Brexfactor: Million more reasons to ignore Katie Hopkins

The prospective MP for Dudley North launched his election campaign in an Indian restaurant to ‘put to bed once and for all’ the idea that UKIP is racist.

It’s hard to believe why anyone might think that of Etheridge, who has written a book about golliwogs, called for a ban on kosher and halal meat and once said Hitler ‘achieved a great deal’, during a speech in which he advised Kipper candidates to pick up tips from the Fuhrer’s oratory style (‘I’m not saying direct copy – pick up little moments’).

Confirming his firm grip on reality, the West Midlands MEP and Dudley councillor told his election launch party: ‘If I had one dream I would be Prime Minister tomorrow. Don’t believe politicians who say they are not ambitious.’

9. Ray Winstone

The actor, famed for playing a Cockney Irish Bostonian in The Departed, a Cockney Greek/Italian FBI agent in Point Break and a Cockney 11th century Scandinavian warrior in Beowulf, told The Times he was a Brexiteer ‘without any shadow of a doubt’. Asked why, Winstone replied: ‘We’re a f***in’ island race. I get the hump being told I can’t have a kidney with my pork chop. Do not f*** with the way I live.’ As Ray’s unfortunate adversary in Scum nearly said: What a fackin’ tool.

8. Jane Collins

Like many other British politicians, Collins is occupied with June 8. Yet unlike the rest, the UKIP MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber is more concerned with collection boxes than ballot boxes. Having failed in an attempt to claim immunity via the same EU Parliament she despises, the former horse physio has now failed to pay £358,000 in damages and costs after falsely claiming three Rotherham MPs were aware about child grooming gangs in the town but had ignored them because of political correctness. Now election day is also the deadline for a full examination of Collins’ assets, with a subsequent hearing set for the Royal Courts of Justice to discuss how she will pay – and she will face bankruptcy proceedings if she cannot.

7. Theresa May

Bob Dylan completed his UK tour this week without having said a single word to any of his audiences. That’s an achievement which the Prime Minister no doubt regards with envy as she continues to plod towards coronation, parroting her catchphrases to party workers and vetting out troublesome questions as she goes.

But whichever controlled environment she eventually surfaces in, May cannot stop piling up the porkies. ‘There is a unity of purpose in the country behind Brexit,’ she tells us, despite the YouGov tracker on the referendum result veering between narrow leads for both right and wrong. Her demands for a large majority as Emmanuel Macron ‘has claimed a strong negotiating position on Brexit as a result of his election win’ is irrelevant since she will be negotiating Brexit with the European Commission and not with the French government.

In fact, just about the only verifiable thing May says on the campaign trail is that she’s in daily contact with Remainers who want her to get on with Brexit. She neglects to say that she accomplishes this by looking in the bathroom mirror.

6. Arron Banks

The former UKIP backer responded to Macron’s victory by Tweeting ‘at least the Germans saved the fuel and the bullets this time around’ while at exactly the same time his Leave.EU organisation Tweeted ‘The French rolled over in 1940. This time they’ve saved Germany the fuel and bullets.’

A new low even for the people behind the Breaking Point poster, and the best possible response came from French football writer Philippe Auclair: ‘My great-uncle rolled over, it’s true, when he was mown down by Wehrmacht bullets, attacking a convoy of German tanks in 1940. Fuck you.’

5. Caroline Santos

The UKIP parliamentary candidate celebrated her adoption to fight the Rutherglen and Hamilton seat in west Scotland, by calling Islam a ‘growing cancer’, then attempted to reach out to potential Muslim voters by saying the religion had ‘problems in parts of England, not here in Scotland’.

Santos last came to our attention on International Women’s Day, when she instructed feminists to ‘Go march in Saudi. They’d soon shed the fat marching in that heat.’ But was that just feminists in parts of England?

4. Terry Sanders

This hitherto obscure Twitter user, whose profile brilliantly describes him as a ‘proud Lutonion’ (sic), gave possibly the most convincing reason yet why we snowflake Remoaners should shut up about the referendum. Sanders told his 570 followers: ‘It seems democracy only works for the Left if they win. By Lefties I mean the people who still oppose Brexit. I wasn’t a fan of Leona Lewis but accepted she won the X Factor.’ Truly Schamazeballs.

3. Nigel Farage

On a rare foray to Brussels, Boozy Frog lost his rag during a hilarious interview with German paper Die Zeit during which he was pressed repeatedly on his links with Russia before eventually refusing to answer further questions. Hard to know what the highlight was. Could it have been Farage denying taking ‘a penny’ from the country before admitting he’d made regular paid appearances on Russian-owned TV channel RT? Or claiming that ‘it is obvious that the EU wants to expand eastwards and threaten Russia’? Or was it him insisting he’d ever met the deputy Russian Ambassador before saying, ‘ah, wait a minute. He came to my office in the European Parliament. Maybe I met him in London. So what?’

Perhaps Nigel was just unsettled by the sad news coming in from France, where his chum Marine Le Pen was busy losing the election run-off by a Nutallesque 31%. Not exactly what Farage predicted at a pro-Trump rally in Maryland three months ago, when he told cheering rednecks they were ‘at the beginning of a great global revolution and it’s one that is not going to stop… We’ve got some very exciting elections coming up in the Netherlands, in France, in Germany… we’re winning!’

Add in the fact that late on the evening of June 23 Nige was telling TV channels that ‘it looks like Remain will edge it’ and it doesn’t add up to a great record of predictions. But we’re sure that once he finally loses his well-paid gig in Brussels, it won’t stop him taking up a lucrative gig as the Pravda’s Mystic Meg.

2. Paul Nuttall

The man for whom Graham Nash’s King Midas In Reverse might have been written responded to losing 145 council seats by claiming UKIP were the ‘most influential party of the 20th century’.

Let’s doff our Tweed caps to Nuttall for failing to realise that it’s been the 21st century for quite some time now, that his disintegrating cabal’s high water mark came some 16 years after the 20th century ended and that Labour, founded in 1900, might just lay claim to being the 20th century’s most influential party, having launched the NHS and won seven general elections during that time. Now on to Skegness and on to victory!

1. Katie Hopkins

The loveable MailOnline columnist went to Paris in support of another blonde extremist, only to have her dreams dashed. Still, she courageously live-Tweeted the crushing defeat of Marine Le Pen even as the tears slid down her iPhone screen.

‘Macron supporters are hurting my heart,’ Hopkins wrote as the exit poll came in, a tragic echo of the moment from Blade Runner in which Rachael The Replicant refuses to believe she isn’t a real person.

But Katie did not have to wonder about the mysterious salty discharge leaking from her eyes for very long. By the next day, she was cheerfully reporting on a ‘million or so individuals’ marching through Paris ‘against Macron & the Establishment elite’. Even the excitable chaps at Breitbart put the numbers at the Social Front’s demo slightly lower – ‘around 10,000’. Police estimated the crowd at a whopping 1,600. Perhaps the other 998,400 protestors were hiding.

Before she boarded the Eurostar back to a Brexit safe haven, there was just time to compose a column telling the French, like an alt-right Jim Bowen, about what they could have won.

‘I thought back to my England on June 23,’ she wrote. ‘To… my friend stood on the roundabout – waving her Leave banner like a maniac, to the hot pubs and pavements up and down the UK where grown men were suddenly made proud to be British… People with battered Union flags flung over shoulders, memories of blue passports, proud of their pound, pictures in their wallet of their grandad in his service uniform. Deep connections to a time before.’

Just a thought Katie, but might it have been deep connections to a time before – say, for example, the period from 1940-44 – that made the French vote against Marine Le Pen?