Further to my previous post, which mentioned Forest’s Stand Up for Liberty shows at The Comedy Store in Manchester, I don’t think I’ve ever told the full story of the 2013 event.

After the success of the 2011 show, I was keen to do it again when the Conservatives returned to Manchester two years later. But this time I wanted to make a whole evening of it and organise three back-to-back events, including Stand Up for Liberty, and promote them under one umbrella - The Liberty Lounge - rather like a mini Freedom Zone which Forest had co-founded with The Freedom Association in 2008. (One day I will reveal the full story of that too, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

First, let me explain how Stand Up for Liberty came about. The Comedy Store Manchester was opened in 2001 as an offshoot of the Comedy Store in London. The latter was founded by Don Ward in 1979 after he visited the original Comedy Store in Los Angeles and brought the idea back with him. In those days there was nothing like it in London or anywhere in Britain apart from the old northern clubs like the Embassy Club in Manchester which was founded by Bernard Manning in 1959.

The northern clubs generally featured ‘old school’ comedy acts, but the Comedy Store in Soho gave a platform to the new wave of ‘alternative’ comedians and helped change the face of comedy (both live and on TV) in the UK. In fact, the national comedy tours that are ten-a-penny these days were unheard of in the late Seventies and early Eighties, let alone the mega gigs by the likes of Peter Kay at the O2 and other arenas. Arguably, that all started with The Comedy Store.

Anyway, I knew that if I booked The Comedy Store in Manchester as the venue for Stand Up for Liberty there was a much greater chance it would work because not only would the venue give the event some instant credibility, I wouldn’t have to worry about booking the acts because The Comedy Store would do it for me because, as I subsequently learned, private events were an important part of their revenue stream.

This is how it worked. For a not unreasonable fee, The Comedy Store would give us exclusive use of the venue on a night they would otherwise be closed, and for that we would have access to the 380-seat auditorium and the large bar on the ground floor. Most important, the venue would book the three acts that were required for a 60-minute show, with each act (one of whom would MC the event) doing 20 minutes.

I was happy to leave the choice of comedians to The Comedy Store but that was because I didn’t know many comedians apart from those that appeared regularly on TV, and I assumed they were outside our budget. In fact, as I mentioned in my previous post, the only act I specifically requested was ‘heavy metal comedian’ Steve Hughes, who I had seen on Live at the Apollo but he wasn’t a household name. (As it happens he was unavailable in 2011 but became our headline act in 2013.) Otherwise, the only guidance I gave The Comedy Store was a preference for ‘libertarian’ leaning comedians who at that time were even thinner on the ground than they are today.

Anyway, the 2013 event was one of three back-to-back events that took place under the umbrella of The Liberty Lounge, with a drinks reception sandwiched between an on stage interview with the then Ukip leader Nigel Farage, and our 60-minute comedy show. And that’s when we ran into trouble, as I shall explain.

A Beer and a Fag with Farage was organised with the Institute of Economic Affairs after I discovered that Farage had been invited by The Freedom Association and the Bruges Group to take part in other fringe events on the same day. It seemed too good an opportunity to miss so we invited him to be interviewed by Mark Littlewood, the IEA’s director-general, at The Comedy Store from 6.00-7.00pm, and he accepted.

It wasn’t the ‘exclusive’ event we would have liked, but we still considered it a bit of a coup. Unfortunately, The Comedy Store took a different view and after they read about it on the Guido Fawkes blog a few weeks before the conference we were notified that A Beer and a Fag with Farage couldn’t go ahead because of ‘security fears’.

To this day I don’t know if those concerns were genuine (it followed an incident in Edinburgh where Farage had been locked in a pub, allegedly for his own safety) or whether it was politically motivated (there was talk of the event posing a risk to The Comedy Store’s ‘brand’), but I do know that Don Ward was involved in the decision-making.

Anyway, emails went back-and-forth for several days, during which I explained that, if we couldn’t go ahead with the Farage event, we would cancel both the drinks reception and Stand Up for Liberty. Re-reading the correspondence, I see that I wrote:

Clearly, it makes no sense to go ahead with an event entitled 'The Liberty Lounge" in the knowledge that one of our key speakers had been denied the opportunity to speak. Given that the meeting is an integral part of our Liberty Lounge event, we would like to request that you review the decision as a matter of urgency.

To their credit (and I include Don Ward), the decision was then taken to allow the Farage meeting to go ahead, and although it didn’t get as much publicity as his appearance at Manchester Town Hall, photos of him supping a glass of beer (and smoking) outside The Comedy Store did appear in the press, with the event featuring in a BBC report - Tory conference: Boris Johnson v Nigel Farage. I believe it also got a mention on the Today programme and PM on Radio 4.

Clips from the interview with Mark Littlewood also featured, fleetingly, in Nigel Farage: Who Are You?, a film directed by Martin Durkin and broadcast on Channel 4 in March 2014.

Below: Nigel Farage outside The Comedy Store, Manchester. Photos: Alamy / PA Images / Dave Thompson

Comedy central: the Farage factor

No laughing matter