Freelance evangelist says ‘there is no hope for Britain,’ except maybe with UKIP

DONCASTER, UK — There were a lot of characters outside Doncaster Racecourse last week, where the UK Independence Party gathered for its national conference.

One stood out, a tall, thin man in an all-weather jacket and a thrift-store shirt and tie.

He balanced a picket-style sign on one shoulder with a determined smile as he handed out homemade fliers covered in small print and the admonition: “Be sure: There is no hope for Britain, but there is still hope for you.”

For the last few years, freelance evangelist Chris Brough has come to almost all of Britain’s annual political party conferences.

The 56-year-old is the UK’s political equivalent of Rollen Stewart, the guy who used to show up at US football games in a rainbow wig and “John 3:16” T-shirt.

(Stewart is now in jail for taking a housekeeper hostage in a Los Angeles hotel, so on second thought perhaps that’s not the best comparison.)

This is the first year he’s traveled to a conference of UKIP, an ascendant, populist right-wing party that abhors unchecked immigration and the European Union.

The group’s conference last week in Doncaster — a north England market town not coincidentally located next to the home constituency of Labour Party leader Ed Miliband — was its biggest ever.

Party membership more than doubled last year, peeling away white, working-class voters from both Conservative and Labour parties.

Like any upstart religion, UKIP makes much of its converts. Douglas Carswell, a former Conservative parliamentarian who resigned in August after officially switching to UKIP, was a featured speaker.

Mark Reckless, another Tory lawmaker, defected to UKIP this weekend. Both men must resign from parliament and re-run for their seats. If they win, they would be UKIP’s first parliamentarians.

Brough took an equally circuitous path to his tribe. In the mid-1980s, he was 27 and “living like the devil,” he said. “Drugs, drink, you name it. Fornicating left, right and center.”

After he ran into some drug-related legal trouble, he ended up in court. Terrified that news of his arrest would fatally shock his aged grandparents, he made his first fervent prayer: Please God, don’t let my name end up in the papers.

“The local reporters were there, but my name never went in,” he said.

Brough took it as a sign. Soon after, he was born again. Life has never been the same.

Brough works nights in a group home for ex-prisoners and takes vacation time during conference season. He doesn’t make it to all of them, just those that can be reached within a day or so from his home in Morecambe, a seaside town in Lancashire on England’s northwest coast.

He comes prepared with comfortable shoes, two bottles of water, a camping-style backpack stuffed with religious tracts and a sign on a metal pole that he had made at a local print shop.

“Broken Britain,” one side reads, above a clip-art Bible. “Return to Maker’s Instructions.”

The other features shadowy figures falling into a fire beneath the words “Pride Goes Before Destruction.”

“That’s a relatively new one, that bit,” Brough explains. “I go to gay pride marches sometimes.”

He has been cursed at. Labour conferences in particular, he says, can be “a bit hairy-scary.”

But of all the party gatherings, Brough adds, the UK Independence crowd is “the friendliest, definitely. The most sympathetic. I would say right now in Britain, for Bible-believing Christians, UKIP is the only party you can go to.”

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Unlike the US, Britain has no concentrated Christian voting bloc. Anglicans have tended to vote Conservative. Catholics vote Labour. Almost all Brits are more comfortable leaving God out of politics.

But for evangelicals like Brough, cross-party support for gay marriage, which became legal in England and Wales this year, was a betrayal.

UKIP doesn’t support same-sex marriage. The conference agenda this year included a panel from the gay marriage-opposing Coalition for Marriage, featuring a Cornish inn owner sued for refusing a double room to a gay couple.

“I think UKIP are going to do astoundingly well in the next elections,” Brough says. “There’s very, very few people with convictions.”