In the year 2000 I gave the Conservatives their largest ever donation, and have in every year since then given them money, including a further single payment of £500,000 when Michael Howard took over as leader in 2003. On 28 March 2009, I announced that I would donate £100,000 to the UK Independence Party – which I have now done - and that I would vote for them in the upcoming EU elections on 4 June. The Conservatives responded the next day by expelling me from the party.
The reason I have taken this action is because I think that voting UKIP in the European elections is the only way to bring home to the main parties that voters all over the country are fed up with the horrifying cost and other disadvantages of our current relationship with the European Union.
I explained my reasons in an interview on the BBC Politics Show on Sunday 29 March 2009 and outlined my thoughts in an article printed in The Times Online. My supporters will know that last year I took legal action against Gordon Brown and the Foreign Secretary to try to force them to uphold their promise to hold a referendum on the latest EU treaty – what was originally called the Constitutional Treaty (and rejected by France and the Netherlands in referendums in their countries) and later tweaked in superficial ways and resubmitted as the Lisbon Treaty.
