Ukip Founder Alan Sked Mocks 'Wet Turd' Douglas Carswell

Ukip's 'Wet Turd' Row Has Party Holding Its Nose
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Newly-elected UK Independence Party (UKIP) MP Douglas Carswell (L) and party leader Nigel Farage pose for pictures at their local party office in Clacton-on-Sea, in eastern England, on October 10, 2014. Britain's anti-EU UK Independence Party won its first seat in the House of Commons Friday, sending jitters through Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives seven months before what is likely to be a tight general election. AFP PHOTO / LEON NEAL (Photo credit should read LEON NEAL/AFP/
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Ukip's founder, Professor Alan Sked, has issued a withering verdict of Douglas Carswell's leadership potential, saying he has "the charisma of a wet turd".

Sked, who was the party's first leader, told the Huffington Post UK that the Clacton MP "might offer a focus for opposition" to Nigel Farage within Ukip, but lamented that "he has already shown he lacks the backbone to confront him".

Sked, a history professor at the London School of Economics, also expressed doubt about what Farage could do if he decides to quit as party leader before 2020, as he has previously hinted.

"He has no shame and no ability to do anything else,” Sked said. “He couldn’t go into the City – he was only an unsuccessful commodity broker. He would remain as an MEP collecting what he could in salary and expenses in Brussels."

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Professor Alan Sked, Ukip's founder and first leader

In response, a Ukip spokesman said: "One has to question the motivations, if not the manners of an increasingly bitter and disappointed man. Just as in the case of Ted Heath there is nothing that rankles as much as an opponent's success."

Sked has been an outspoken critic of Ukip under Farage's leadership, variously describing him as a "dim, racist alcoholic", a "fantasist" and a "none too bright bar-room bore".

Meanwhile Farage, in his memoirs "Flying Free", described Sked as "soft, unworldly and strangely spoiled", adding: "I suspect that, by appealing as any democratic political party must, to all and sundry... we have tainted SKed's lovely, pure, nineteenth-century vision of his [Anti-Federalist] League and brought him, to his mind at least, into disrepute amongst its academic peers".