William Hague helped to secure a million-pound pledge to Ukip yesterday after he enraged a former Tory, who had just announced his defection to Nigel Farage’s party, by dismissing him as insignificant.
Arron Banks, a businessman from Gloucestershire, began the day promising £100,000 to the party. By tea-time, he had upped that figure by £900,000 in a fit of pique.
Of Mr Hague, he said: “He called me ‘a nobody’... Now he knows who I am.”
The party had stoked expectations of further defections from the Conservatives after the departure of the MPs Mark Reckless and Douglas Carswell. Responding to the initial donation, Mr Hague waved it away. “The conference has fully moved on from the defection of one MP on Saturday,” the leader of