This is the man Ukip leader Nigel Farage hopes will help his party win this week’s Rochester and Strood by-election – posing proudly with a real handgun.

Raheem Kassam has been hired as the Ukip leader’s new election strategist, and tasked with turning the party’s poll surge into more Commons seats.

Mr Kassam’s appointment was proving controversial even before The Mail on Sunday unearthed the gun picture, which was taken on a recent visit to America.

'TROUBLESOME': Ukip's new election strategist Raheem Kassam poses with a real gun

CAMPAIGNING: Nigel Farage, seen here last week, hired Mr Kassam to secrure more Commons seats

Critics have described Mr Kassam variously as ‘troublesome’, ‘wildly self-important’ and ‘a professional wind-up merchant’.

And last night Godfrey Bloom, the former Ukip MEP who used to share a flat with Mr Farage in Brussels, warned: ‘This typifies the triumph of style over substance in the party – hiring flash gurus purely for effect. Where are our policies? We are now as bad as all the other parties.

‘Mr Farage is much more useful with a knife than a gun, given the number of colleagues he has stabbed in the back.’

It comes as polls put former Conservative MP Mark Reckless on course to win the seat for Ukip on Thursday and become the party’s second MP, following fellow defector Douglas Carswell’s triumph in Clacton last month.

David Cameron warned yesterday that a win for Ukip would cause ‘economic instability’, because it reduced the chances of a Tory General Election win. He urged voters not to give Mr Farage cause to have another celebratory pint.

‘If they vote Ukip… it’ll be another sort of notch for them,’ the Prime Minister said at the G20 summit in Brisbane. ‘They will all celebrate with a pint in the pub and there will be a greater danger of insecurity and instability in our economy.’

SEEKING VOTES: Ukip's candidate for Rochester and Strood is greeted by supporters yesterday in Rochester during the final weekend of campaigning

Although Tory strategists initially pledged to ‘throw the kitchen sink’ at Rochester to try to deprive Mr Farage of another scalp, they now privately concede that a Conservative victory is unlikely.

Instead, the town will be flooded with heavyweight Cabinet Ministers in ‘one last heave’ this week in an effort to limit Mr Reckless’s majority and to deter further Tory MPs from defecting. They remain confident of reclaiming the seat at the General Election in May.

Labour is also watching the result nervously, with a poor result likely to pile the pressure on Ed Miliband’s strained leadership.

Mr Kassam has courted controversy throughout his career. He is a former manager of the Student Rights organisation, which claims to ‘ensure freedom of speech and freedom from political oppression for students’. In February, he helped to establish a London outpost of Breitbart, a Right-wing US-based news and opinion website.

David Cameron warned yesterday that a win for Ukip would cause ‘economic instability’, because it reduced the chances of a Tory General Election win

The picture is understood to show Mr Kassam on a visit to a ‘gun roadshow’ in America. The 28-year-old – said by one political commentator to have been ‘trained in the arts of vicious American-style attack politics’ – agreed in 2010 to set up a British wing of the Tea Party, the ultra-conservative American movement which advocates low taxes and a small state.

Ironically, given the picture, Mr Kassam insisted that although the British Tea Party shared its American counterpart’s libertarianism, it was ‘less concerned with God, guns and gays’. On one occasion, he outraged members of the ethnic minority community by backing racial profiling, saying the Security Services should be allowed to single out those who look as if they might follow Islam, on the grounds they are statistically more likely to be involved in terrorism.

In an article, he said: ‘Once people who look like me stop blowing themselves up, then I’ll get upset at being profiled. Not before.’ On another occasion, after being accused on social media of ‘flirting with anti-Muslim bigotry’, he responded: ‘I’m a flirtatious kind of guy.’

Mr Kassam, who has reputation for ‘trolling’ Left-wing writers by leaving critical remarks under their internet articles, has also been described by the Right-wing Spectator magazine as being ‘a troublesome… wildly self-important figure who flits about on the internet Right’.

The picture of Mr Kassam emerged just a few months after Mr Farage criticised former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to criminalise the carrying of handguns, saying: ‘If you criminalise handguns then only the criminals carry the guns.

‘It’s really interesting that since Blair brought in that piece of law, gun crime doubled. I think the ban on handguns is ludicrous.’