Nigel Farage was facing a storm of protest last night after one of his MEPs was revealed to have coached Ukip candidates to emulate Hitler.

Bill Etheridge described the Nazi dictator as a ‘magnetic and forceful public speaker’ who ‘achieved a great deal’ – and said the candidates should copy the rhetorical style deployed by Hitler at the Nuremberg rallies.

Mr Farage is on the brink of formally confirming his intention to stand for Parliament in the Kent seat of Thanet South.

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In full flow: Bill Etheridge addressing the UKIP Young Independence conference (left) the day after a training day at which he commended Hitler's rhetoric (right)

This new disclosure will dismay the Ukip leader as he battles to de-toxify the party’s image following a string of rows over extremism.

Mr Etheridge, who recently wrote a book celebrating golliwogs, made his astonishing remarks last weekend while training young Ukip members planning to stand in council or parliamentary elections.

The West Midlands MEP was hired to give a class on public speaking at the Young Independence Conference in Birmingham.

He suggested that the audience should take their oratorical tips from ‘a hateful figure who achieved a great deal’.

Mr Etheridge, 44, said: ‘Look back to the most magnetic and forceful public speaker possibly in history. When Hitler gave speeches, and many of the famous ones were at rallies, at the start he walks, back and forth, looked at people – there was a silence, he waited minutes just looking out at people, fixing them with his gaze.

Anger: The West Midlands MEP has sparked anger after tipping the Nazi leader as a 'forceful public speaker'

‘They were looking back and he would do it for a while. And then they were so desperate for him to start, when he started speaking they were hanging on his every word.’

He added: ‘I’m not saying direct copy – pick up little moments.’

When a member of the audience asked Mr Etheridge, who was tasked by his party to deliver the conference, how they should use social media for pro-Ukip campaigning, he warned: ‘If you think for even a second that what you say can be screwed, twisted and spun, do not allow that video to be posted by people.’

Last night Labour MP Mike Gapes described the training session as ‘unbelievable’.

He said: ‘I thought nothing could surprise me any more, but this just goes to show that Farage has completely failed to clean up his party.

‘One of his MEPs training young candidates to speak like Hitler? Simply unbelievable.’

During the past year, Ukip has been embarrassed by a series of racist and sexist outbursts by its activists.

One candidate said that the comedian Lenny Henry should emigrate to a ‘black country’.

Look back to the most magnetic and forceful public speaker in history: Hitler

Another compared the family of murdered Stephen Lawrence to apes. And a Ukip councillor suggested that January’s floods were linked to the Government’s decision to legalise gay marriage.

Mr Etheridge was one of 24 Ukip MEPs elected in May and is planning to stand in Dudley North in the General Election.

He was suspended by the Conservative Party in 2011 after he posed on Facebook with a golliwog.

Shortly after his suspension he wrote the book Britain: A Post-Political Correctness Society – featuring a picture of two of the dolls on its cover.

In it he argued that ‘the political and social elite have cravenly surrendered to the diktat of the Politically Correct dogma that has crushed free speech, smashed enterprise and reduced Britain to a mere shadow of its former self’.

Mr Etheridge’s speech at a training day before the Birmingham conference was addressed to a 40-strong audience of under 30-year-olds, three-quarters of whom said that they were planning to stand in elections for the party.

After the ‘Hitler workshop’, other speakers, including Mr Etheridge’s fellow Ukip MEP Tim Aker, talked about policy, campaigning and the use of social media.

Last night, Mr Etheridge stressed to The Mail on Sunday that he had also mentioned other public speakers in his tutorial.

Under fire: Ministers are calling on Nigel Farage (right) to respond to the latest in a number of un-PC controversies that have marred his party. It comes after Bill Etheridge wrote a book celebrating golliwogs (left)

At one point he also name-checked the wartime Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and made clear that he thought that both Mussolini and Hitler changed the world in a ‘very negative way’.

