Nigel Farage Savages Douglas Carswell

17 September 2016, 16:15 | Updated: 18 November 2019, 11:36

Nigel Farage savages UKIP's only MP Douglas Carswell as he opens up about inner workings of the party.

Talking on his first LBC show since he stopped being UKIP leader he excoriated Carswell for ‘undermining his leadership and trying to split the party.

"Since the general election of 2015 I have been biting my tongue. I have been diplomatic, I have been holding back. I haven't said or done some of the things that needed to be done to solve some of the problems that exist in UKIP.

"Why, well I felt that fighting the referendum mattered more than dealing with the internal problems in the party and whilst on the outside the Ukip bonnet may have looked clean, perhaps even shiny to some."

"Underneath the engine. I'm afraid has been breaking down. When Douglas Carswell defected to Ukip it was a big moment. An MP, reasonably well known, joining UKIP, calling a by election on a point of principle which I thought was terrific. Then going back to his fiercely eurosceptic Clacton constituency and winning that by election and you know that was big stuff for us, big stuff for us we just won an Europe election, you know the momentum that was really getting going, the European debate was being heard more clearly."

"But I'm afraid since the general election It's been a very strange juxtaposition of Douglas and UKIP. He hasn't supported my leadership at all and he completely disagrees with what has been our main electoral policy, namely the immigration should be talked about frankly and openly, and that we should have proper border controls."

"So quite why you would join up with me as leader and with that as our policy and then disagree with all of it you know I simply don't know during the referendum campaign he's really done all that he can to basically split the party and every time we have whether it's during the referendum or it's a party conference every single time, there's an event, there's a sense of division that he's given because he says something different to what I say about so many of the rest of us say."

"Unfortunately what we've inherited here is the kind of culture that comes from Westminster, that comes from the lobby. It is a sort of conservative nasty backbiting kind of politics where one constantly briefs the press. I think this has been very very against the interests of our party, added to that Douglas was a huge cheerleader for Neil Hamilton being rehabilitated and put back into electoral politics which he's been in the Welsh Assembly and it's something that I was fiercely opposed to you."

"UKIP's problem is this, twenty years ago we set ourselves up with a national executive committee of willing volunteers to make the big decisions and to run the party and that was fine for them, for a grassroots movement."

"We now have people making these big decisions who have got very little experience of politics in many cases not much experience of business either and they are vulnerable to the professional lobbying that career politicians do and because of that in many ways UKIP could be slightly paralysed, paralysed in terms of recruiting new members in terms of planning for election campaigns. We're not really in a good place."