What made Mark Reckless decide to defect? Coffee House earlier revealed the timeline that led to the Tory MP standing on the conference stage in Doncaster today, but after his announcement, he sat down with a small group of journalists and explained why he’d decided that Ukip was the right party for him. It started with a row in Oxfordshire.
Before explaining, Reckless first refused a glass of wine, and when it was pointed out that sipping water was a little unusual for a Ukipper, he told the group that ‘I’m not a big drinker’, adding sheepishly ‘I had an unfortunate incident some time ago as some of you will recall’. Other Ukippers in the room were merrily consuming wine to toast their latest defection as he spoke.
Reckless’s grievances stretch back far longer than the 1922 Committee meeting where, like Douglas Carswell, he started to think the Prime Minister wasn’t serious about EU reform. His account of a conversation at a Tory party away day (which was feted at the time for improving backbench relations) is worth reproducing in full:
‘I hope I wasn’t vicious about [Cameron]. I wouldn’t want to be. I don’t have any personal animosity against him. I felt that the AV referendum was a mistake and it was absolutely extraordinary to give an AV referendum in advance without getting the boundary changes agreed, that was, you know, a terrible political mistake that the government made.
‘You ask about moments where I lost faith in David Cameron, well I’ll give you two of those actually. One we were at a Parliamentary away day and Lynton Crosby was saying from the stage for the Prime Minister how important it was for everyone to be united, and all say the same thing and not to rebel against the government or say anything different and the rather wonderful Sarah Wollaston interrupted and said well actually I find that part of why people vote for me in my constituency is they see me as someone who is independent minded who will come to their own decisions.
‘And after the session ended, I was coincidentally sitting next to Sarah and the Prime Minister sort of came over to her and said well Sarah the thing you have to understand is when you rebel when you vote against me, you never change anything, you just make us look divided, you never change anything and I sort of interrupted at this point and said what about the size of the EU budget? And the Prime Minister sort of snapped at me and said, I’d have cut that anyhow, at which point Sarah said with dripping sarcasm, really, Prime Minister?
‘And then there was a bit of a scene and Lynton Crosby came over to break things up. And that was meant to be the Prime Minister’s charm offensive, but I thought it was a conceit that he was just going to cut the EU budget, they’d set up a whole thing that their objective was to freeze it so it didn’t go up.
‘And the only reason that was cut was because of what we did in Parliament because I won that vote and a majority in parliament voted for a cut and when Germany and Merkel looked at that they said actually we’d prefer to keep these people in the EU paying something than risk them leaving and it was because of that we got the cut and the fact the Prime Minister told me actually he’d have done it anyhow I just thought that was a conceit.’
He also said the party was failing to ‘fess up’ to voters when it had broken promises, claiming that ‘rather than admit.. and apologise’ that net migration was not falling to the tens of thousands but instead going up, ‘it’s just pushed under the carpet’.
On whether Cameron should resign, Reckless said ‘that’s a matter for him and the Conservative party and not for me now’. He then explained in further detail the 1922 Committee meeting where he and Carswell started to contemplate leaving.
Reckless, who was sitting next to Carswell, had asked the first question of the meeting, on why the party was telling voters it was regaining control of justice and home affairs in the EU while opting back in to so many of the major measures. The Prime Minister’s response astonished the two MPs:
‘And rather than just saying it was part of the deal with the Lib Dems, the Prime Minister came out and actually passionately argued for the European arrest warrant, despite the fact that, and you may also be aware that he and Chris Grayling had been arguing against Theresa May and Nick Clegg on this subject only weeks beforehand and as a backbencher he passionately argued against the European arrest warrant, yet now he just turned to him and sort of, you know, had a sort of look of great sincerity and put this sort of you know huge passionate argument in favour of the arrest warrant as the only way to catch terrorists.
‘It I think undermined our sort of belief and trust in the Prime Minister because I didn’t think he believed that or at least he hadn’t, or wasn’t saying anything and then John Baron asked a question about what we were going to renegotiate and he said that if I was to get back some of the powers that some people wanted, it would be almost like associate membership, as if that was self-evidently a bad thing rather than what most MPs in that room and most in the country wanted and I think that was the moment that Douglas and I decided actually that he wasn’t serious about it.’
Carswell jumped first, but before he announced he was leaving the Tory party and triggering a by-election in Clacton he set up a meeting between Reckless and Nigel Farage. The pair talked about Farage’s vision for Ukip and what he wanted the party to be. They did not discuss the policies due to be unveiled in Doncaster, and Reckless claimed he did not seek assurances from the Ukip leader either. But he does ‘hope that I would be able to discuss aspects of the manifesto and perhaps pitch in with ideas’.
Extraordinarily, the defecting MP suggested that the whips had never directly asked him whether he was going to defect. He said:
‘Discussions have been perfectly, perfectly friendly and I haven’t really been asked the outright questions point blank that have required me to say something that wasn’t true.’
He claimed that when he was spotted being lunched by Michael Gove shortly after Douglas Carswell defected, the pair were mostly discussing Reckless’s plans to clean up the whips’ office, rather than what he thought of Ukip. He said ‘I was very pleased with my lunch and he gave assurances that some of the stuff that’s gone on in the whips’ office in the past wouldn’t happen in the future. That was the major part of our discussion.’ Gove didn’t offer him anything to get him to stay, though he did get the sense that the whips were trying to keep him on side. He described the chief whip as ‘a decent honourable man’ and ‘one of my favourite people in the Conservative party’; a compliment Gove would probably happily have done without in exchange for no defection.
But he accepted that while he didn’t think he’d told any barefaced lies to colleagues, he ‘left people with a different impression than what was the case, I wouldn’t say that I had lied’.
He says he was ‘pulled’ rather than pushed to Ukip, arguing that he believes ‘in the fresh approach that Ukip offers’. He reminded the group of the atmosphere in the hall, where members were chanting ‘UKIP, UKIP, UKIP!’ with excitement, saying:
‘You’ve been at this conference, just the level of enthusiasm, the belief, the political commitment, you have a vague memory of how the Conservative party used to be 15 or 20 years ago, it wasn’t like this, but it was more like it than it was now.’
It’s right that the Conservative party conference will not have the same atmosphere as the Ukip conference did today. Much of the energy this coming week may well be anger, rather than excitement. And Reckless’s claims about the way the Prime Minister has handled his party and his vision for Europe may well be turning round and round in colleagues’ minds, too. After today, it’s impossible for anyone to say with any certainty that Ukip won’t get more MPs coming over to their cause.
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