Bumbling Bryant is no match for May

Another week, another Ukip gaffe.

This time it was party Treasurer Stuart Wheeler claiming that women are not very good at poker, bridge or chess.

Like Godfrey “Bongo Bongo land” Bloom last week, he tried to talk his way out of trouble and just made things worse.

He reckons it’s just that women are better at some things and men at others. On the Ukip evidence men are definitely better at saying stupid things.

Hopes are high that a chess match can be arranged between Wheeler and one-time junior chess champion, now shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Rachel Reeves.

Trouble is, Reeves is one of those women who’s better at not lowering herself to the level of sexist dinosaurs.

There are two theories as to why there’s been a succession of Ukip stories making the party look a bit silly.

One is that Ukip is made up of silly people.

The other is that the Tories’ election supremo Lynton Crosby is dripping these tales to a press starved of anything else to report in the summer recess.

Given that if you look hard enough and it doesn’t have to be that hard there are Ukip members coming out with outrageously un-PC statements most of the year round, there does seem to be something in the idea that the Tories are quietly undermining what credibility Ukip have worked hard to build up.

The other reason that Ukip supporters are migrating back to the Tories is that the Government is putting out a clear message on immigration the Conservatives are reducing it.

The so-called “racist van” stunt of a fortnight ago that saw vehicles drive round London boroughs popular with immigrants telling anyone here illegally to go home wasn’t intended to actually catch anyone it was targeted at Ukip supporters to let them know that the Tories care about the same issues they do.

Labour finally woke from an extended summer siesta last week and decided to get involved in the immigration argument, too.

However, they sent in Chris Bryant to do the job.

Bryant first came to prominence when he posted a picture of himself in his pants on the internet. His career has yet to scale such heights again.

Certainly his intervention in the immigration debate was, well, pants.

Having pre-briefed reporters that he was going to kick Tesco and Next for their employment practices, he actually ended up praising them after the two retail giants spent the time between news stories appearing about his speech and the statement itself utterly trashing his accusations.

Bryant was to highlight a Tesco distribution centre in Kent. Tesco don’t have a distribution centre in Kent.

Perhaps his about-turn shouldn’t be a surprise given he was a Tory in his youth.

There was some sense to what Bryant had to say it was essentially a long-winded way of repeating Gordon Brown’s derided “British jobs for British workers” slogan and, as with Brown, was somewhat undermined by the fact it was Labour for good or ill who opened the doors to Eastern European immigration. But the message was lost in the melange.

Given Bryant is a particularly political animal, the Tories enjoyed themselves enormously at his expense.

Only a few days previously he’d accused Home Secretary Theresa May of stumbling from one shambles to another.

Bryant didn’t just stumble into one but dived in headfirst.

Immigration is an incendiary issue and, with Bryant and May involved, there were bound to be sparks.

However, it was Bryant who got burned.