POLITICAL campaign skills picked up on the streets of Bootle are to form the centrepiece of the UK Independence Party’s strategy for the 2009 Euro elections.

Merseyside-born Paul Nuttall, 32, is the youngest chairman since the party was created in 1993, and is hoping his youthful enthusiasm can push the right-wing anti-European Union party to new heights.

He wants to replicate the party’s [partial] electoral success in his home-town of Bootle to more than double its current nine MEPs to 20.

Mr Nuttall hopes to be one of them, topping the party’s candidacy list in the North West for the elections, having taken the place of retiring academic John Whittaker.

In 2006, he stood in Bootle’s Derby ward and took 21% of the vote, rising to the 38% he took this year.

While he was in second place both times, he believes UKIP will take the seat in the next local elections in 2010.

He claims the secret to the increase in votes is a combination of hard work and “letting people know the facts”, telling people that many of the things they are unhappy about are driven by the demands of the EU.

“More than 3,000 working groups [in the EU] will dictate 75% of the laws of our country,” he says.

The former Savio High School pupil has spent the past two years working in the European Parliament researching and learning the intricacies of the organisation, having previously lectured on politics.

Since being made chairman of UKIP in September, he is now based again in the UK, living in Liverpool’s Hatton Garden with his wife, Linda, a PR expert who works in Manchester.

“In many ways, I am pro- European. I have lived in Barcelona and Brussels, I just don’t like the EU.”