'Bongo Bongo' cartoon lands Ukip candidate in the soup

It seems Ukippers are now so confident about their surge in popularity - Clacton in the bag, Rochester looking good – that they're able to send themselves up. It's a worrying development for those of us spooked by the party's anti–immigration politics and where it could all lead.

The Ukip candidate at the centre of this story is David Little, who is standing in Dover at the next election – surely the most iconic of seats for a party intent on closing our borders to foreigners.

Little saw a cartoon he liked by Marf on the Political Betting website and, although it was clearly designed to take the p*** out of Ukip, decided to re-post it on his Facebook page. [I should disclose that the cartoonist is my former wife.]

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In the grand tradition of spoof maps, Marf had drawn a 'Ukip Map of the World' complete with angry arrows denoting the paths of "zillions of immigrants" from "Bongo Bongo Land" and Eastern Europe, London written off as the home of "cosmopolitan poofters" and Clacton marked as the "proposed new capital".

But while David Little was happy to see his party lampooned, Tory MP Charlie Elphicke, who has to defend Dover and Deal against Little next May, refused to see the funny side.

He told yesterday's Sunday People: “I’ve had complaints about this from constituents. They think it’s disgusting, anti-gay and anti-women.”

As the People helpfully reminded us, Ukip has actually banned its members from referring to Africa as "Bongo Bongo Land" and cut its ties with Godfrey Bloom, MEP, who famously used the phrase in an attack on British aid going overseas. (Ukip plans to cut the overseas aid budget by 85 per cent.)

None of this mattered to Little, who posted the cartoon anyway, saying: “I love Marf’s cartoons and I thought it was a brilliant bit of satire lampooning Ukip.

“It’s clearly a joke at Ukip’s expense. I think it’s really important to laugh at yourself now and again.”

But Tory MP Elphicke remains suspicious of Little’s motive for re-posting Marf’s cartoon. He went on Radio Kent this morning to argue that Ukip appeared to see the cartoon as “a badge of honour rather than the satire of shame it was intended to be”.

His constituents, said Elphicke, were worried “that this is what they [Ukip] really think.”

As Ricky Gervais wrote in 2011, discussing the difference between American and British humour: "We [the British] mercilessly take the p*** out of … ourselves. This is very important. Our brashness and swagger is laden with equal portions of self-deprecation. This is our license to hand it out."

That's the problem: after the self-deprecation, we're threatened with the “swagger” - and down in Kent there could be a lot of it to come from Ukip.

First, there's the 20 November by-election in Rochester, 50 miles up the road from Dover, where Tory defector Mark Reckless looks set for victory.

Then there's the general election in May. An opinion poll published last month for the Dover Express put Ukip on a stunning 48 per cent in Dover and Deal, making Little the likely winner by a landslide. Which, depending on your point of view, will or won't be funny at all.