Britain’s Nigel Farage has insisted he kept his underpants on during a late-night swim to celebrate his final conference as Ukip leader.
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Mr Farage and his supporters have been at loggerheads with Mr Hamilton, along with the party’s only Ukip MP Douglas Carswell and former deputy chairman Suzanne Evans.
“I had a very good feel for why the U.S. model is quite frankly failing and the pitfalls that are there if the United Kingdom doesn’t get it right”, she told local newspaper the Southern Daily Echo in 2013.
“I don’t have the same national profile as Diane, she is in the media and on the television an terrible lot and a big part of any election is the recognition factor”.
She said that with the Brexit vote, Ukip has “only just won a heat in a 28-member state Olympic competition to leave the European Union”.
Ms James, 56, was elected to the European Parliament as an MEP for South-East England in 2014, as part of the political “earthquake” achieved as UKIP became the first non-mainstream party in modern times to win a national election in the UK.
She came well ahead of fellow European Parliament members Jonathan Arnott and Bill Etheridge, local authority councillor Lisa Duffy and party executives Elizabeth Jones and Phillip Broughton.
Mr Farron is set to dismiss incoming Ukip leader Diane James as being nothing more than a puppet of Mr Farage.
The MEP, who was the frontrunner in the contest, took the top job with 8,451 votes.
Facing down criticism that with the European Union referendum outcome UKIP was a spent force, Mr Farage said the party still had much to do and stood to benefit from a “deluge” of votes from dispirited Labour supporters.
Mr Hamilton described his speech as a “backwards ramble down memory lane”.
“There is a huge opportunity for the party, but it also requites the party to unite”.
The anti-immigration party won 12.6 percent of the vote in the 2015 general election, though it only has one MP to show for it under Britain’s first-past-the-post system.
When she announced her candidacy following Mr Farage’s election, she was catapulted to front runner after the deputy leader Paul Nuttall refused to join the race and second favourite Steven Woolfe was disqualified.
Farage gave three examples of what Theresa May needs to do to ensure her frequent promise that Brexit means Brexit.
As she took to the stage to take over from Mr Farage as the party’s new leader, Ms James paid tribute to the work of her predecessor.
Mr Farage also stood down briefly as leader in 2009, but was re-elected the following year.
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But she sought to dispel criticisms that she would serve as a continuity candidate under Farage’s influence: “I am not Nigel like, I am not even Nigel-lite”, she said, “but I will be doing everything to achieve the political success that he’s handing over to me and to you”.
