General Election 2015: Is William Cash the man to woo Warwickshire North for Ukip?

William Cash is swearing at his purple campaign Jag. It got dusty on the drive back from the Ukip manifesto launch and now his magnetic livery won't stick. The yellow "Vote for Cash" strips have also become warped after a night in the boot. "I don't always keep them on because above about 60mph, they all fly off," he says, flattening them under his suede shoes. "But there is also a slight diplomatic issue, to put it mildly."

Cash's father, the veteran Tory MP Sir Bill Cash, publicly disassociated himself from his son when he learned, via a journalist, that he was standing as the Ukip candidate for North Warwickshire. "We didn't speak for about three weeks, but then I wrote an article in the Telegraph and I think he understands that I genuinely feel betrayed by the Tories," the younger Cash says. Awkwardly, the ultra-marginal Conservative seat is down the road from Sir Bill's patch in neighbouring Staffordshire. "It would be inappropriate for me to drive along the M42 with 'Vote Cash' on the car," he adds.

If the family rift passed you by last September, Cash, who is 48, gained further attention – and ridicule – earlier this month. In another Telegraph column, he described how difficult it has been to find a competent housekeeper for the moated Elizabethan manor he shares with his third wife, Lady Laura Cathcart, a society milliner. A "chaotic young Eastern European couple" had to go when "I asked her to put up some Christmas decorations and she decorated the holly hanging above various paintings – including a rare portrait of Charles II by Adriaen Hanneman – with gold spray paint".

It was classic Cash: entertaining enough but, for many readers, so divorced from the real world as to read like a joke. (It wasn't, he says, "but nor was it a dull article.") It also made what the journalist calls, with characteristic self-regard, his "political odyssey" seem odd. What could the Westminster and Cambridge-educated playboy founder of a magazine for Britain's richest people (Spear's, £25 per issue) offer Farage's "anti-establishment" party? And what could Ukip offer him?

Cash leaps at the chance to get some coverage for his campaign. He wants to explain why he thinks Ukip can win this Midlands seat, which the Tories took from Labour by just 54 votes in 2010. He says that he appeals to disaffected Green Belt Conservatives like himself, as well as to a former mining community that feels abandoned by Labour as corporations exploit an immigrant workforce to drive down wages. As Ukip's heritage and tourism spokesman, he also wants to show off Warwickshire's neglected market towns, and explain his new interest in rural affairs. But first, he suggests, let's find some immigrants.

The No 70 bus from Birmingham winds into the constituency to Hams Hall, a campus of distribution warehouses with a rail freight terminal. "They are now employing so many East Europeans that local former miners can't get jobs, let alone seats on the buses," Cash says. But at 7am, at the start of a chaotic day (we get lost repeatedly, and nearly crash into a van when Cash veers too far to the right) the bus is far from full. "I don't think we're hitting the start of a shift," he says, eating a croissant on the top deck. "But if we were here later, these buses are full of people coming in on the sort of contracts that a lot of English workers feel don't give them a sense of pride."

Cash says he doesn't blame immigrants for finding jobs. He blames New Labour. "Blair knew that if he opened the doors and let them all in, with a spot of luck 95 per cent of them would vote Labour," he says. By happy coincidence (for Cash) his biggest rival in North Warwickshire was, as the Ukip man puts it, "Blair's chief door opener". Mike O'Brien, a QC and the MP here from 1992 until 2010, was Blair's first Minister of State for Immigration. A Faragean nightmare, he is also pro-EU and pro-renewables, while his party supports HS2, which would cut through this historic countryside.

Polling suggests that O'Brien is the favourite to win back the seat, thanks in part to Ukip's divisive surge. The party won just three per cent of votes here in 2010, but last year Ukip sent three of the West Midlands' seven MEPs to Brussels after winning 31 per cent of the vote, more than Labour or the Tories. Party HQ has sent Richard Wright, one of its top strategists from its recent by-election triumphs, to manage the Cash campaign and the candidate is throwing everything into it – at least for the two days a week that he is not editing Spear's. (The latest issue includes Cash's review of a £252,000 Bentley and a round-up of Britain's best divorce lawyers.)

Cash's background in journalism – he has been a reporter and columnist for 25 years – gives him an edge, he says. He compares his interest in Hams Hall to Zola's research for Germinal. ("He would have got up early to get that bus, but then he'd probably have got the shift times right.") Yet while he can cut an incongruous figure on the doorstep and high street, the dozen or so voters we meet are largely supportive. A retired farmer says that "immigration, without a doubt" is his greatest concern. Are there a lot of immigrants where he lives? "No, but you can see 'em coming." In Atherstone, where the Red Lion pub serves as Cash's HQ, Josh Donaldson, 22, says, "There's only so much space, only so many jobs." Is his job threatened? "No, it's the people in the warehouses, and that's where I started." In Bedworth, a down-at-heel market town, Garry Beck, 59, a former miner turned nurse, earns £6.50 an hour in a care home. "All my nursing shifts were going to immigrants," he says. "We need to take our country back."

