He talks like a UKIP MEP, he looks like a UKIP politician, right down to the rosette with the pound. But Nigel Farage seems to have developed a blind spot for Ashley Mote.
After Mote was convicted of fraud for a second time in Britain's biggest ever expenses scandal, the UKIP leader commented "I knew he was a wrong 'un."
"He was never a UKIP MEP I'm pleased to say. He was elected on a UKIP list. I found out very quickly and I kicked him out even before he took his seat."
But here is the picture Farage would rather forget. Mote in the South Today studio the day after the 2004 election count, one of two UKIP MEPs elected in the South East England constituency.
Mr Farage was top of the list, Mote was number two. It is perfectly true to say that when they realised the charges being brought against him, UKIP acted swiftly to stop him sitting with them in the Brussels Parliament, but they got him there in the first place.
Since then the party has worked much harder to check the background of their candidates, but for five years Mote's campaign against EU corruption and UKIP's ran in parallel - yet it was the European anti-fraud police which flushed Mote out, following an anonymous tip-off.
Sentencing Mote to five years in jail for defrauding nearly half a million pounds of taxpayers money, the judge Mr Justice Stuart-Smith had no doubts about his view.
"You lied, protested, lied and lied again about the monies you had fraudulently claimed as expenses," he told Mote.
"What stands out is the consistency of your dishonesty over nearly five years, the financial scale of your fraud, the rank abuse of the trust that was placed in you by your constituents and the European Parliament, and the financial and reputational damage you have done to the democratic institutions you said you were trying to clean up.
"Your greed and dishonesty were matched only by your hypocrisy, because while this was going on you carried out a high-profile campaign condemning corruption and the improper use of public money in the very institution from which you were leeching it."
It wasn't just the theft of taxpayers' money that is so shocking, but the huge damage that expenses scandals do to the reputation of democratic institutions.
