Listen! The sound you hear in the damp Tory grassroots as they gather in Manchester for the party conference this weekend is not the noise of a questing vole, but the first, faint squeals of panic as the General Election nears and the cry goes up : ‘What on earth are we going to do about Ukip?’
Already, commentators of a Cameroon bent have started to scratch their heads and gnaw their knuckles as they contemplate the awful truth: without those lost Ukip votes the Conservative party will not win re-election, yet if Cameron remains as their leader, that support will never be forthcoming. Last week the Telegraph’s Iain Martin concluded a column in which he grappled with this conundrum by admitting that he didn’t know what the Tories can do about Ukip; and this week the Spectator’s James Forsyth and Toby Young have both put their minds to the same problem and effectively come up with the same answer: the two parties must unite.
Well, I have news for the siren voices trying to lure those thousands of departed Ukip voters back on to the Tory rocks: we won’t have David Cameron and his catastrophic clique, not at any price.
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