Arron Banks, the Ukip donor who bankrolled the multimillion-pound Leave.EU Brexit campaign, has said he has quit Ukip and will now set up a new political force.
The insurance millionaire said on Tuesday that he was planning to “concentrate on our new movement” after he claimed Ukip had suspended his membership.
Asked by the Guardian if it meant his increasingly strained relationship with Ukip was now over, he quoted the pop star Taylor Swift: “We are never ever getting back together … like ever.”
He also described his new movement on Tuesday as “Ukip 2.0, the Force Awakens”, although it is unlikely to use the Ukip name. He has previously suggested it could be called the “Patriotic Alliance”.
Banks’s move had been on the cards for several months but was finally precipitated by a row over his membership, which followed increasingly outspoken attacks on Ukip by its main funder.
After the Ukip leader, Paul Nuttall, failed to win the Stoke-on-Trent Central byelection last month, Banks demanded to be made party chairman or said he would set up a rival movement that would “destroy” Ukip.
He complained the party was being run like a “jumble sale” and pledged to run against Ukip’s only MP, Douglas Carswell, accusing him of treachery and alleging the MP didn’t do enough to help Farage get a knighthood. Carswell denies the allegations.
In a statement sent from a flight to Atlanta, Banks said: “The party has somehow managed to lapse my membership despite my having given considerably more than the annual membership this year!
“On reapplying I was told the membership was suspended pending my appearance at the NEC meeting. Apparently my comments about the party being run like a squash club committee and Mr Carswell have not gone down well. I realise I was being unfair to squash clubs all over the UK, and I apologise to them. We will concentrate on our new movement. Over and out.”
Banks also said the party had made the move because he had claimed the “current leadership couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding”.
Banks gave more than £1m to Ukip and was the main funder behind the Nigel Farage-backed Leave.EU campaign last year. He previously said he was considering setting up a new political party or movement to “drain the swamp” of what he considers ineffective MPs at Westminster.
Amid confusion on Tuesday morning about Banks’s membership status, a spokesman for the party claimed that Banks could not have been suspended because his membership of the party had lapsed in January.
“Arron, by accident I think, let his membership lapse in January,” the spokesman said. “So to be suspended from a membership you don’t actually hold is quite entertaining. How can he be suspended when he is not a member? I think it was an oversight. I don’t think it was deliberate.”
Discussions of membership now appear academic. Both Banks and Farage have been buoyed in their ambition to establish a new populist movement in part by the confidence they have gained from high level access to Donald Trump’s administration in Washington.
