Ukip notches up own goals in attempt to play blame game | John Crace

The heckles from Ukip supporters began even before the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg had finished asking her question. “Fake BBC news!”, “Get back down your hole!” and “Learn to speak English!” Talking with a Scottish accent is now a proscribed act of liberal multiculturalism for some Kippers. Keep English for the English.

Kuenssberg wasn’t the only one to get shouted down. Almost every member of the media got booed for asking if Ukip was trying to make political capital out of the Manchester terrorist attack at its manifesto launch in central London. Not unreasonably, given that the party leader, Paul Nuttall, and Suzanne Evans, the author of the manifesto, had spent the first 20 minutes of their presentation talking about the Manchester bombing and the need to crack down hard on Islamic fundamentalists.

Sensing that the rising anger levels among his members were not quite the image he had been hoping to promote, Nuttall tried to broker a peace – only to insult the rest of Manchester by saying that candlelit vigils and messages of sympathy on social media were basically just for wimps. Laying flowers was giving in to terrorism.

What was needed was something much more robust. The only way to tackle radical Islam was to target all Muslims. The only Muslim who could be trusted not to be a member of Isis was … Nuttall paused. He wasn’t entirely sure of the answer to this.

But a good place to start would be to stop women from wearing the niqab and burqa. Not just because everyone in Britain had a right to see their faces – along with those of bee-keepers and anyone wearing a balaclava on a chilly day. But also to make sure that Muslim women were getting the essential levels of Vitamin D from natural sunlight.

To make sure that Muslim women didn’t get rickets, Ukip was going to provide the 20,000 extra police officers and 20,000 extra troops that would definitely have prevented the Manchester attack. “So are you saying that Theresa May is responsible for the attack by cutting police numbers?” someone asked.

“Yes,” Evans declared. “She does bear some responsibility.” Realising that blaming the prime minister was probably not the best way forward, Evans tried to backtrack a little. She wasn’t blaming her. She was just blaming her. Along with the EU. They were also to blame. As an afterthought, she added that the suicide bomber might also have been to blame. Time to move on.

“So what else have we got in our manifesto?” Nuttall said – for his own benefit as well as the audience’s. He might well have asked. With Brexit largely a done deal and the Tories having already annexed many of their policies, Ukip had been left to feed off scraps in its desperation to prove it still had relevance.

Nuttall racked his brains before coming up with immigration. That always went down a storm with the hardcore, so it must be in the manifesto somewhere. The Tories may have promised to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands, but he was going to reduce it to nothing.

From now on it would be a one-out, one-in system with border guards stationed at every port and airport. Too bad if the NHS was short of a brain surgeon or two. We would have to wait for an east European strawberry picker to go home. Far better for people to die and for the country to go broke than to have one extra foreigner. It was a question of priorities.

The rest of the manifesto was left to Evans. Principally because she was the only person who had actually read it. The UK would stop giving foreign aid. Not because we wanted to be mean but because we were doing the third world a favour. The only thing that would help poor countries was trade, so she could promise to buy stuff if they ever got round round to making something she wanted. The biggest cheer came for the abolition of the House of Lords. Ukip still has not forgiven the Tories for not giving Nigel Farage a peerage.

With the launch becoming increasingly acrimonious, Nuttall halted proceedings at 11am so that everyone could observe the minute’s silence for the victims of the Manchester bombing. The moment the minute was up, Nuttall and Evans rushed towards the door, leaving their members – including several MEPs – to resume warfare with the media. “We are tolerant,” someone shouted, pressing his face into the lens of a TV camera. Sometimes the only way to prove your tolerance is through intolerance.