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He believes the European Union was conceived by Nazi Germany, suggests the Bilderberg Group is a "shadow world government", and wants to ban the building of new mosques.

Meet Gerard Batten, senior Ukip MEP and top lieutenant to Nigel Farage.

In recent weeks, Farage has tried to dismiss the string of "unpleasant" and "appalling" remarks - to quote the Prime Minister - made by various Ukip candidates by stressing how minor they are within the party. Batten, thus, poses a particular problem for his party leader.

A founding member of Ukip in 1993, he has been the party's chief whip in the European Parliament since 2009 after being appointed by Farage to the post. Batten was also Ukip's mayoral candidate in London in 2008 and came second in the party's leadership election in 2009.

Yet the London MEP, first elected in 2004 and re-elected in 2009, has a wide range of controversial opinions, as colourful as the pink suits he is known to wear.

"Gerard is much more hardline than many of his colleagues in the party," a party insider says. "He's got very strong views, with many of them too strong for a lot of people."

HuffPost UK spoke to a dozen sources, including current and former colleagues of Batten, both on and off the record, to find out more about the controversial top Ukipper.

'IT'S NOT LIKE HE WANTS TO KILL ALL MUSLIMS'

Batten, the party's "immigration and Islamism" spokesman, hit the headlines in February when he said he still agreed with a "charter of Muslim understanding" that he had originally proposed in 2006. British Muslims, according to Batten's document, were meant to sign as a "code of conduct" which would signify that they rejected violence and accepted equality.

The MEP also argued that some Muslim texts also required updating, particularly those bits he claimed say "kill Jews wherever you find them". He said: "If they say they cannot revise their thinking on those issues, then who's got the problem us or them?"

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Meet Gerard Batten, The UKIP MEP Scare-Mongering About Islam, Immigrants And Bilderberg