Robert Michael Kilroy-Silk (born Silk; born 19 May 1942) is an English former politician and broadcaster. After a decade as a university lecturer, he served as a Labour Party Member of Parliament (MP) from 1974 to 1986. He left the House of Commons in 1986 in order to present a new BBC Television daytime talk show, Kilroy, which ran until 2004. He returned to politics, serving as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2004 to 2009, initially as a member of the UK Independence Party (UKIP). He had a significant role in the mainstreaming of Eurosceptic politics in the UK and has been dubbed 'The Godfather of Brexit'.
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Early life
Kilroy-Silk was born in Birmingham, son of William Silk, a Royal Navy leading stoker, and his wife Minnie Rose (née Rooke). William Silk was lost at sea when aged 22, serving on HMS Charybdis, which was torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Brittany by German torpedo boats on 23 October 1943. His son was 17 months old.
Robert's mother Rose remarried in 1946, to family friend John Francis Kilroy, a car worker at the Rootes plant in Warwickshire. He adopted Robert, who from then used the surname Kilroy-Silk.
Kilroy-Silk failed his eleven-plus examination, for entry to selective schools, in 1953. He spent his first year at a secondary modern school and later passed the review exam and went to Saltley Grammar School in Saltley, Birmingham. He attended the London School of Economics to study politics and economics.
Marriage and early career
In 1963, Kilroy-Silk married Jan Beech, daughter of a shop steward. The couple met when he was 18 and she was 17. They have a son and a daughter.
After graduation he became a lecturer in politics at the University of Liverpool, serving from 1966 to 1974. He published a theoretical work, Socialism since Marx, in 1972.
Labour Member of Parliament
At the February 1974 general election, Kilroy-Silk was elected as a Labour MP for the Ormskirk constituency in Lancashire. He remained its MP until its abolition at the 1983 general election, when he was elected to represent the new Knowsley North seat; he held this until his resignation from the House of Commons in 1986. In an article for The Times in 1975, Kilroy-Silk argued that politics was not "compromises and bargains" or hankering after "a spurious consensus". He wrote that the function of government, particularly a Labour government, was
"to impose its values on society. Its role is creative: to cast, so far as it is able, society in its image". Furthermore, socialists should not be worried about being accused of dictatorial powers; they must go forward with "a tint of arrogance".The next year he was quoted as saying, "the Labour Party must always be a class party, for it is a class war we are fighting".
Kilroy-Silk was appointed Shadow Home Affairs spokesman, resigning in 1985. In resigning his seat, he said that he had been assaulted by members of the Militant group and was reported to have had a scuffle with left-wing Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn. He wrote a book about his experiences, entitled Hard Labour, and subsequently left the Labour Party.
During his time as Labour MP, he was known as a "unapologetic nuisance" for "unfashionable" and "unpopular" causes such as penal reform, civil liberties and opposition to the tampon tax, as well as "rearguard action" against the Militant tendency; "his speeches were essentially invitations to pass him over for promotion", such as when "in one Budget debate, he accused James Callaghan’s government of following Tory orthodoxies on the economy".
Television and journalism
Kilroy
His talk show Kilroy started on 24 November 1986. Originally called Day to Day, the programme was renamed to Kilroy in September 1987. It ran until 2004 when it was cancelled by the BBC in reaction to the publication of an article by Kilroy-Silk entitled "We owe Arabs nothing" which was published in the Sunday Express on 4 January 2004. This provoked considerable controversy.
Ireland
In 1992, Kilroy made a comment regarding Ireland in his Daily Express column, attacking Ray MacSharry, a former Irish government minister and EU commissioner, whom he described as "a redundant second-rate politician from a country peopled by priests, peasants and pixies". This was condemned by the then Irish ambassador to the UK, Joseph Small, for its "gratuitously offensive and indeed racist remarks". The newspaper's editor, Sir Nicholas Lloyd, apologised to MacSharry and the Irish people in general, while Kilroy added: "I accept that my references to Mr MacSharry and the Irish people were both offensive and unjustified, and I fully associate myself with this apology."
Shafted
In 2001, Kilroy-Silk hosted a television programme on ITV1 called Shafted. It was a quiz-show and at the end of the show, Kilroy-Silk would ask players whether they wished to "share" or to "shaft", with accompanying hand gestures.
The show was cancelled after four episodes, with sixteen recordings unaired, due to falling ratings. The Penguin TV Companion (2006) ranked it as the worst British television show of the 2000s.
We owe Arabs nothing
The BBC cancelled the Kilroy show in January 2004 after an opinion article, entitled "We owe Arabs nothing", by Kilroy-Silk was published in the Sunday Express on 4 January 2004. The article had first been published in April 2003 by the same paper and 'republished in error' according to Kilroy-Silk. It did not attract much national attention when first published. According to Faisal Bodi, a columnist for The Guardian, the reaction at its second publication was a measure of "the increasing organisation of the Muslim community". Bodi added:
Kilroy-Silk's suspension was precipitated by a flurry of web messages and emails circulated by various Muslim organisations notifying people of the outrage. The circulars from the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, the Muslim Council of Britain, the Islamic Human Rights Commission and the Islamic Affairs Central Network, to mention a few, were focused, informative and, above all, empowering. They contained a chronology of Kilroyisms, names and contacts of editors at the BBC and the Sunday Express, and instructions on how to make complaints. In the end, the BBC was left with little choice.
