UKIP leader to challenge Speaker

Nigel Farage’s UKIP got 3 per cent to the Tories’ 57.4 per cent in Buckingham at the last general election but the UKIP MEP and party leader is going to give the seat a try anyway and take on the Speaker, John Bercow.

Tradition has it that the main parties don’t challenge the Speaker at a general election so the Liberal Democrat and Labour votes (they combined to about 40 per cent of the vote last time) could be up for grabs.

UKIP took a lot of comfort from the Norwich North by-election result where they felt they picked up a lot of disenchanted traditional core Labour voters.

Nigel Farage says John Bercow is exactly the sort of “careerist” politician he loathes, “interchangeable” between parties, he claims, and representing everything that is worst about this Parliament. Most importantly, he says, this challenge is all about striking a blow against the MPs’ expenses scandal (Mr Bercow in the past claimed close to the limit for the second home allowance).

But Mr Farage leads a party that largely floats on a sea of public money – £2m (largely allowances) from the European Parliament.

Mr Farage emphasises that the money is used to fund UKIP and doesn’t line his own pockets. Though he told me a few moments ago he’s “had some rotters” in the party and admitted in an interview this summer that his own party has “suffered horribly” with people being caught out with their fingers in the till.

One other snippet on Mr Farage. He is toying with standing down as leader of UKIP to concentrate on leading the MEP group in Brussels, but I hear that if he did it he would have no intention of devolving anything much more than boring administrative bits of the job and would hope to still be the man sitting in the TV studio seat when invitations come.