The good lord doth provide

In what must rank as both the funniest political story of the year so far and irrefutable proof that there is a god, it has today been revealed that the Electoral Commission will be taking legal action against everyone’s favourite BNP-with-middle-class-accents gang of ne’erdowells, the UK Independence Party.



Apparently the Party’s sugar daddy, a retired bookie called Alan Bown, ‘forgot’ to register himself on the Electoral Roll from December 2004 to January 2006. During this period he donated £360,000 to UKIP, pretty much single-handedly keeping the party afloat.

Unfortunately, Section 54 of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 states that all individuals wishing to give money to political parties must be ’registered in an electoral register’. The Electoral Commission is seeking to reclaim all monies donated by Bown during the period that he was not registered, effectively bankrupting the party.

What makes this story even sweeter to all of us who are not psychotic racists is that all of the reclaimed money will go straight into the pocket of the Treasury, rather than back to the doner, and thus, according to UKIP’s madcap beliefs, into the hands of those dastardly bureaucrats in Brussels.

It gets better - Section 54 of the 2000 Act is intended, in the words of UKIP party chairman John Whittaker, to ‘prevent dodgy overseas money being given to UK political parties’. UKIP of course would be the last people to criticise any legislation that prevented those dirty foreigners having access to our sacred British political system and so can only plead for clemency, rather than rail against the Act itself.

In fact, the only way this story could be topped is by a future revelation that the reason Mr Bown was not registered on the Electoral Roll was that he was living abroad at the time. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility – it certainly seems strange that the main benefactor of a party standing at the 2005 General Election would fail to remember to register to vote in that election. And it is often the case that those who most fervently believe that Britain is being ‘overrun’ by slimy, money grabbing foreigners intent on destroying our precious village green ‘n’ afternoon tea culture are the very same people who spend half the year supping John Smiths and eating nothing but fry ups in an ‘Only Fools and Horses’ pub on the Costa del Sol.