He left the House of Commons in 1986 in order to present a new BBC Television daytime talk show, Kilroy, which ran until 2004.
[2] Kilroy-Silk was born in Birmingham, son of William Silk, a Royal Navy leading stoker, and his wife Minnie Rose (née Rooke).
Robert's mother Rose remarried in 1946, to family friend John Francis Kilroy, a car worker at the Rootes plant in Warwickshire.
In resigning his seat, he said that he had been assaulted by members of the Militant group and was reported to have had a scuffle with left-wing Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn.
His recruitment and celebrity significantly raised the profile of the party,[1][2] further helped by his enlisting of actress Joan Collins who attended a UKIP press conference at Kilroy-Silk's invitation.
The next day, in an interview on Breakfast with Frost (BBC), Kilroy-Silk expressed ambition to lead UKIP and criticised the party's leader Roger Knapman.
Following this, businessman and friend Paul Sykes announced his intention to cease his partial funding of UKIP and to return his support to the Conservatives, as he feared that the Euro-sceptic vote might be split.
[citation needed] On 27 October 2004, Kilroy-Silk officially announced that he had withdrawn from the UKIP whip in the European Parliament, branding the party "incompetent".
[citation needed] In Manchester on 3 December 2004 at about 7.15 p.m., Kilroy-Silk was attacked outside the Girls' High School, when a bucket of manure was thrown over him as he arrived for a recording of the BBC Radio 4's Any Questions.
He tried to press charges against a man who, he said, "smashed a bottle of water against the side of his head" while the politician was being interviewed by a European television crew outside a supermarket.
The alleged assailant said he had squirted Kilroy-Silk with water from a plastic bottle before running away; this account was confirmed by the TV crew, which also filmed the incident.
They went on to complain that Kilroy-Silk was not "fulfilling the pledge he made on becoming an MEP, to serve the electorate of his region" and to call for him to "either do the job for which he is paid, or get out and leave it to those who can.
[citation needed] Kilroy-Silk, who was elected to the European Parliament on the UKIP list, remained a member of the Veritas Party, but sat as an Independent MEP.
[17] In 1992, Kilroy made a comment regarding Ireland in his Daily Express column, under the guise of attacking Ray MacSharry, a former Irish government minister and EU commissioner, whom he described as "a redundant second-rate politician from a country peopled by priests, peasants and pixies".
Bodi added: Kilroy-Silk's suspension was precipitated by a flurry of web messages and emails circulated by various Muslim organisations notifying people of the outrage.
They contained a chronology of Kilroyisms, names and contacts of editors at the BBC and the Sunday Express, and instructions on how to make complaints.
[24]The article was strongly criticised by the Commission for Racial Equality, whose head, Trevor Phillips, said that the affair could have a "hugely unhelpful" effect.
[24] By contrast, Ibrahim Nawar, the head of Arab Press Freedom Watch, came out in support of Kilroy-Silk in a Daily Telegraph article.
It ran until 2004 when it was cancelled by the BBC in reaction to the publication of an article by Kilroy-Silk entitled "We owe Arabs nothing" which was published in the Sunday Express on 4 January 2004.
[citation needed] In November 2008 Derek Clark MEP complained that Kilroy-Silk was taking his parliamentary wage while being paid to appear in the reality TV show I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!.