UKIP leader Diane James hails Putin as her hero

Who are your heroes? is such a good question to ask a politician, yet it rarely gets asked. The answer usually reveals a great deal about who they are trying to appeal to and how they see themselves, but even so it is highly unusual for the leader of a party to admit on television to being an admirer of a Russian leader with dictatorial tendencies and a fondness for dirty tricks and even invasion.

That is what Diane James, the new leader of UKIP, did on the BBC’s Sunday Politics show under questioning from Andrew Neil today. Watch it here.

She chose Churchill and Thatcher, and then when those two names were put to her along with Putin – very clearly – she smiled, nodded and said: “Mmm hmm.”

You have to go back a long way, to the 1940s, when Stalin was a British ally having invaded Poland and then been outsmarted temporarily by Hitler, to find a time when it was fashionable in Britain to hero-worship a leader of a foreign power who hates the West. Some veteran Corbynistas never gave up loving the Soviets, of course, and some of the Labour leader’s young, new supporters seem attracted to Stalinism.

But the leader of UKIP? Perhaps there are a few isolationists or anti-German UKIP right-wing voters who look at Putin and see an admirable strongman (who hates independent media and dissent) and think it worth calling him a hero. But alongside those British heroes of the centre-right Churchill and Thatcher? Really? There cannot be many sane people who will find this an encouraging first intervention in the national debate by the new UKIP leader.

It is a baseball cap moment, even worse than that suffered by William Hague when he took over as Tory leader and never recovered from being pictured in a cap. The new UKIP leader enters the national consciousness, for the first time, as a fan of Vladimir Putin.