I see your frozen smile and thousand-yard stare, the utter panic building inside you hidden behind a public veneer thinner than the walls of the National Security Council. You’re putting on a brave face, holding the wheel of the UKIP ship so tightly that your knuckles are white enough to get ten votes all by themselves. Never mind the iceberg on the horizon or the cackling maniacs shovelling coal into the roaring furnaces of the engines. You let them on board, didn’t you? You welcomed the dankest memes and the edgiest of edgelords into the fold. How fitting then that you’ve become the human personification of the “this is fine” dog, sitting in his burning house and denying the inevitable.
UKIP have been steadily pissing away their credibility in fits and starts for a while now. Diane James managed ten minutes of party CPR before deciding it was a total waste of her breath. Paul Nuttall had a little go at tipping the party further right but then he had too many important historical events to not attend and similarly buggered off into the sunset. Henry Bolton somehow couldn’t keep it in his pants, despite looking like a tweed effigy of every suspect from Midsomer Murders. Unfortunately his penis turned out to be a divining rod for a well of racism too fetid even for UKIP and he managed to land it in a Myra Hindley lookalike who committed the cardinal sin of slagging off a royal. It was a series of catastrophic PR fails that exposed the long-suspected rotten underbelly of the party – one of genuine unpleasantness and ignorance, hidden by the thick fur of opposition to the EU’s bureaucratic excesses.
Getting everything UKIP ever wanted with Brexit somehow blew the party to pieces, a dog chasing cars that managed to catch up with one just as it slammed into reverse. The rigor mortis currently gripping the process should be UKIP’s victory lap; Theresa May has seized up tighter than Barbie’s vagina, Labour keep tiptoeing around a second referendum, Change UK continue to be a laughable embarrassment of arrogant media darlings with no actual ideas and the Liberal Democrats are still so fundamentally tainted by allying themselves with He-Who-Skullfucked-Babe that they can’t even get parliament’s latest coalition of shameless opportunists to buddy up with them. It’s a bonfire of failures so massive you could burn every copy of To Kill a Mockingbird on it but the only thing rising from the ashes is Nigel bloody Farage.
I’m about as likely to celebrate that bloviating pillock’s political resurgence as I am to staple my bollocks to my thighs before a Zumba class. That being said, just how the European elections pan out will provide a litmus test for Leavers that shouldn’t be ignored. You’ve set your stall out, Gerard Batten, and it’s a pitiful, pathetic imitation of even the shitfest of empty rhetoric and false promises Farage is offering. UKIP were questionable at best even in their heyday but now? Now you’ve welcomed in the sort of cretins and agitators that don’t even warrant naming, let alone by the Xbox Live usernames they’ve adopted as their public personas. Vote UKIP if you think aiming rape jokes at Jess Philips is the *true* face of equality!
The 17.4 million Leave voters are by no means all racist idiots. But make no mistake, Gerard Batten; those that choose to vote in support of your new cabal of giggling, far-right idiot children with no sense of decency or commitment to public service beyond boosting their online followings will be quite happily nailing their colours to a burning cross. What’s more, they’ll be doing it without the excuse of ignorance or naivety. UKIP are now the home of the transparently irredeemable, the house of the sad old man who welcomed in the racist teenagers he met at the social club in a desperate attempt to convince himself of his own relevance.
Quite frankly, Gerard Batten? You deserve to be entirely annihilated at the polls and even if you’re not, the rest of us will then be able to see clearly who chooses to swim in your cesspit. As for you?
I see you, Gerard Batten, all alone upstairs in your crumpled suit. I see you microwaving the pizzas, answering the door to the Deliveroo driver, sighing and resetting the router when you hear the broom handle banging through the floor.
I see you open the basement door, that same frozen smile on your gormless face. I feel the thick fog of body odour swamp your nostrils, your eyes twitching like those of a sous chef struggling with onions. I see you carry the grease-stained paper bags downstairs, the pasty white hands grasping for them, hissing at you, grunting at you to fuck off as you beat your hasty retreat.
This is the UKIP you chose to create, Gerard Batten. A basement full of trolls in a house no-one voted for.
Still, at least you’ve got your country back. And now you get to share it with the worst of us. Even better, Neil Hamilton will be home soon.
I see you, Gerard Batten. I fucking see you.