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All three men are from strong Labour families. All three say they will vote for Cash.

The sudden conversion from columnist to candidate surprised Cash Senior more than his son's alignment with Ukip. "I hadn't shown a blind bit of interest in politics for 25 years," William says. He was too busy writing, earning a not always great reputation, especially during a 10-year posting in Los Angeles. "LA to the 1980s and 1990s was what Kenya was to the 1930s," he says. "It was the Happy Valley." When the 1992 riots broke out, he was at a party at the Playboy Mansion. "We weren't allowed to leave, so while LA was burning, I was covering it for The Times from Hugh Hefner's desk. He had eight TV screens so it was the perfect place for foreign reporting." Reviewers did not love the memoir he published later the same year. This newspaper called Educating William "a wearisome round of sycophantic self-promotion".

In 1994, Cash examined the domination of Hollywood by Jewish executives in an article for the Spectator. It went viral in America (via fax). "'Disgusting,' 'despicable,' 'bigoted' and 'odious' are some of the words used to describe the article," a journalist wrote in The New York Times, adding: "Few in Hollywood could recall such an anti-Semitic article in a mainstream publication." Cash shifts slightly in his leather driving seat. "All I can say is that it was well defended by [the then editor of the Spectator] Dominic Lawson," he observes. "I said their influence was no worse than public schoolboys' in the City, but I did make some derogatory remarks... I've been known to poke the odd bear and sometimes they snarl back."

"My second wife was Jewish," he adds. The Cracker from Caracas? "Erm, yes." Cash's love life has been as colourful as his Ukip rosette, which his team keep reminding him to wear. His first wife was jewellery heiress Ilaria Bulgari. Then came Vanessa Neumann, the Venezuelan, who had earned her nickname after a fling with Mick Jagger. There have been plenty in between, and in 2011 Cash became embroiled in what the Daily Mail called a "love pentagon" when he dated a glamorous art consultant whose previous paramours included Boris Johnson. He has leaned on a network of friends through it all, including Elizabeth Hurley, and he says that many (though not the actress) have written large cheques in support of his campaign. At a recent fundraising dinner he hosted in London, a "well-known aristocrat" bought a Cash campaign poster for £1,000.

The more you learn, the easier it is to understand why Cash looks slightly out of place while canvassing outside Gregg's in Bedworth. He already has a decent career. Even during a day of campaigning, he breaks away to write an article about the countryside for the Sunday Times ("whether they publish it is another question" – they haven't yet); gets commissioned to write about his unruly peacocks for the Mail on Sunday; and takes a conference call to appoint a new managing editor at Spear's. He is happily married, at last, and Laura is expecting their first baby in July.

Why politics, why now, why Ukip?

The answer lies in his manor house, he says. He retreated to Upton Cressett Hall, which his father bought in 1969, after his second divorce and set about restoring it "to create a kind of Arcadia… it was an attempt to restore myself, metaphorically and emotionally". But Cash says he soon "came under attack. Within 500m of the house there were plans for two wind turbine applications, a solar park, a 2,000-strong pig farm, and an anaerobic digester". He campaigned against the developments, calling the localism that David Cameron had promised before 2010 "a fraud". His articles prompted Farage to invite him to become his heritage and tourism spokesman, and run for election. "I agreed out of an utter sense of deep betrayal about what the Tories were doing to the countryside," he explains. "Ukip is the only party that shares my views."

Cash presents the party's rural vision on page 51 of the manifesto, which he says he wrote. It promises the removal of VAT on listed building repairs (great for his house, among others), the reform of planning laws in favour of conservation, and a campaign to save pubs. He wants to restore pride to rural communities by, for example, rescuing from ruin the dilapidated hat factory in Atherstone. No more "identikit" housing developments or wind farms imposed on Greenfield land, he says. He abhors the controversial National Planning Policy Framework, which he says has pitted villagers against developers and landowners in a rural "civil war".

Ukip also promises to appoint a Minister of State for Heritage and Tourism. Who could that be? "Well, say we won eight seats and propped up a Tory government, we'd expect a couple of ministerial positions, wouldn't we," Cash says, dismissing projections that the party will win one or two seats. "It would be challenging to be editor-in-chief of Spear's, too, but my great uncle edited the Spectator while he was an MP. Graham Greene was literary editor then…" he goes on, before putting his foot down when he realises he's going to be late for a hustings.