A senior Ukip figure has written a history book in which he says Winston Churchill admired Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, Poland “goaded” Nazi Germany into the 1939 invasion, and the recent child abuse scandal within the Catholic Church is “statistically negligible”.
Hugh Williams, the party’s assistant treasurer, claims his self-published 350-page work frees the study of history from the shackles of political correctness. The book — From Ur to Us, Everything you Need to Know about History — follows Ukip treasurer Stuart Wheeler’s claim last week that women should not be promoted to company boards because they are worse than men at card games, and party member Godfrey Bloom’s description of countries in receipt of foreign aid as “bongo bongo land”.
Father-of-five Mr Williams, 67, said today: “I’m proud of being politically incorrect.”
He writes that while Britain’s great wartime leader admired the German dictator and his Soviet counterpart, they did not reciprocate his feelings. The Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 “is correctly presented as a German attack, but what is seldom mentioned is that the Poles had been goading Germany for some time, so the invasion was in part a response to the Polish aggression”.
Hitler subsequently “offered peace to the British government, but his offer was rejected”, claims Mr Williams, whose father and both grandfathers were Tory MPs, and who stood for Ukip in Plymouth and South Devon at the last election.
The book claims the reputation of Renaissance Italy’s murderous Borgia family has been “unfairly tarnished” by history, while the great Egyptian queen Cleopatra is referred to only in the context of her marriage to Mark Antony, and the suffragettes receive only two brief mentions.
Mr Williams says scandalous Pope Alexander VI Borgia, famed for his financial greed and many mistresses, was persecuted for his “virtuous” and fair political beliefs, and compares him to former Ukip MEP Marta Andreasen, who defected to the Tories in February amid concern that hatred was being stirred up against immigrants. He says the corrupt and secular pontiff, who led the Catholic Church for 11 years from 1492, was on a par with “whistleblowers, like Marta Andreasen, who tried to stop corruption in the EU”.
The Catholic Church child abuse scandal was “disproportionately recorded”, he claims, concluding that it coincided “with the sexual revolution and liberation of the Sixties and Seventies” and is “a liberal problem, not a Catholic one”.
