Me and the Champ! Meeting Winston McKenzie

Party conferences can be depressing, and I stopped inflicting that particular pain on myself some years ago. This year is different, however, as Nikki Sinclaire is holding a number of fringe meetings to promote her petition for a parliamentary debate on Britain's membership of the EU.

So I found myself in Torquay last week, which is always a pleasure, not least because I have some family connections there, helping out with what proved to be a hugely successful meeting. More successful, I understand, than the main UKIP meeting which took place across the road.

An unexpected pleasure was the chance to meet and chat with former middleweight boxing champion, Winston McKenzie. Winston is a terrific guy, and is very politically aware. His stance on immigration challenges all the left-wing dogma on the issue, and he is probably better placed to speak about inner city youth issues than most politicians.

He appears to have thrown his hat in the ring for the UKIP leadership, following the resignation of the utterly ineffectual Lord Pearson.

Pearson is the kind of politician you could only find in UKIP - he calls EU subsidies "a vast swindle", and yet he claims heaps of them for himself. He was (de jure) leader of UKIP, and yet in the last general election he urged people to vote for the Conservatives.

Some UKIP members wonder why the party bombed in the election....