Ukip’s general election campaign got off to a rocky start on Monday as speculation mounted that the party leader, Paul Nuttall, will not be standing and other high-profile names including Arron Banks and Suzanne Evans declined to fight for seats.

Nuttall gave his strongest hint yet that he may not put himself up for election in June, as Ukip launched a policy blitz billed as an “integration agenda”, aimed at recasting it as an anti-Islam party.

Among the policies announced were mandatory medical checks for schoolgirls at risk of female genital mutilation, tougher prison sentences for rapists who were a different race or religion to their victims, and a ban on the full-face veil.



After the launch, Nuttall repeatedly dodged questions on his election intentions and then barricaded himself into a hotel room for 15 minutes. Emerging from the room, Nuttall said his candidacy was a matter for Ukip’s national executive committee, but made it clear he was not pinning his party’s ambitions on regaining a seat in Westminster.

Jessica Elgot (@jessicaelgot) Paul Nuttall is barricaded behind these doors, there are a lot of journalists outside wanting to know if he is standing in June. pic.twitter.com/VCbfpg6UvF

“Ukip leaders have done quite well not being in parliament, haven’t they?” he told reporters who followed him into a waiting cab.

Banks, the party’s former donor who last week admitted he knew nothing about the Essex constituency where he had been planning to stand, announced his decision not to put his name forward after visiting Clacton on Monday.



The Leave.EU founder had initially planned to stand to unseat his long-time adversary Douglas Carswell, the MP who defected from the Conservatives to Ukip, but Carswell has since quit the seat.

Vincent McAviney (@Vinny_LBC) Video: UKIP leader Paul Nuttall refuses to say where he will stand and @christopherhope tries to hop in his taxi: pic.twitter.com/cZZESqdlxS

Banks said he would make way for a Ukip councillor, Jeff Bray, to stand. “I have no intention of standing in the way of hard-working activists who are the soul of the party,” he said.

“Therefore, after visiting Clacton I believe it would be wrong of me to stand against Jeff in the forthcoming hustings. Both myself and Nigel [Farage] will be campaigning hard in Clacton and I have agreed to give the local party financial assistance to fight the election.”

Farage, the party’s former leader, has already expressed his intention not to stand again for Westminster, having failed in seven previous bids for a parliamentary seat. Suzanne Evans, the party’s deputy chair, has said she will not stand for a seat and is focused on writing the party’s manifesto.

Anti-FGM campaigners criticised Ukip’s mandatory inspection policy as “madness”. Nimko Ali, a co-founder of the campaign Daughters of Eve, said it was “wrong and offensive” but also pointed to a 2014 speech given by Labour’s Diane Abbott, who proposed a similar measure.

Nimko Ali (@NimkoAli) Forcing girls at risk of #FGM to have medical checks in an abuse of their human rights. #Ukip are not just wrong but offensive as well.

Nuttall said the party was “10 years ahead of its time” on the issues, likening its new approach to its pursuit of Brexit, and said the three major parties would be “where we are today at some point in the 2020s”.

The party said it would explicitly ban sharia law and establish a legal commission to examine the dismantling of sharia courts. Where the victims of grooming gangs are of a different race or religion to the offenders, it should be an aggravating factor in prosecution, the party proposes.

Caroline Lucas, the co-leader of the Green party, called the proposals “full-throttled Islamophobia” and said it was a sign of desperation. “Now that the referendum has passed, Nuttall’s party is desperately scrabbling around for relevance and seem to have settled upon attacks on Muslims and fringe far-right politics as their new home,” she said.

Lynne Featherstone, the former Lib Dem minister behind the coalition’s FGM legislation, which put a statutory duty on frontline workers to report any concerns, said the Ukip policy was “horrifically heavy-handed and will likely alienate the very communities we are trying to reach”.

Featherstone said further action against the practice should involve more teacher training rather than mandatory inspection. “Research shows that schoolteachers are still too scared to talk about FGM, honour-based violence and forced marriage, let alone report it,” she said. “This is where we should be concentrating our efforts, not forcing girls to undergo invasive medical examinations.”