A Marta to the cause

Why Marta Andreasen’s decision to leave UKIP is no surprise.

Marta Andreasen’s decision to quit the UK Independence Party, which she announced on Friday (22 February), cannot be considered a surprise. An MEP since 2009, Andreasen has had a succession of battles with her UKIP colleagues and besides, it is hardly in her nature to settle down. 

Some mystery may still be attached to her employment history at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris (1998-2001), but her time with the European Commission, once appointed as its accounting officer in 2002, has been well-documented. She fell out there with her immediate boss, Bernard Mingasson, the director-general for budget, was soon suspended and later sacked, a decision that the European court upheld.

In 2007, Andreasen became UKIP’s treasurer, only to resign those duties in 2009, amid some acrimony.

Last month Andreasen clashed with the party leadership, having complained that an ex-Conservative MP was being lined up for a seat at the next Parliament elections. Now she has defected in the opposite direction. As she left, she accused Nigel Farage, the leader of UKIP, of being dictatorial and anti-women.

The statement that Farage released in response was stronger on emotion than sentence construction: “Having left the OECD, the European Commission and UKIP in unpleasant circumstances, the Conservative Party deserve what is coming to them [strict grammarians may blanch at the suggestion that the Conservative Party was ever part of the OECD or the Commission or UKIP]. The woman is impossible.”

Entre Nous is still trying to work out whether Farage used the phrase “the woman” because he is a male chauvinist pig, or because Andreasen was the last female MEP left in his delegation. Or perhaps he had forgotten her name.

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