Neil Hamilton and Ukip: it just wasn't meant to be

  

Neil and Christine Hamilton campaigning for Ukip in 2013. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

Earlier this year, James Landale, deputy political editor for BBC News, reported on a form doing the rounds of potential UK Independence party candidates at their conference in Torquay. It was a list of statements, asking them to declare that they had never engaged in racist behaviour, or had links to organisations that might bring the party into disrepute. Among the statements: "I do not have any 'skeletons in my cupboard' that may cause me or Ukip embarrassment if they were to come out during the election."

This seemed slightly incongruous, considering the identity of the man then leading the party's campaign for the European elections in May. It's debatable whether Neil Hamilton has any skeletons left in his cupboards, given the graveyard that dances around him. There is, of course, the cash-for-questions affair he was embroiled in while MP for Tatton in the 1990s – a scandal which led him to resign from his post as a minister in John Major's government, and eventually leave parliament in disgrace, synonymous with sleaze. There is the libel suit he brought against the Guardian, which he abandoned the day before the trial was due to start in 1996, and many other embarrassing incidents in the years since. Once you have seen Hamilton stripped to the waist, cradling his wife Christine, recreating the pottery scene from the film Ghost, the image cannot be easily erased.

So perhaps it's not surprising that, as the Observer reported this weekend, Hamilton has been dropped as Ukip's campaigns director. With questions having been raised about Nigel Farage's use of EU allowances over the past few weeks – allegations that Farage calls "outrageous" – an Observer report suggests that Hamilton's demotion stems from fears his reputation might leave Ukip vulnerable to sleaze allegations. There's also the small matter of Hamilton's comments about the party's main donor, Paul Sykes, at Ukip's conference in February. "So far, we haven't seen the colour of his money," he told the Observer.

In The Times earlier this year, it was reported that the Hamiltons had initially been wooed to the party by Farage, over a "four-bottle lunch" at a Westminster restaurant. Neil Hamilton was elected to the party's National Executive Committee in 2011, but had his application to become a Ukip MEP rejected last August. Still, his star seemed on the rise. That same month, the Telegraph reported Farage was keen to make him either chief of staff or deputy secretary general of the party's group in the European Parliament, but in February Farage referred to Hamilton as a "backroom boy", and he has now reportedly been demoted to a regional support role. Even in a party as legendarily odd as Ukip, Neil Hamilton may have too many skeletons to bear.

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