Ukip launched its general election campaign poster today. Nigel Farage was there, both in person and in print, with a very large image of his face emblazoned across the new poster. Mark Reckless was there, posing for photos with the party’s ‘pledge card’ (although unless he has very big pockets or an enormous wallet, the one pictured is probably a poster for people’s windows rather than the real pledge card).
And here is our pledge card pic.twitter.com/9o5ArIW5Um
— Mark Reckless (@MarkReckless) March 30, 2015
But Reckless isn’t the party’s only MP, is he? Where was Douglas Carswell?
Carswell was back in his constituency campaigning today, and received a barrage of calls from reporters asking why he didn’t attend the launch. This may be taken as further evidence that he isn’t on the same page as the rest of his party, particularly Farage, but Carswell told Coffee House:
‘It doesn’t say anything about the relationship between me and my party which is comfortable.’
But it did seem rather odd that the Clacton MP, now sitting on a majority of 12,000, was back in his seat knocking on doors when Reckless, defending a much smaller majority of 2,930, was there, and Nigel Farage, fighting to win South Thanet, managed to make it too. Carswell has, though, just got back from a week away campaigning with other Ukip candidates in Redditch, Shrewsbury and Sutton. Now, he says, his priority is Clacton.
‘Chris Patten once did a brilliant job of telling Conservative candidates how to win their seats in 1992, and he lost his own. Michael Portillo did the same, and when i was elected for the first time a terribly nice MP called Tim Collins came and helped me and he lost his seat.
‘There’s no such thing as a safe seat. I genuinely mean that. I think the fact that I won a majority convincingly in a by-election six months ago is actually not that important: the score is nil, the slate is clean, we’re starting from scratch.’
It’s worth bearing in mind that Carswell built his majority himself when a Conservative MP, working on his own brand and using all sorts of clever techniques to develop his constituency party that his Tory colleagues really admired. So the man knows how to campaign, and also how difficult it is to retain voters’ support. He has always operated on his own terms, following his own wisdom rather than central party diktats, so perhaps it’s no surprise at all that he wasn’t at a launch of a poster.
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