Just when you thought Ukip had reached their nadir with Godfrey Bloom’s rant about “bongo bongo land”, Hugh Williams, the party's assistant treasurer pops up having penned a book detailing a non-PC history of the world.
Within Williams’ self-published, 350-page tome, the 67-year-old claims that Winston Churchill admired his fellow wartime leaders Hitler and Stalin, and that the brutal Nazi invasion of Poland was a result of “goading” by Warsaw.
First reported by the Evening Standard, the book, entitled From Ur to Us, Everything you Need to Know about History, makes a series of claims that will cause yet another headache for beleaguered Ukip leader Nigel Farage, still reeling from Stuart Wheeler’s recent admonishment of companies that promote women to the boardroom.
Likely to add to Farage’s woes is Williams’ claim that child abuse in the Catholic Church was “negligible”, and that the German invasion of Poland in 1939 was due to “Polish aggression”.
The assistant treasurer, who stood for Ukip in Plymouth and South Devon in the last election, told the newspaper he wrote his history “unencumbered by the shackles of political correctness”.
So... shackles off, Williams asserts, “Hitler offered peace to the British government, but his offer was rejected” and Italy’s Borgias, a family synonymous with adultery, simony, theft, bribery and murder, had been “unfairly tarnished” by history.
Correction: An earlier version of this story referred to Stalin as Churchill's wartime foe. They were wartime allies.