Originally Posted by Daily Mail
Only on Monday there was an emergency meeting in London of some of the party’s biggest donors who were warned she was on the verge of quitting. Their donors included Arron Banks, who gave millions of pounds to the Leave side in the referendum, and Chris Mills, a hedge-fund financier who has loaned Ukip £200,000. Banks, who has given the party more than £1million, is refusing to part with any more money until certain reforms are introduced.
And these, crucially, include the deselection of the party’s only MP, Douglas Carswell, and its newly elected leader in Wales, Neil ‘Cash for Questions’ Hamilton – both of whom are despised by Farage and Banks. This brings us to the second reason James decided to leave – the blisteringly toxic atmosphere in the party. Just days before that vicious clash at the European Parliament, James had had another row, this time with the party’s ruling National Executive Committee.
She had tried to meet NEC members to implement Carswell’s and Hamilton’s deselections. (Hamilton, of course, is the former Tory MP who has never escaped his reputation for sleaze. He lost his Tatton seat in the 1997 election after being accused of taking cash from Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed in return for tabling parliamentary questions – a charge he’s always denied). James also wanted to give party members a say in policy for the first time and to bring in professional administrators to try to restore order to the chaos – managerial and financial – at Ukip’s headquarters.
Yet the NEC – where both Carswell and Hamilton now have considerable influence – rejected James’s demands and refused even to meet her. This must have been sweet revenge for Hamilton – for in one of her first acts party leader, James blocked him from speaking at their party conference in Brighton.
‘The amount of abuse she received from some of Hamilton’s supporters was unbelievable,’ said a friend. A third factor in her resignation is the hostility she encountered from the general public. When she announced she was stepping down, James revealed she had been badly shaken when someone spat and shouted at her at Waterloo station.
Then, travelling by train from London to Cardiff recently, a fellow passenger recognised her, spat at her and shouted abuse at her. And the fact is that, while Nigel Farage has his own personal security guards who travel everywhere with him, members of the NEC laughed at James’s request for similar protection. Farage’s guards are paid for by a wealthy donor.
On top of all this is the fact that James, 56, loathes the media spotlight.
In 1998 a tabloid newspaper exposed her three-year affair with a senior MoD official Ron Smith, who was married and a senior aide to the then Labour defence secretary George Robertson. The affair came to light when Mr Smith’s wife Susan, an RAF wing commander, was investigated by the military police over another matter. James now lives with another man in a secluded £1million house in Surrey – John Forrest, who at 73 is 17 years her senior and seriously ill with cancer.
He had been married for 32 years to his wife Jane when he and James started having an affair. James was never destined for frontline politics – she used to work in private healthcare before becoming an independent local councillor in Waverley, Surrey, a decade ago. She switched to Ukip and became the party’s MEP for the South East in 2014.
And now that she has stepped down, Farage – who is temporarily taking her place although immigration spokesman Steven Woolfe is front-runner to take over in the long term – will have to contend with all that fear and loathing within his party. Last year Farage was accused by Ukip MEP Patrick O’Flynn of being a ‘snarling, thin-skinned aggressive’ man who risked turning the party into an ‘absolute monarchy’ and a ‘personality cult’.
O’Flynn, a former Daily Express journalist, said Farage had been transformed from a ‘cheerful, ebullient ... daring’ politician into a ‘bullying control freak’. Whatever happens, the divisions in Ukip and the loss of its leader risk alienating the four million people who voted for the party at the last election. It can only be good news for the Tories.
