[Image: Independent].

No less than three articles appeared on other blogs last night (Friday), bringing the Party That Loves The Media into ridicule.

First we had The Critique Archives‘ joke, based on the howler committed by Kipper councillor Victoria Ayling while she was discussing renewable energy.

Then Pride’s Purge weighed in with the revelation of the “jaw-dropping” remarks made by another (now-former) UKIP councillor, Rozanne Duncan.

Perhaps even more jaw-dropping was the article’s comment that Ms Duncan was a card-carrying Conservative Party member and activist for more than 20 years before joining UKIP. Tom’s comment, “At least UKIP threw her out,” is more damning for the Tories than the Kippers.

Finally, it was back to The Critique Archives for a discussion of UKIP’s situation that, in fact, had a serious basis – even if it was filled with references to the farcical, such as Nigel Farage’s latest gig as an ‘expert-voice’ on European immigration for Fox News.

The verdict on Farage is triply damning. First, he is described thus: “As addicted to publicity as a crack-addict is to white powder”; then the article points out that the party’s leaders have been trying “to distance themselves from the air of xenophobia and, frankly, comedic stupidity that has pervaded the party since its earliest days, and that job is quite difficult enough when so many of its members are prone to making crass, opinionated and uninformed public gaffes. But the exercise is defeated altogether when Farage allows himself to be so expressly associated with a poisonous and ultra-conservative hate-receptacle like Fox News”.

Finally, we are told: “Even if we were to assume for the moment that Farage is telling the truth when he denies he is a racist or xenophobe, he never quite acknowledges an ugly related fact – that an awful lot of UKIP supporters are both.”

The solution? Farage needs to say, not only that he does not want racists in his party, but also that he does not want them to vote for UKIP either: “Until he does say it, the whiff of suspicion surrounding his own attitudes will remain”.

The dilemma is that the move “will cost him more support than it is likely to win him; anyone impressed by it is likely to vote for the Conservative Party instead (not that they are exactly racism-free themselves), while the easily-angered racist fringe will become disillusioned very quickly and desert in droves”. His support base is too divided – built “on racism and xenophobia in the first place”, it “has only grown due to large numbers of newcomers who know almost nothing about UKIP, but just like the ‘cool-sounding’ idea of voting for a new party”.

What is his best option?

Read the article and find out.