There’s a foul smell about Ukip’s new partner

Why has Farage forged an alliance with a fan of Hitler and wife-beating? Could it be the £2m-a-year subsidies?

‘Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,” says the shipwrecked Trinculo in The Tempest as he seeks shelter alongside a sleeping monster. “What have we here . . ? A strange fish.” From Shakespeare’s phrase comes the cliché “politics makes strange bedfellows”, which is rolled out every time a politician or a party strikes up an alliance of convenience with an ugly partner.

This is an excuse for cynical expediency, the shrugging rationale of the politician for whom power is more important than principle: and it is precisely the reason given by Ukip for hopping into bed with a Polish MEP of the extreme right who is not only a strange fish, but an exceptionally smelly one.

Robert Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, of the Polish Congress of