OF THE SAME ILK

A slightly worse for wear Robin Page, the after dinner speaker at the UKIP Telford conference.

It was sad to see Robin Page announce, so publicly on the pages of the Daily Telegraph, his resignation from UKIP. Robin has always been someone I have admired since first encountering him at the 1996 Referendum Party conference in Brighton where he gave one of his typical irreverent talks on the EU which had the full attendance of his audience.

Over the years since, as a UKIP conference organiser and past member of UKIP’s National Executive Committee, I have had some contact with Robin, especially when asking him to speak at our UKIP conferences, and it was a great privilege to have known him. However, because of his fit of pique that the rules could not be bent especially for him regarding his late application to apply for his name to be put on the UKIP MEP list, I feel he is quite wrong to make the statements he did on the pages of the Telegraph, which as a Tory supporting publication made sure he was given a prominent place to wail his grievances.

UKIP, under the strong leadership of Nigel Farage, is working hard to expose the damage done to the UK through membership of the EU. It was Nigel Farage who created outrage in the cosy world of the EU Parliament when he exposed the past misdeeds of Jacques Barrot at the time France was proposing him as a Commissioner. It is UKIP MEP’s who constantly vote against the EU directives which are responsible for the closure of our Post Offices and the introduction of such EU inspired lunacies of having to drive in bright daylight with headlights on. If UKIP is so cosy with the EU then why are its MEPs so hated and reviled within the EU Parliament? If it is a gravy train which Robin opposes why did he want to get on it?

Had Robin taken the time and trouble to attend the UKIP conference last year he could have voted on the motion regarding genetically modified crops which, despite him complaining was done in secret, was decided by the membership. He stated: "The grassroots of UKIP are good people," so why are you betraying them Robin? I thought that being a down to earth countryman he would not be the sort of person to suffer from silly tantrums and go storming off because he could not get his own way, as another sun-tanned TV personality once did – but it seems Robin Page is of the same ilk.