AN OXFORD record label owner was told he had successfully bought the UK Independence Party’s website before it was snatched back hours later.
Jack Clothier, of city-based record company Alcopop! said he received a receipt after paying £200 to buy ukip.org on Tuesday.
And after posting a picture of the transaction on Twitter he said of the party: “If they can’t be trusted to run a website, I fear a country may be too much for them.”
But just as the 32-year-old was asking fellow social media users to suggest alternative uses for the website, internet hosting firm GoDaddy said it would have to cancel the transaction and refund him.
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Mr Clothier, of Iffley, said: “Their excuse was very flimsy. The only explanation was that it was for sale via a third party they represented. It didn’t seem right to me.”
And he said GoDaddy has still not offered any further information.
The idea to buy the website, Mr Clothier explained, came to him when Ukip’s website was temporarily unavailable to view and internet users began speculating that the party had not paid its fees.
A Ukip spokesman later blamed the glitch on a ‘technical problem’ and the website was up and running again later that day.
However Mr Clothier, following a suggestion from another Twitter user, said he decided to try to buy the website’s address and initially believed he had succeeded.
He added: “It was one of those off-the-cuff decisions that I thought would be absolutely brilliant if it worked.
“When I got the confirmation I thought I had done it. It’s a real shame because I’m no fan of Ukip and had planned on replacing the website with something nicer than its policies, like unicorns.
“Otherwise I might have turned it into the ‘UK Indy Party’ to arrange lots of parties around the country.
“I also got a lot of emails from pro-immigration charities suggesting that I use it to link through to their websites. I would probably have done that.
“There were a lot of suggestions on Twitter. One particularly popular idea was that we should use it to promote one of our bands, Johnny Foreigner.”
Whatever he decided, Mr Clothier added, he would not have sold it back to the party.
“I didn’t do it for the money,” he said. “I did it to make a point. If they can’t run their own website, how could they run our country?”
Bob Mountain, chief revenue officer of Afternic, a firm owned by GoDaddy, said the sale was a mistake.
He said: “Due to an error at the customer’s side the domain name ukip.org was listed on the aftermarket, but quickly removed once the customer realised the error.
“The ownership of this domain did not change during this time.”
The transaction was cancelled and refunded on January 7, but Mr Mountain added: “Refunds can take five to seven days to process.”
Ukip Oxford West and Abingdon parliamentary candidate Alan Harris told the Oxford Mail a “technical problem” was to blame for the issue.
He added: "It was worked on and resolved by midday. The website was registered until March 2016, so claims it was not renewed are false."
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