New Ukip leader Henry Bolton reveals frontbench lineup

Ukip’s new leader, Henry Bolton, has unveiled a front bench lineup which retains two of the candidates he defeated last month to take the job, as he seeks to unify a party riven by grievances and splits.

Bolton has also named as one of his deputies Mike Hookem, the MEP involved in the scuffle last year with a colleague, Steven Woolfe, which saw the latter end up in hospital.

However, there is no place among the 34 jobs announced for four of the other candidates who stood against Bolton, including David Kurten and John Rees-Evans, who finished third and fourth.

The second-placed candidate, anti-Islam activist Anne-Marie Waters, is also not among Bolton’s team, but she has now left Ukip to form a new party, called For Britain.

Waters, who has close links to some far right activists, launched the party on Sunday, where she was pictured with Stephen Lennon, who as Tommy Robinson set up the extremist anti-Islam street group the EDL.

Announcing his new team Bolton – whose highest-profile intervention since becoming leader was to talk jokingly about throttling a badger – said the party had “a moral obligation to hold the government to account for taking us out of the European Union”.

“Together, my team and I will now commence the urgent work of projecting our party firmly and decisively into British politics with the purpose of securing our nation’s interests through Brexit and beyond,” he said.

Bolton faces a tough task reinvigorating a party which won almost 4m votes at the 2015 general election but under the leadership Paul Nuttall slumped to fewer than 600,000 in June.

His main deputy is Margot Parker, one of Ukip’s MEPs, while two other MEPs become so-called assistant deputies – Jim Carver and Hookem, who allegedly confronted Woolfe after the latter disclosed he was thinking about defecting from Ukip. Hookem also speaks on fisheries and on veterans issues.

One of Bolton’s fellow candidates, Jane Collins, is the spokeswoman for home affairs. Another, Peter Whittle, is demoted from deputy leader to spokesman for London affairs.

While Waters is no longer in the party, another member with vehement anti-Islam views has remained on Bolton’s front bench.

Gerard Batten, another Ukip MEP, stays as spokesman on Brexit, despite arguing that non-Muslims should have a “perfectly rational fear” of the faith, which he described as a “death cult” steeped in violence.