He said that it was a huge relief to distance himself from the UKIP MEPs whose behaviour he had found embarrassing, and accused Nigel Farage, the MEP closest to Mr Knapman, of secretly running the party.

“I’ve won and I’ve walked away,” Mr Kilroy-Silk said after attending a session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg. “They’ve backed down, they were going to withdraw the whip, but I kept saying, this isn’t due process, and not the way to run a political party.

“Not only do we have an invisible leader, we have incompetence on a large scale,” he said. “Nigel treats the party as a one-man plaything, and the leader just says ‘yes Nigel, no Nigel’.

“I’m relieved not to have to defend some of the strange things they’ve done,” he said, citing UKIP MEPS who had told women to clean behind the fridge, and another who compared withdrawal from the EU to the Chechen struggle for independence from Russia, “days after the Beslan massacre”.