The continued divisions within Ukip have been laid bare as the presumed frontrunners to become its new leader, Paul Nuttall and Suzanne Evans, both formally declared they would stand, only for the latter to be immediately denounced by the party’s outgoing figurehead, Nigel Farage.

Nuttall, Ukip’s deputy leader and one of its MEPs, is the favourite to succeed Diane James’s brief tenure in the job, and sought to present himself as the only candidate able to unite a party recently beset by splits, resignations and alleged punch-ups.

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“Ukip at the moment is looking over the edge of a political cliff,” Nuttall told BBC1’s Sunday Politics programme, following weeks of speculation as to whether he would stand. “It will either step off or it will step back. And I want to be the candidate that will tell us to come backwards.”

However, the scale of the task for the new leader had been illustrated shortly before as Evans announced her candidacy, only to attract condemnation from Farage, Ukip’s interim leader since James walked away from the job after 18 days.

Evans, a former Conservative councillor who helped draft Ukip’s 2015 election manifesto, appeared on BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show to declare herself “the right person to lead Ukip into the challenges ahead” and to champion the cause of continued Brexit.



“With me at the helm, I’m absolutely confident that we will be able to reach out to voters on both the left and the right of politics,” Evans said, adding that “perhaps at times there’s been a bit too much testosterone in Ukip”.

Evans was then asked about Raheem Kassam, a former aide to Farage who now edits the UK arm of the rightwing US news website Breitbart that supports Donald Trump. Kassam on Saturday won the support of Ukip’s biggest donor, the insurance tycoon Arron Banks.



She described Kassam as on the “far right wing”, and said Ukip did not need a “fresh injection of toxicity”. This brought an immediate rebuke from Farage, who was appearing on another show, ITV’s Peston on Sunday, immediately afterwards.

“For her to talk about the party being toxic, for her to already declare one of the candidates who is running, Raheem Kassam, as being far right, I don’t view this as being a very good start,” said Farage.

“I have to say they are the sort of things she said to me – after the general election, she said to me I shouldn’t take any part at all in the referendum campaign, I was toxic, immigration shouldn’t be discussed with the British public. I think she has been in the wrong place ever since that,” he said.

Farage added: “I won’t be voting for her, not after that, no.”

Disagreement between the two is not new. Evans was once close to Farage but was prevented from standing in the election which saw James voted in as she was suspended for six months for alleged disloyalty.

Also prevented from taking part in that election was Steven Woolfe, the initial favourite, who was barred after filing his nomination papers 17 minutes late.

Woolfe has been at the centre of a tumultuous few weeks for Ukip, first admitting he had considered joining the Conservatives, before spending three days in hospital after an alleged scuffle with a MEP colleague, and then quitting the party, saying it was in a “death spiral”.

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Farage dismissed this comment, saying: “He talked about the downward spiral of Ukip and I’m sorry to say it is the downward spiral of Steven Woolfe.”

Nuttall has stayed largely apart from the party’s recent divisions, and said he was the only one who could bring it together.

“I have huge support out there across the country, not only among people at the top of the party, in Westminster and with the MEPs, but also among the grassroots,” Nuttall said. “I want to stand on a platform of being the unity candidate. Ukip needs to come together.”

The leadership campaign, for which voting among party members will open next month, is nonetheless likely to be a bruising one, given the already open warfare between Evans and Farage, and Banks’s decision to back Kassam over Nuttall.



Kassam, who also has a track record of falling out with fellow party members, called Evans’s description of him “sad”. He said: “This is a project fear tactic and Ukippers are sick of these smears.”