Ukip Q&A: Who will be the party’s new leader now Nigel Farage has stepped down?

Having seen his life’s work completed with Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, Nigel Farage stepped down as leader of the UK Independence Party. Now the task of finding someone to guide the party in post-Brexit Britain has begun. Here are some of the key questions surrounding the upcoming leadership contest:

Ukip is doing what the Labour Party is doing, and what the Conservatives did for a couple of weeks: they are having a leadership election. Their leader, Nigel Farage, did not have to resign, as David Cameron did, nor was anyone trying to force him out, as is the case with Jeremy Corbyn, but he chose to quit, announcing at a press conference on 4 July: “During this referendum campaign I said I want my country back. Now I want my life back.” He had after all achieved what had been his mission in life for more than 20 years.

Nominations for the resulting leadership contest close this Sunday. Ballot papers will go out on 1 September, and the votes will be counted on 16 September.

It is impossible to believe that Mr Farage will go gently out of public life. He is still a member of the European Parliament, where he leads a band of 22 Ukip MEPs. Last week, he was in Ohio for the Republican National Convention, cheerfully giving interviews about Donald Trump, and what he believes to be the imminent disintegration of the EU. He suggested that the next countries to go could be Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden – Dexit, Nexit and Sexit – and announced that he is planning a European tour to encourage everyone who is prepared to listen to him on what they can do to dismantle the EU. He has also given Theresa May notice that if she does not begin the formal process of Brexit by invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty within five months of the referendum, he will make trouble.

Besides, Mr Farage has resigned from the leadership of Ukip twice before, in 2009 and 2015. In neither instance was he gone for long.

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Douglas Carswell is Ukip’s only MP. Paul Nuttall has been Deputy Leader since 2010. Suzanne Evans is an articulate former Tory councillor whom Mr Farage once named as his preferred successor. Patrick O’Flynn is an MEP and former Political Editor of the Daily Express. And, the multi-millionaire Aaron Banks has been their biggest financial backer.

None.

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Like other political parties one could mention, Ukip is riven by in-fighting. It is so serious that in the months preceding the June referendum, they could not agree on which anti-EU campaign to support. Mr Carswell, Ms Evans and Mr O’Flynn were part of the official Vote Leave campaign fronted by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. While Mr Farage was the main front man for the unoffical Leave.EU campaign, bankrolled by Mr Banks. When Mr Banks found out last September that Mr Carswell was supporting Vote.Leave, he threatened him with deselection and denounced him as “a borderline autistic with mental illness wrapped in” – for which he later apologised.

This dispute was not simply about personalities. Leave.EU was prepared to use the immigration as a vote winner for Brexit with a ruthlessness that disturbed people in Vote.Leave.

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Mr Farage hailed Ms Evans as a “tower of strength” when she took over as temporary leader after he resigned in May last year. But she was not pleased when he promptly unresigned, and described him as “divisive”. She lost her positions as the party’s policy chief and deputy chair. In March, she signed a petition calling upon Ukip to remove Alan Craig from the party’s candidates list for the London Assembly, because he had previously likened gays to Nazis, claiming society was being “crushed under the pink jack boot”.

This was treated as disloyalty, and she was suspended from Ukip for six months, preventing her from running for the London Assembly or the leadership. She tried to get a court to overturn the suspension, and Mr O’Flynn organised a petition calling for her reinstatement, but neither was successful. Rather oddly, she called a press conference in Westminster on Tuesday to announce that she has given up hope of being able to contest the leadership.

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The frontr unner in the current leadership election is Steven Woolfe, a former barrister who is the party’s spokesman on immigration. Mr Banks has publicly backed him, which is perhaps a clue as to whom Mr Farage would like as his replacement. However, Huffington Post has seen documentary evidence that Mr Woolfe allowed his Ukip membership to lapse in December 2014, and did not renew it until four months ago. On one reading of the party rule book that disqualifies him as a candidate, because candidates have to have been Ukip members for at least two years; but the fact that he has been a Ukip MEP in good standing since July 2014 may be taken to mean that he satisfies the membership criteria.

His main challenger will be Lisa Duffy, a former store manager and the leader of the Ukip group on Huntingdonshire District Council. She has the backing of Ms Evans, Mr O’Flynn and Mr Nuttall.

Ukip began as a single issue campaign, and achieved its original purpose when the country voted Brexit, so, on the face of it, it would seem to have nothing left to do except keep watch over the Brexit negotiations. However, those 17 million people who voted for Brexit may well feel unrepresented, since none of the main political parties is led by a Brexit supporter. Ukip was the only political party of any size whose official policy was to support what the country eventually voted for.

Labour, in its current turmoil, is particularly vulnerable to having its support eaten away by a reinvented Ukip with a new purpose. Mr Woolfe, who comes from a Labour background and from an ethnically mixed family background, has said that if elected he will make social mobility the theme of his time as leader and will keep racists out of Ukip.