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Baroness Thatcher would have joined us, says Ukip leader Nigel Farage
Baroness Thatcher would have joined the UK Independence Party if she were starting out on her career, Nigel Farage said today.
The Ukip leader told the Parliamentary Press Gallery that he could not believe a young Margaret Thatcher would have joined a party led by David Cameron.
He asked: “Who is the heir to Thatcher? Is it David Cameron? Good God, no. Most certainly not. She was about leadership. He appears to be far more about followership.” Ukip was the “true heir” to Thatcher on the issue of Europe, he said. “What is clear is that Margaret Thatcher from the mid-1990s thought this country should leave the European Union.
“And I cannot believe that a young Margaret Thatcher leaving Oxford today would join the Conservative Party led by David Cameron. I think she’d come and get involved in Ukip and no doubt topple me within 12 months or so.”
Mr Farage said the Conservatives had no chance of winning the general election and believed his party could have its first MP in the Commons by summer. Ukip was eyeing the Portsmouth South seat of Mike Hancock, the Liberal Democrat MP who has been tipped to be ready to stand down. It could go one step further than the Eastleigh by-election – where it lost to the Liberal Democrats by nearly 2,000 votes – and win, he said.
Mr Farage also admitted that he had “unwittingly” visited a lap dancing club after he was elected as an MEP.
The Ukip leader was asked why the party was backing Karim Ayoubi in the local elections in Northampton. Mr Ayoubi was the general manager of Urban Tiger, which claims to be “the best lap dancing club in the Midlands”. Mr Farage initially joked “sounds all right to me, I have no problem with that”.
Asked if he had been to such clubs, he said: “I have been to one in my time in Strasbourg, which I was taken to unwittingly by a candidate for the French presidency.
“I had no idea where we were going and we walked through the door and I thought: 'Bloody hell, this is pretty good here, I like this’. But the fact that a Ukip candidate runs a lap dancing establishment sounds to me that he is a free market entrepreneur.”