ROBERT KILROY-SILK, the star of the UK Independent Party, pledged to “get back our country” in a frostily received maiden speech to the grandiose European Parliament in Strasbourg yesterday.

Allocated just 90 seconds to speak in the chamber packed with overwhelmingly Europhile MEPs, the former Labour MP and television presenter said: “My constituents do not want to see the creation of a federal state called Europe. They want to be governed by their own people in their own Parliament, and they will during the lifetime of this Parliament, believe me.”

Mr Kilroy-Silk said that he wanted to copy Margaret Thatcher’s famous victory in gaining an EU budget rebate in the 1980s. “Some 20 years ago Mrs Thatcher went to Fontainebleau and said: ‘I want our money back’, and she got some of it. We want our country back, and believe you me, we are going to get it.”

He also condemned the new EU constitution, saying that it was “based on obsolete economic and political theories of the 1950s, of a fear of war and an outdated threat of communism”.

José Manuel Durão Barroso, the former Portuguese Prime Minister, sat in the chamber laughing openly at Mr Kilroy-Silk’s speech. The new parliament had voted 413-251 to approve Senhor Barroso as the European Commission’s next president.

Mr Kilroy-Silk’s speech earned scattered applause from fellow Eurosceptics in the Independence and Demo-cracy political group, to which the UKIP belongs.

The group contains 37 MEPs, including Eurosceptics from Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and France. However, the UKIP’s attempts to gain credibility and distance itself from the far Right was dealt a blow when an MEP whom the party suspended last week entered talks about joining forces with Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the French National Front.

Ashley Mote, who was disciplined for not revealing that he was awaiting trail for charges of housing benefit fraud, reduced the number of the UKIP MEPs from 12 to 11.

Mr Mote immediately started talks with M. Le Pen, who is also an MEP and is trying to form a sufficiently large group of far-Right MEPs to qualify for EU funding and staff. Mr Le Pen told The Times that he had 14 of the 18 MEPs needed to form an officially recognised political group. Claude Moraes, a Labour MEP and former Commissioner for Racial Equality, said: “This is a clear connection between UKIP and the far Right.”

Another UKIP MEP, Godfrey Bloom, who made headlines by saying that women did not clean enough behind the fridge, was denounced by Alessandra Mussolini, MEP, the granddaughter and sympathiser of Benito Mussolini, the Italian Fascist leader.

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