Only a few years ago, Ukip was fixed in the public mind as the party of tweed jackets, warm beer, and monomaniacal devotion to a single political cause.

In 2018, the battle to define Brexit is still raging, but Ukip’s position is far less clear. It has been through a string of increasingly eccentric leaders. The clarity of its goal has been diluted, and it has begun to find common cause with the jailed founder of the English Defence League, Tommy Robinson.

Now, to the significant alarm of some of its old guard, a new group of online political agitators, some connected to the hard right, has joined the party – and promised to swamp it with their online followers in what has been presented as a “soft coup”.

The move has caused ructions within Ukip. While some are aghast at the idea, others hope it could revitalise the party, which is polling at around 3%.

It also highlights a wider political flux in which a party with just over 21,000 members still receives national coverage, while activists with well over a million YouTube subscribers are unknown beyond their mainly young army of acolytes.

The best-known new arrival is Paul Joseph Watson, who has 1.2m YouTube subscribers. Calling himself a small-government libertarian, Watson works for Infowars, the US conspiracy theory website that has claimed the Sandy Hook primary school shooting was a hoax.

Another is Carl Benjamin, who posts videos as Sargon of Akkad and has attracted condemnation for alleged misogyny – he described some of Harvey Weinstein’s victims as “gold-digging whores” – and taunts about rape on Twitter, from which he is banned.

Finally there is Mark Meechan, on YouTube as Count Dankula. A self-styled comedian, he is best known for being fined £800 after he posted a video of his girlfriend’s pug raising its paw in response to comments such as “gas the Jews”.

Ukip has confirmed all three have been accepted into the party. Another online activist, the self-promoting professional contrarian Milo Yiannopoulos, has applied for membership but it remains unknown if this will be approved.

The group’s motives remain unclear, and are partly based on a joke. Meechan began the process by pledging to join if a tweet was retweeted 10,000 times, while Benjamin posted a video saying he was doing so “for the bantz”. But they have pledged to take the party over, with 1,000 new members arriving in their wake, according to Ukip sources.

Some of Ukip’s old guard are unimpressed, having already seen the interim leader, Gerard Batten, move the party towards a hard right, anti-Islam stance and associate himself with Robinson.

But a party spokesman said the new arrivals were welcome: “Many of them seem to be young and libertarian – it reminds me of the more socially liberal members we had in our youth wing about eight years ago. We lost a lot of them when the gay marriage law was passed.”

Nathan Ryding, the chair of Ukip’s youth wing, Young Independence, said the arrival of the online activists “allows us to be seen by a much younger audience all over the country”. He added: “They are all libertarians who believe in freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Ukip is the only party that seems to actually support those freedoms.”

The sudden new alliance highlights wider shifts in right-leaning politics in the past few years, much of which has taken place online.

Eschewing traditional party labels, the newcomers present an often aggressive and often juvenile form of grievance politics, focusing on what they call the threat to free speech, liberally sprinkled with insults to opponents, who are labelled “virgin”, “pussy” or “soyboy”.

Many questions remain, not least about whether they can make good on their promise to flood Ukip with supporters. The party spokesman said he was sceptical: “If we get a surge of somewhere near to 10,000-15,000, then you can start talking about it. But we’re nowhere near that.”

It is also unclear whether they have the patience for traditional politics, not least as their income comes from online activities – Benjamin makes £6,500 a month from supporters via the online membership site Patreon.

Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics at Kent University and an expert on Ukip, said that while the new members could help the party tap into a newer “anti-left, anti-political correctness” sentiment, it remained to be seen whether they would be active enough to change its fortunes.



“Given that Ukip has been in a freefall since the 2016 referendum and is currently polling some of its lowest ratings in recent history, I think the party will probably be happy with this development,” Goodwin said. “ It could potentially be significant in terms of bringing in new members to a party that has been haemorrhaging them.

“But at the end of the day we’re talking about a party that needs a new message, not a new activist base. That’s the problem – after the referendum it’s not entirely clear who it’s speaking to and why.”