In a statement, Mr Etheridge said: ‘I was talking about a whole range of public speakers and the techniques they used. I also mentioned Tony Blair.

‘At no point did I endorse Hitler or anybody else. I was merely discussing public speaking and the techniques used down the years.

‘Hitler and the Nazis were monsters and I am angry that I am even being asked questions about whether we would wish to be linked with them. Yet another cheap shot to deal with from the media.’

Mr Farage is expected to announce in the coming days that he will be standing for the Commons in Thanet South at next year’s General Election, after party officials in the constituency let slip this weekend that he is on their shortlist.

The most recent local polls indicate that the Ukip leader – who has said that he wants to fight a contest in his native Kent and previously identified the Thanet seat as his most likely option – would win if he ran.

The Conservatives have selected Craig Mackinlay, who briefly led Ukip in 1997 and joined the Conservative Party in 2005.

The choice is an attempt to defend the seat against Mr Farage.

The sitting Conservative MP, the pro-European Laura Sandys, has already announced that she is standing down at the Election.

Mr Farage was not available for comment yesterday.

...and revelling at Nazi salute party, man who wants to be BBC chairman

National outrage: Nicholas Prettejohn joined members of the far-right Monday Club in 1980

One of the leading contenders to become the new chairman of the BBC Trust once attended gatherings of a far-Right group who gave Nazi salutes, sang songs glorifying Adolf Hitler and campaigned in favour of ‘racial purity’.

Nicholas Prettejohn, a City grandee who has served as an adviser to George Osborne, is on a shortlist of candidates who are being interviewed for the £110,000 role at the top of the Corporation.

But it has now emerged that when he was a student at Oxford University, Mr Prettejohn attended a meeting of the Monday Club, an offshoot of the Conservative Party that has campaigned for voluntary repatriation of ethnic minorities.

A photograph unearthed by The Mail on Sunday shows Mr Prettejohn, then a 20-year-old student at Balliol College, at a Monday Club event in 1980 which caused national outrage at the time.

Newspapers reported attendees had shouted ‘Sieg heil’, talked about ‘racial purity’ and sung Tomorrow Belongs To Me, a song performed in the musical Cabaret by members of the Hitler Youth – despite the fact that the event was held close to a memorial to members of the college killed fighting the Nazis.

James Sainsbury, son of Sir Timothy Sainsbury, a former Conservative Minister, was pictured at the event performing a Nazi salute.

Mr Sainsbury, who was 19 at the time, later apologised, saying he had been ‘very, very drunk indeed’: he received an OBE in 2013 in recognition of his charitable works.

There is no suggestion that Mr Prettejohn engaged in or condoned the chanting and saluting.

Eight months before the dinner, Mr Prettejohn had been elected president of the famous Oxford Union debating society – with his political opponents claiming he had been swept to victory by a ‘Monday Club machine’ which mobilised Right-wing supporters.

The Conservative Party severed its ties with the Monday Club in 2001, when then leader Iain Duncan Smith warned the group that its racist policies were damaging public perception of the party.

The race to succeed Lord Patten as BBC Trust chairman was blown wide open last month after the favourite, Lord Coe, unexpectedly pulled out of the running.

Mr Prettejohn, 54, who was recently appointed chairman of pensions and investment firm Scottish Widows, became one of a group of City advisers to Mr Osborne after the 2010 General Election. He became a BBC trustee last December.

The Chancellor is understood to have been heavily involved in the recruitment process for the Trust chairman, and called for the shortlist to feature candidates with strong City experience.

Other potential contenders include Tory peer Patience Wheatcroft, a former Times journalist, and Suzanna Taverne, a BBC trustee and former senior manager at the British Museum.

Government sources say that although Mr Prettejohn is a ‘strong candidate’, No 10 is keen for the successful candidate to be a woman.

A BBC spokesman said: ‘Nick is on holiday at the moment and is not available to comment.’