UKIP’s Eastleigh candidate knows the political rough and tumble

(PA)

Diane James, chosen yesterday to fight the Eastleigh by election for UKIP, will make an interesting rival to the Conservative, Maria Hutchings, who seems to be spending her time avoiding contact with journalists.

UKIP have stressed Mrs James’s long experience in healthcare and her disillusionment with “political interference” in local politics, which motivated her to join the party in 2010.

Unlike Ms Hutchings, she has a record for winning elections, and for coping with tabloid interest in her private life. In 2006, she scored a political upset in Waverley, in Surrey, by standing as an independent in a council by-election and beating all three of the main parties. She easily held the seat a year later.

The Labour Party does not feature in a place like Waverley, but Mrs James did have a small role in Labour’s history 15 years ago, when she had an affair with a defence expert named Ron Smith, who was working with the Defence Secretary George Robertson on the strategic defence review. Smith’s wife found out, and he resigned, in the vain hope that it could be kept quiet.  Unfortunately, the Daily Mirror was onto the story. They made Mrs James, who was then 38, look glamorous, but the experience cannot have been a pleasant one.

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• mercury51

  which hysteric declared “After thousands dying in hospitals = murder”?-presumably a crazed modernist labourite who, to our infinite regret, has yet to be sectioned.to a hospital with any luck.in my experience, ? yours, such hysterical modernists are all wet behind the ears with mother’s milk scarce dry on their lips.

• mercury51

  that’s right diddums call those that you don’t like names, that will make ‘everything different, not. we’re both silly, because I do it too, fool that I am;we’d best et out reasoned argument of which I am no paragon; what people like you and i deserve is a bullet in the head.

  had i an ounce of sense I would set out good reasons why you should abjure your religion.
  1. never believe anything or anyone, and certainly not with you emotions.
  2. there is no democracy of truth; if a billion trillion zillion beings and the overwhelming majority of the beings in all the billions of cosmoses say that two and two is nineteen…….. they are ‘all’ wrong, even if your mummy said hypothesise.
  that that is anathema to your religion is the measure of your addiction to it.

  there, not an ounce of name calling in that eh?just reasoned argument. so that you can learn, the very second the our emotions walk in at our front door our reason flies out of an upstairs window, and we become fools.so no more emotion for either of us OK?-tis emotions that make lunatics of us all, and emotions=likes/dislikes, wants/not wants;emotions never persuaded anyone, did they?-they only evoke their opposite.

  now god keep you and bless you a devout skeptic that you may be free.

  ‘never’ _believe.

• a_no_n

  that’s the most round about way of saying nothing i’ve seen in a long time.
  It doesn’t bother me whatever names you want to call me go right ahead…Though i find that people who constantly use insults like queer, fag and poof like you do are normally trying to hide their own rampant homosexuality…What with you being a Tory too, it all makes sense…Like those hate preachers in America that spend their whole lives preaching hate of gays, only to get caught with a rentboy in a seedy motel somewhere.

• Paddyman

  Your dummy’s fallen out. And I have no “modernist religion precepts.” If you are a sample of UKIP, then you have strengthened my assessment of the party and its adherents.

• Paddyman

  You’re being unfair to twelve year old girls, who are generally more mature than that.

• George W. Potter

  Really? That’s the best you can come up with in the face of a perfectly valid criticism of UKIP politicians who take taxpayer’s money and then fail to do their job?

• mercury51

  too truthful for you sonny? stop it, you’ll go blind.