Neil Hamilton’s Ukip supergroup – alt-right Led Zeppelin or white supremacist A-Team?

As a new supergroup, it came out of the blue – and is all the more musically historic for it. On Tuesday, Neil Hamilton took to the internet with an announcement: “I’d like to welcome @PrisonPlanet, Sargon of Akkad, @CountDankulaTV and Milo Yiannopoulos to UKIP.”

Wow. Talk about Crosby, Stills, Nash and Himmler. It’s easily Hamilton’s best-advised welcome since he welcomed those brown envelopes from Mohamed Al Fayed in the 90s, doubtless thinking: ooh, this feels like something that would be a good idea for an MP to do. What’s the worst that could happen?

I suppose the sobering answer to that is “not a lot”, because the year is 2018 and Neil Hamilton is still somehow in politics, as a Ukip member of the Welsh parliament. Well done, the Mid and West Wales region! Incredible that staying home and stapling your eyelids to the floor didn’t seem a better way to pass the time than voting to give a salary to this bow-tied cheat, who appears unable to say as much as “gottle o geer” without his wife’s hand up his jacksie.

Still, I know what you’re thinking: what’s going on with the supergroup? And can you remind me who these pricks are? OK, here goes: our dramatis personae are Prison Plonker, AKA YouTube and InfoWars starlet Paul Joseph Watson, who makes pink-eyed videos in front of a map, acting for all the world as if he doesn’t work for a man who claims the Sandy Hook massacre of children was a hoax. Then there’s Milo, formerly of Breitbart, formerly of something called Milo Inc, and now just a sort of rolling compendium of mid-00s hairstyles and olde worlde power top jokes.

Next up is Sargon of Akkad – real name Benjamin – who is apparently some sort of anti-feminist YouTuber. (I know. Imagine you’ve opened a fantasy novel – call it Lord of the Ringpieces – and are squinting at the map at the start. Aha, so THAT’S where the Forest of Dank Memes is in relation to the Mines of Inceloth and the Mass Grave of Normies ...) And, finally, there’s Count Dankula, the chap who recently had to go to court after he taught his girlfriend’s pug to do a Nazi salute every time he said “gas the Jews”. I’m not sure what their band name will be, but we’ll give it a working title of One Erection.

Enter Ukip. Or rather, the boys are entering Ukip – last seen polling vegetatively in the local elections – having paid their £30 sub to have their way with it. As Paul put it recently: “Take over Ukip for the banter? How hard can it be?” Hoping to get an answer soon from this week’s Ukip leader Gerard Batten, unless he’s too roofied to speak.

Meanwhile, first thoughts on all this:

1. Gotta be tough on Katie Hopkins. Even Linda McCartney was allowed to do backing vocals in Wings. The decision not to allow Katie to drone tunelessly on about Sadiq Khan or whatever alongside this foursome confirms one thing: madam desperately needs to get something out of the Trump state visit to stay relevant.

2. To my editors: you know I said I didn’t want to do Ukip party conference this year? I’ve changed my mind. Also, can I put a tetanus booster on expenses?

3. Christ, Hamilton! You’ve basically signed the whole of Van Halen EXCEPT Eddie Van Halen. You’ve got four pieces of luggage and no talent to carry them. Who’s going to do it? Who’s going to play bass on Eruption? You? Your wife, more like. Look, Neil, you need a bigger name to tie it all together. Tommy Robinson, say – although I understand he’s currently locked in the studio – or Paul Joseph’s organ grinder, InfoWars wingnut Alex Jones. Or, to use another analogy you’ll instinctively understand: where’s your Hannibal Smith in this A-Team? You’ve got a Z-list Murdock with Sargon, a white supremacist BA (stay with this) in Dankula, and two other guys who would rip each other’s deep-V Ts to shreds over who gets to be Faceman. I imagine the minutes to the first Ukip policy meeting will read simply: “Paul told Milo he’s being Templeton Peck or he’s taking his walkie-talkie set home.”

Truly, a cracked commando unit. Today, not really wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of misfortune.

Then again, do they survive? Paul is certainly doing all right, but you wouldn’t accuse the other edgelords of expecting a Christmas bonus. I last saw Milo being chucked a pity shift on Infowars, during which he was required to sell Alex Jones’s hilariously silly nootropic pills on air. I don’t know if you’ve read or seen Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller? It was like that, but much more tragic. As he floundered poignantly behind the desk, Milo felt like a Willy Loman for our times – manically necking the pills and wittering something about milk-thistle extract and the body’s detox systems. Has it come to this? It’s like Willy’s wife says: a small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.

Back to Neil Hamilton, though, who doesn’t seem to realise quite what he’s got himself into with this new band he’s so keen to promote. With his bullish welcome, which went on to take a few potshots at Gary Lineker and James O’Brien, Neil seemed to be casting himself as a sort of Peter Grant to the alt-right Led Zeppelin. Grant was the legendary 6ft 5in manager who was as adept at bullying 110% gate fees for his artists as he was using his massive bulk to bodysplash anyone from a couple of mafia-linked promoters pointing a gun at them, to my beloved and very-recently-departed father-in-law. (When my husband was a child, Grant raided his house looking for something he thought my pa-in-law was hiding from him. He would almost certainly have been right. RIP Peter Clifton, you crazy diamond xxx.) As for Neil ... well, his Baron Hardup was well received in a production of Cinderella in Kettering. But is it quite the same thing?

Either way, perhaps we should have seen this coming. For the past few months, a clearly smitten Neil has been aping Prison Plonker’s highly imitable style by doing his own YouTube videos in front of a map. I had assumed the latter piece of cartography was a sort of racist Westeros, but on closer inspection it turns out to be Wales. Sticking with the Game of Thrones theme, though, you can’t help but suspect that some grimly R-rated things are going to happen to Neil over the coming months, as this Theon realises the personal implications of signing four Ramsay Boltons.

Lost in Showbiz hasn’t formally consulted a psephologist on this, but assumes it is possible for Paul, Milo, Dankula and Sargon to comprise Ukip’s NEC within about 15 minutes. As mentioned, we’ve yet to hear from Gerard Batten on his new recruits, suggesting he’s less than enthused that four bloated monsters of rock have decided to headline his small folk festival.

Whether they are headliners worthy of the term is another matter. Take Dankula’s little stunt. My sole takeout from it wasn’t that nazism is bad or that free speech is somehow under threat, but that this guy is just ... really not funny. I mean, he fully sucks. He’d die on any stage he got on to. Lulz-seekers like him imagine that being shocking is, in and of itself funny, which would be nice if it was true, because – hey – then anyone could be a comedian. But it’s not. I’m sorry to disappoint commies like Dankula who want something for nothing, but you’re not equal. It takes skill. There’s a reason Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle or Jerry Seinfeld is making bazillions and you’re crowdfunding your little pug case: it’s because they are FUNNY. Any old idiot can be racist. It’s a piece of piss.

Whether they can parlay it into the position of Ukip’s shadow fisheries spokesman, however, remains to be seen. Let the show / shitshow / internecine band wars commence, while we officially stamp this story as “developing”.

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