Renton says “he certainly didn’t mention it once” in his presence.

Nuttall said he was angered by a Guardian report two weeks ago in which a number of people who had known him for decades questioned his claim to have been present at Hillsborough. He insists he was at the match that day.

Three days later he admitted that a claim – again on his personal website – that a number of “close personal friends” had died in the disaster was false. It was that press officer again, and Ukip said she had offered to resign.

By the time the Guardian had discovered Nuttall’s website had published incorrect claims that he served on the board of a charity, nobody was any longer surprised. He complained that he was the victim of a politically motivated campaign – the same response he gave when asked about Renton’s recollections.

As the election campaign drew to a close, users of social media began to enjoy themselves. On Twitter there were pictures of him strolling across Abbey Road with the Beatles, raising the flag at Iwo Jima, walking on the moon and joining Christ at the Last Supper.

Even the Daily Telegraph weighed in, with a columnist declaring: “Leave Paul Nuttall alone. This is no way to treat a man who fought for his country at Waterloo.”

In the middle of his election campaign, Nuttall took down his entire website. Anyone clicking on the site was greeted by a page that announced: “We are currently undergoing scheduled maintenance.”

Amid this chaos, Ukip’s most generous donor, Arron Banks, dropped a heavy hint that he was considering pouring his millions into a different political movement. The party, he declared ominously, was at a tipping point.

When the Stoke Sentinel newspaper reported the byelection result on its website on Friday, the first below-the-line comment was from a reader who seized upon Nuttall’s statement that “we’re not going anywhere”.

Perhaps, the reader suggested, this was the first time he had told the truth in the entire campaign.