YouTuber Carl Benjamin’s controversial and chaotic bid to win a seat in the European Parliament will take another turn on Thursday, when far-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos joins him on the campaign trail.



Two days after police revealed they are investigating Benjamin for talking about raping the Labour MP Jess Phillips in a YouTube video, UKIP’s most prominent candidate is scheduled to appear with Yiannopoulos in the southwest of England for the first of a series of public events around the UK.

Yiannopoulos is a British former technology journalist who became a star in ultraconservative circles in the US as an editor at Steve Bannon's Breitbart News. In 2017, a BuzzFeed News investigation revealed that Yiannopoulos had played a key role in introducing extremist white nationalist ideas into the mainstream of American politics in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

In a Google Hangout between the pair posted on YouTube on Monday night, Yiannopoulos confirmed he was flying to the UK to campaign alongside Benjamin.

Taking questions from his social media followers, Yiannopoulos at one point joked that he could turn up to one of the campaign stops “dressed as Jess Phillips” to “troll” the UKIP candidate.



“Sorry to break it to you but owing to your recent behaviour, I’ve become your reasonable, common-sense friend,” Yiannopoulos said.

He added: “I’m going to be able to place you in historical, literary, journalistic context as a product of the times. You are a function and a product of a crazy moment in culture.”

Yiannopoulos, who is from the UK, has spent much of his career in the US, where his extreme views resulted in bans by major platforms including Twitter and Facebook. In one instance, Yiannopoulos resigned from Breitbart and lost a book deal after a video emerged of him talking about sexual relationships between adults and teenagers. Yiannopoulos denied that he was defending pedophilia.

The involvement of Yiannopoulos in the campaign will raise new questions for UKIP’s leadership about the startling direction the party has taken in the last year — a direction that prompted its former leader Nigel Farage to quit the party, saying it had been taken over by leader Gerard Batten’s “fixation” on Islam and was now electorally toxic.

