As more and more clapped out old Tories reveal the swivel of their eyes, I’ve decided to help the UKIP strategists (well, Max Clifford) by knocking up this list of the great and the loon who they could try to persuade to defect. The higher up the list, the bigger the news story.

10. Teresa Gorman
9. Ian Paisley
8. Lord Archer
7. Iain Duncan Smith
6. Lord Lucan
5. Nick Griffin
4. Ronald Reagan
3. Neville Chamberlain
2. Oliver Cromwell
1. Margaret Thatcher

(And if they can get the first seven on board, raising the top three from the dead should prove no problem.)

(Update: Make that the top four.)

So disgraced former Tory MP Jonathan Aitken is backing the swivel-eyed loons of the UK Independence Party. He joins disgraced former Tory MP Piers Merchant, standing on the party’s list in the North West, and disgraced former BBC presenter and former Labour MP Robert Kilroy-Silk. The party’s leader, Roger Knapman, is a former Tory minister. They claim to be “the people against the politicians”, but they seem rather more like “the washed-up politicians against the mainstream politicians”.

Kilroy was at his most irritating on UKIP’s Party Election Broadcast the other night. He sadly had to resort to complaining about the EU’s rules about the bendiness of bananas as a reason for leaving. Yet despite the harbingers of doom in the right wing press telling us that the EU would change the shape of our bananas and cucumbers, would prevent our sausages being called sausages, and would ban smoky bacon crisps, Kilroy may have noticed that we still have pretty normal cucumbers, our sausages are still called sausages, and we can still eat smoky bacon crisps. And as for bananas, all that was introduced was a unified system for classifying the fruit for sale. Which would of course be just as necessary if we were in a free trade arrangement with the EU from outside, which is what UKIP purport to desire.

I want our MEPs to sort out the bizarre system of expenses and renumeration that undermines the European Parliament, and to end the nonsense of shifting the whole operation to Strasbourg every few weeks. But electing UKIP MEPs won’t achieve that: it’s in their interest, as a party that hates the EU, to reinforce rather than resolve the EU’s problems. It’s in everyone else’s interest for the EU to become an efficient, well-run organisation. While I will enjoy seeing the Tories (and the BNP) suffer in the European elections as their voters switch to the UKIP, I doubt that any elected UKIP MEPs will perform a constructive role in the European Parliament. Lucky we’ll have plenty of LibDem MEPs to do that then.

Popped out for a relaxing walk this afternoon and I’m now absolutely soaked. It’s pouring with rain at the moment. It was drizzly a couple of days ago here and bright and sunny yesterday. Thoroughly inconsistent weather.

Saw a few Tory poster boards and some LibDem ones. No sign of anyone wanting to be seen promoting Labour around here. I was also relieved to spot a 21, which had seemed elusive.

I was out in Kirkstall this evening delivering letters to local voters. There are a significant number of students at the Headingley end of the ward and we were explaining to them why they would be better off electing Liberal Democrats. It’s not just our national positions (opposing top-up fees, taking a principled stance against the war) that are popular: on issues closer to home (tackling landlordism, keeping the streets clean, reducing crime), LibDems in Leeds are ready to take action.

Kirkstall is close to my heart as I lived there for two years, during which time I helped to halve Labour’s majority. We have a really good, hard-working team in Kirkstall who deserve to win; and residents in Kirkstall deserve a hard-working team representing them. With the whole council up for election this year and more and more people disillusioned with Labour’s failings, we have a real chance to change things for the better.