An Early Acceptance Of Failure
Dr Peter Gardner must be fairly unique among UKIP candidates standing for parliament. He is a softly spoken man, able to speak both French and Spanish fluently (the latter he speaks at home to his Venezuelan wife), who lived in Grenoble for four years and confesses to love Europe ‘culturally’.
He is also a man who has taken a week from his holiday time at work to fight a general election campaign, funded from his own pocket, which he knows will be unsuccessful – the hopelessness of which situation seemed to be echoed by the dismal weather during his day of campaigning on Oxford on Saturday. Gardiner is good at producing considered answers where we have been used to the rantings of some other of his party in the past – Robert Kilroy-Silk most obviously.
When asked about asylum and immigration, for example he says: “The decision to campaign on asylum and immigration was taken realistically because it was a vote winner. I wasn’t entirely happy with the decision to do so. I am happy with party policy, but am not enamoured with the way it has been presented.” He also has detailed ideas about how European cooperation could work, using individual multilateral treaties, while keeping sole legislative power within national governments.
His categorical statement: “There is no crossnational debate, so there can be no cross-national democracy. It’s as if there are walls between countries,” seems a little less justified, however, while only on occasion is he given to making over-thetop, irrational statements, though, such as: “I think Labour hates the British people."
This quiet, considered approach does not help him so much when it comes to meeting voters, though, and a lack of presence meant that most of the voters he met during an hour of leafleting in Blackbird Leys were allowed to go away with a UKIP leaflet stuffed into their back pocket and little impression of the man they had just met.
The question, ‘Do you think that Europe is a major issue at this election, or are health and education more important for you?’ naturally led members of the public away from the response Gardner would have liked, and, having given an answer which was almost always the latter of the options, they were left unchallenged and unengaged by the candidate.
He says that he rarely campaigns in such a way, as he simply wants people to have heard of the name of his party, but you might be forgiven for suspecting it’s also because he’s not especially good at it. On more than one occasion, Gardner starts a sentence by saying ironically, ‘Being the good xenophobe that I am…’ followed by some example or another of how enamoured he is with European culture as a whole.
He does not seem a xenophobe, but perhaps someone not entirely at ease with the full mix of cultural diversity that exists within his constituency.
On seeing a black Rastafarian get out of his car and approach an obviously severely mentally handicapped black man, he pauses in his laughter at the behaviour of the latter only to point to the former and say to his assistant: ‘Hey, Darren – Chill, Winstan!’ The joke was made even stranger by the hilarity with which it was greeted by his fellow campaigner.
For a member of a party who claim to hate political correctness, however, he soon realised that this joke may not either be very funny or particularly well received to state soberly: ‘It’s not that funny.’ In general, however, Gardner’s demeanour is that of an intelligent man, with a particularly strong view on one issue, who knows that this one view is not shared by most of the electorate, and certainly not by most of his prospective constituents.
This depressing position for a politician to be put in is made even worse by the fact that he is part of a party that is defined simply by their opposition to something, as Gardner admits: ‘It can be demoralising constantly to be anti-something.’ It must be even more demoralising to be paying for the privilege to do so out of his own back pocket.
28th Apr 2005