The Ukip leader, Paul Nuttall, has been criticised for failing to turn up at a hustings in Stoke-on-Trent Central, the constituency where he is contesting next week’s byelection.
Nuttall gave just an hour’s notice that he was pulling out of the event on Thursday that had been organised by business representatives in the area.
He claimed he needed to attend “essential party meetings” before a Ukip conference.
Meanwhile, Nuttall’s personal website was offline on Thursday, displaying a message saying that the site had been temporarily taken down. It comes in the wake of his admission that the claim he had lost “close, personal friends” at the 1989 Hillsborough football disaster was untrue.
The claims, twice made in posts on the website, vanished shortly after Nuttall’s admission on Tuesday. On Wednesday night, the entire content of the site disappeared, and was replaced with a notice that read: “Site is offline for maintenance. We are currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. Sorry for the inconvenience. Please try back soon.”
It is the second time in less than a week that Nuttall has failed to attend a hustings event in the constituency. On Saturday, he did not attend one at a local sixth-form college. Voting is now one week away.
According to Ukip activists in Stoke, Nuttall has been finding it hard to juggle his commitments as party leader and as an MEP for the North West with campaigning in the constituency.
“We had 237 activists here on one Saturday; I’ve honestly never seen a campaign as optimistic as this,” one campaigner said. “But Paul is the party leader and he has commitments nationally and in Brussels.”
The Ukip leader did not appear at a crucial vote on the EU-Canada trade deal at the EU parliament on Wednesday, however. Seven other Ukip MEPs, including Nigel Farage, voted against the Ceta deal in Strasbourg, with another abstaining. Nuttall was among 15 Ukip MEPs who did not vote in Strasbourg.
On Thursday, at the hustings event in Stoke, the Ukip media and sport spokesman, Patrick O’Flynn, turned up in Nuttall’s place. Many in the crowd applauded when the Labour candidate, Gareth Snell, condemned Nuttall’s failure to attend the two hustings events, and his failure to vote in the European parliament on a plan to overhaul a trading scheme to cut carbon emissions, which he said would have a direct bearing on the constituency.
Vernon Coaker MP, a member of Labour’s campaign team, said: “With just one week until the Stoke Central byelection, Paul Nuttall is nowhere to be seen. It seems that on his list of priorities, writing speeches and glad-handing at conferences come above the concerns of hard-working voters.”
On Thursday evening, Nuttall arrived at BBC Radio Stoke for a panel discussion, but refused to talk to journalists as he entered the building. Specifically, he refused to say what he thought of a statement by Arron Banks, Ukip’s major donor, that he was “sick to death” of hearing about Hillsborough.
Nuttall went on to claim in the interview that he believed the furore surrounding the false claim that he had lost close friends at Hillsborough had been good for Stoke-on-Trent. “I have been great for this election, I have been great for this town,” he said. “You know why? Because the focus of the country is on Stoke-on-Trent, it is on the political map. People are now looking at this election in a way they wouldn’t have if I wasn’t involved.”
He repeated his complaint that he had been the victim of a smear campaign, and said that he had been at Hillsborough during the disaster. He added that he accepted responsibility for the “mistake” on his personal website, which carried the false claim that he had lost a number of close personal friends in the disaster.
Staffordshire police are currently investigating an allegation of election fraud after Nuttall submitted nomination papers in which he gave an address for a property in Stoke-on-Trent Central, which he subsequently admitted he had not yet set foot in.
Nuttall, the Ukip leader for less than three months, has faced a difficult week, with people who have known him for many years saying he has only recently begun stating that he was a survivor of the Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 Liverpool fans died, and then being forced to admit that his claim to have lost personal friends was false.
He later blamed that false claim on an error made by a press officer. He previously blamed the same press officer for another false claim on the same website: that he had once been a professional footballer.
When challenged last year about the false claim that he had a PhD, which appeared on the LinkedIn networking site under his name, Nuttall insisted that he did not know who had created the site.
