Nigel Farage: high stakes for Ukip

If the court of public opinion convicts Mr Farage, Ukip's most high profile and popular figure, of hypocrisy, it could do deep damage to his cause

A week ago Nigel Farage went to Maria Miller's Basingstoke constituency to feast as publicly as possible on the former culture secretary's political corpse. Mrs Miller, who resigned on 9 April over her expenses, had "taken the mickey out of the system", the Ukip leader charged. The fact that she had not been sacked as an MP was another example, he complained, of "the political class looking after its own and letting down the electorate". By the weekend, one opinion poll had Mr Farage's populist party registering its highest ever polling position, 20%, amid widespread punditry predictions that Ukip would be the big beneficiary of this latest expenses scandal.

Now the boot is very suddenly and very publicly, although perhaps also only very briefly, on the other foot. On Monday, the Times suggested Mr Farage, who is an MEP for south-east England, had accepted almost £60,000 in "missing" European parliamentary expenditure allowances since the last European elections in 2009. The paper accused the Ukip leader of spending around £3,000 a year to pay the overheads on a rent-free converted farm building in Sussex that serves as his European constituency office, thus allegedly leaving around £12,000 a year "unexplained". Mr Farage rejected the accusation as outrageous, accusing the Conservative-supporting Times of a politically motivated attack.

The political context explains precisely why Monday's accusations may matter so much. Mr Farage is not an MP, still less a minister of the crown, but he is an MEP, and thus a recipient of European, including British, taxpayers' money. He is also an MEP with an unrivalled track record of denunciation of the, as he sees it, wasteful and harmful ways of the European Union. If the allegations are true, and if they stick, they could make Mr Farage look like a member of the political class which he mocks and despises so effectively. Ukip already has a heavy-duty history of expenses abuses in Europe, and Mr Farage himself famously boasted in 2009 that he had helped himself to £2m in expenses and allowances. With European parliament elections only five weeks away, the stakes are high.

Ukip is the anti-politics party. According to Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin, authors of a new book on Ukip, its voters are "by some margin the most politically disaffected group in the electorate". Ukip's appeal, they argue, rests on hard Euroscepticism, anti-immigration sentiment, and anger with the established political class. If the court of public opinion convicts Mr Farage (by far the party's most high-profile and popular figure) of hypocrisy, it could do deep damage to his cause. That does not mean the charges are accurate. But it certainly means that they should be investigated as thoroughly as those against Mrs Miller have been.