The article was strongly criticised by the Commission for Racial Equality, whose head, Trevor Phillips, said that the affair could have a "hugely unhelpful" effect. Bodi wrote that Kilroy-Silk should be prosecuted for incitement to racial hatred. He said that Kilroy-Silk had also written statements critical of Muslims in 1989, during the Salman Rushdie affair, and in a 1995 article in the Daily Express.
By contrast, Ibrahim Nawar, the head of Arab Press Freedom Watch, came out in support of Kilroy-Silk in a Daily Telegraph article. He said the politician was "an advocate of freedom of expression" and that he agreed with much of what Kilroy-Silk had said about Arab regimes.
A spokeswoman for Kilroy-Silk told The Observer, "He is not a racist at all – he employs a black driver", a quote which is sometimes incorrectly attributed to Kilroy-Silk.
Eurosceptic politics
UKIP
In 2004, Kilroy-Silk was recruited to the UK Independence Party (UKIP). During that year's European Parliament election campaign he presented one of the party political broadcasts. His recruitment and celebrity significantly raised the profile of the party, further helped by his enlisting of actress Joan Collins who attended a UKIP press conference at Kilroy-Silk's invitation.
Kilroy-Silk stood on the UKIP list for the East Midlands constituency in 2004 and was elected as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) in the second seat for his region.The election used a closed list form of proportional representation; UKIP scored 26.05 per cent of the vote in that region, just behind the Conservatives with 26.39 per cent.
In the 2004 Hartlepool by-election, UKIP came third, ahead of the Conservative Party. The next day, in an interview on Breakfast with Frost (BBC), Kilroy-Silk expressed ambition to lead UKIP and criticised the party's leader Roger Knapman.
Following this, businessman and friend Paul Sykes announced his intention to cease his partial funding of UKIP and to return his support to the Conservatives, as he feared that the Eurosceptic vote might be split. The branch chairmen of UKIP were canvassed on their opinion regarding Kilroy-Silk's challenge for the party leadership. Only a minority (13%) were sympathetic to him; Kilroy-Silk did not think this was significant, as he believed that too few party members had been consulted. Party officials threatened him with disciplinary action if he continued his challenge.
On 27 October 2004, Kilroy-Silk officially announced that he had withdrawn from the UKIP whip in the European Parliament, branding the party "incompetent". But, he said that he would remain as an independent member of UKIP, and would continue to challenge for the leadership.
UKIP's constitution states that 70 days' notice is required before a leadership ballot can take place. With the next general election in the UK expected in spring 2005, Kilroy-Silk pushed for an emergency general meeting of the party as early as possible. On 3 November 2004, Kilroy-Silk said he intended to be leader by Christmas, though this would have been impossible under the rules.
Veritas
On 30 January 2005 Kilroy-Silk launched a new political party Veritas, promising to take the fight to the "supercilious metropolitan elite". Damian Hockney, UKIP's leader in the London Assembly, had defected to Veritas, becoming its first Deputy Leader.
UKIP members and some journalists dubbed Kilroy-Silk's new party "Vanitas", meaning a party acting as a vehicle for its founder's vanity.
On 31 January 2005, a television programme, Kilroy: Behind the Tan, was broadcast on the BBC. Created in documentary style, it followed the politician from his election as an MEP for UKIP to his leaving the party.
The party was formally launched on 2 February 2005 at Hinckley Golf Club in Hinckley, Leicestershire.
In early February 2005, Kilroy-Silk worked on a Channel 4 television programme called Kilroy and the Gypsies. He spent a week living with a family of Romany Gypsies at a campsite in Bedfordshire to explore their lives. He also interviewed residents of surrounding villages.
In the 2005 general election, Kilroy-Silk contested the seat of Erewash, but came in fourth with 5.8%, just above the 5% level needed to save his deposit. He tried to press charges against a man who, he said, "smashed a bottle of water against the side of his head" while the politician was being interviewed by a European television crew outside a supermarket. The alleged assailant said he had squirted Kilroy-Silk with water from a plastic bottle before running away; this account was confirmed by the TV crew, which also filmed the incident. The police decided not to prosecute.
On 12 July 2005, party member Ken Wharton announced his intention to challenge Kilroy-Silk for the leadership, claiming party members were "not being looked after". Discontented party members set up the Veritas Members' Association to "put the truth back into Veritas".
On 29 July 2005, Veritas announced the resignation of Kilroy-Silk as party leader. In his resignation statement, he said:
Retirement
In 2019, Kilroy-Silk was described as "retired" and living in the outskirts of Plymouth.
