ROTTEN BOROUGHS
LOCAL ELECTION SPECIAL
IT’s 19 years since David Cameron described Ukip supporters as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”. In the run-up to the 1 May elections, candidates for Reform UK, Ukip’s successor party, seem to be doing their best to live up to that description in one way or another.
Take Ryan Coogan, Reform candidate to be mayor of the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough combined authority. His website boasts of a successful business career and impressive community work. Among his achievements he lists “starting a campaign to honour” Second World War code-breaker Bill Tutte, which he says “led to a statue and memorial in Newmarket High Street”.
Yet local journalist Alison Hayes, chair of the Bill Tutte Memorial Fund, told the Eye she had “never heard of” Coogan for more than a decade after she first came up with and worked on the idea. She and a fellow fund trustee sent emails asking the “deluded” Coogan to stop claiming to have worked on the project.