Former Boris Johnson deputy Richard Barnes quits Tories for Ukip
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Version 0 of 1. A former deputy to Boris Johnson at City Hall in London has announced his defection to Ukip after deciding that the three main parties do not “speak the language of normal people”. Richard Barnes, who served as deputy mayor of London during Johnson’s first term in office, said he had decided to leave the Tories after concluding that David Cameron’s EU renegotiations plans were unrealistic. The defection of Barnes, days after the Tory MP Mark Reckless joined Ukip, comes after sources in the party suggested it was unlikely to be announcing any more high-profile defections in the immediate future. Amid fears among Tory whips that the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, is planning to disrupt David Cameron’s speech on Wednesday with further defections, Johnson moved to lower the temperature. In a speech to a rally organised by the ConservativeHome website, the London mayor mocked the “quitters, splitters and kippers” who have defected to Ukip as he extended a 20-year-old invitation to Farage to join the Tories. Barnes, a member of the London assembly between 2000 and 2012, ignored his former boss as he announced his decision in an interview with the London Evening Standard. He said: “There seems to be a detachment from ordinary people’s lives in the Westminster village. The parties just don’t seem to relate and talk the language of normal people.” The former deputy mayor, who wants Britain to leave the EU, dismissed the prime minister’s renegotiation plans. He told the Standard: “Do we really believe they can create a new settlement by 2017, with the agreement of all the member states? It’s just unrealistic. There has to be more clarity and it’s not there at the moment. “Our borders are massively porous. Immigration is a good idea, but it has to bring a benefit to our economic, social and cultural life. It cannot be to take advantage of the NHS or to exploit the benefits system. At the moment it’s a mess. We don’t count people in, or count them out. That would be a good place to start.” Barnes, who is gay, says he is unworried by claims that Ukip is a homophobic party after a former Tory councillor and Ukip member blamed the floods this year on the legalisation of same-sex marriage. Barnes said: “I’ll stand my ground against any prat. They are in all the parties. I don’t think they become homophobic the moment they join Ukip.” The former deputy mayor faced embarrassment last year when intimate photographs of him appeared on his Facebook account. Barnes said the account had been hacked. The pictures, believed to have been taken on his iPhone, appeared when changes to iOS settings eased the uploading of photos from Apples devices to Facebook. In his speech at the ConservativeHome rally on Monday, Johnson joked that Ukip members were the sort of people who could damage themselves with a vacuum cleaner. “I have read that there are some people, probably the type who think of defecting to Ukip, who present themselves at A&E with barely credible injuries sustained in the course of vacuum cleaner abuse,” he said. Johnson mentioned vacuum cleaners amid reports that the European commission intends to impose restrictions on the devices. “I am perfectly willing to concede that if you do not handle your vacuum cleaner correctly you may end up accidentally inhaling the hamster, the budgerigar through the bars of the cage.” |