Over the last year, there has been an increasing frustration expressed on twitter and other social media, that the BBC is in love with UKIP. They have been given access to the high profile political programmes such as Question Time, Any Questions and of course the Marr Show on far more occasions than their popularity and public support justified. Late last night the news from the producers of the Marr Show that they were interviewing Nigel Farage was not a great surprise, but the difference is perhaps that the success in the European Elections does actually finally justify this. The problem for those who used to enjoy such programmes is that the corporation has cried UKIP and interviewed Nigel Farage a bit too often, usually treating him and his lack of credible policies with kid gloves. The BBC and other news programmes are in a bind. If they now start treating Nigel and his ‘front bench team’ as though they are serious politicians, they are bound to be on the receiving end of a long stream of criticism from the sort of people who used to criticise the corporation of left wing bias when it challenged Mrs Thatcher for her views. On the other hand if they continue to treat them as light hearted guests, the credibility of the broadcaster will be lost altogether

Historically the UKIP MEPs have operated in a manner that would be ridiculed by all of the media if it was taking place in the full glare of the spotlights in Westminster. The idea that through a Parliamentary system we should pay substantial sums of public money to ‘representatives’ to stay away from the Parliament itself for large periods of time is clearly a nonsense. By the time of the election, UKIPs list of MEPs in the South East had dropped to one, which was Mr Farage himself. Yet despite his many absences from the two debating chambers of the European Parliament, in 15 years as my MEP I have never once had a mailing of any sort from UKIP apart from at election time itself. That I don’t support UKIP is not something of great interest, but hopefully one day his failure to communicate with constituents will be challenged by someone like Andrew Marr. It is not so much that I want lots of material to arrive through my letter box, but I resent that the money given to Mr Farage to write to people like me, is being diverted to strengthen a party which represents so little I could in any way agree with. For the record in the graph, my views are closest to those of Lib Dem voters in that I would welcome Romanians living next door, although my current neighbours are actually very nice people so perhaps not until the property is empty!