Ukip leader Paul Nuttall finally confirms he will run to be an MP – saying he will lead his party ‘into battle’ on June 8
But the party boss refused to reveal which constituency he is standing in next month
PAUL Nuttall finally confirms he will be running for Parliament again saying "I will be leading the party into battle" on June 8.
But the Ukip leader refused to reveal in which constituency he will be is standing to try and become an MP next month.
He told LBC Radio he would announce which constituency he was contesting within the next 48 hours.
Mr Nuttall said: "As the leader of the party I will be, obviously, leading the party into battle as I have done many times in the past."
The issue of whether he will stand has been dogging him since Theresa May called the snap election earlier this month.
At a Ukip campaign event on Monday, Mr Nuttall had repeatedly refused to say whether he would stand in the election.
He ended up locking himself in a side room to avoid reporters asking him about earlier this week as he launched a raft of new policies.
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But the ideas, including a ban on the burka and mandatory medical testing for girls at risk of FGM, have caused anger.
Mr Nuttall's so-called "integration agenda" was labelled the "politics of hate" and "full-throttled Islamophobia".
His week went from bad to worse when he ill-advisedly compared himself to civil rights campaigner Gandhi – because his party are so “ahead of our time” on key issues.
The 40-year-old failed in his previous bid to become an MP, losing the Stoke-on-Trent Central by-election in February.
And he insisted he had not been "unsure" about whether to run for Parliament again, but said: "I just had to take a decision as to what the party really needed me to do."
He added: "I saw what happened with Nigel Farage in 2015 where he spent the majority of his time down in Thanet and I basically had to take the decision as to whether the party needed me roaming the country and geeing up the branches and appearing on the media.
"It's quite difficult to do both when you are the leader of Ukip because, unlike Theresa May and Tim Farron and Jeremy Corbyn, we don't have a safe seat.
"They will literally visit their constituencies once or twice, safe in the knowledge that they will be re-elected. If we go for it then we pretty much have to live and work in the seat."
Mr Nuttall said he would stand in a seat where "we think we can give it a good go", adding that success for his party would be improving on the single seat the party won in 2015 - Douglas Carswell's victory in Clacton.
Stressing the need to "get people over the line this time", he said: "The one thing that we learned from 2015 is that vote share, although it is nice to get four million votes and 13% was wonderful, there is no prize for second place in the first-past-the-post system.
"I would like us to get more MPs elected than we got in 2015. I think it's doable. I think what we have got to do is target our resources sensibly, that means both in resources and in terms of manpower."