Only the insane would enter politics now, insists Bloom

Mr Bloom, who will now represent Yorkshire as an independent, resigned in the wake of the criticism that followed him calling female audience members “sluts” at a fringe meeting of the recent Ukip annual conference.

Writing in today’s Yorkshire Post, he insists party politics “bore” him and says his membership of Ukip was “simply a platform to win my country back from foreign power”.

He lays the blame for his departure from close friend Nigel Farage’s party on a hostile media that responded with “mock outrage” to recent outbursts, which included him condemning the sending of foreign aid to “Bongo Bongo Land” and striking Channel Four News reporter Michael Crick over the head with a Ukip conference programme.

“I make a joke at a meeting using the word “sluts”,” writes Mr Bloom. “Cue mock outrage from those who are addicted to outrage. I am harassed by an awful little man with a camera in a London street. I swat him with a magazine, more horror and mock outrage.

“Is ‘Bongo Bongo Land’ offensive? Only if I say it. Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor, used it in his book and no one said a word. But of course he isn’t me.”

Mr Bloom, an MEP for Yorkshire and Humber since 2004, says that he has received thousands of messages of support from “ordinary folk”.

He confirmed earlier this week that he would sit as an independent MEP until next year’s European Parliament elections, although he will privately remain a party member.

The former fund manager says that his retreat to the back benches means the electorate will be left with “the grey, boring, stand-for-nothing politicians whose names you cannot even remember”.

Comment: Page 16; Lies and vilification: Page 18.