A Ukip donor and key figure in the Brexit campaign has come under fire for excusing Donald Trump’s brag about sexually assault on women.
Arron Banks, who ran the Leave.EU group and met Trump in New York after the shock US Presidential election result, was skewered over the comments by Cathy Newman.
It all started when a social media user told Newman on Twitter it was “ridiculous” to call Trump a misogynist.
Newman replied that she was “puzzled” by the post, saying she could not see how Trump’s unguarded comment of women - that he liked to “grab them by the pussy” - made him anything but a misogynist.
Trump later apologised for the remark, saying in a video that looked like a hostage tape: “These words don’t reflect who I am ... I said it, I was wrong, and I apologise.”
But the apology didn’t win over Newman, who wrote:
Then Banks waded in, saying Trump’s comment about touching women suggested that “he rather liked them”.
Banks was taken to task by Newman, who pointed out:
Banks conceded his excuse “wasn’t the best line” but defended Trump’s use of “locker room talk”.
Leaving Times columnist David Aaronovitch to ask Banks:
Banks is not the first Ukip figure to defend Trump over the groping scandal.
Last month, the party’s interim leader and advisor to the US President-elect Nigel Farage insisted they amounted to “alpha-male boasting”.
He said at one of the Presidential debates in Missouri: “Look, this is alpha male boasting. It’s the kind of thing, if we are being honest, that men do. They sit around and have a drink and they talk like this.
“By the way, quite a lot of women say things amongst themselves that they would not want to see on Fox News, or the front page of a newspaper. I’m not pretending it’s good - it’s ugly, it is ugly.”