Ukip is mad, bad and nasty, and intends real harm

The Conservative party is handling the United Kingdom Independence party problem in a worrying way. Ukip is not an embarrassment; it is not a distraction; it is not an understandable but naive reaction to the issues of the day; it is not a theoretically appealing movement whose practical consequences could sadly prove perverse. And supporting Ukip is not a forgivable but counterproductive thing for a Tory-minded voter to do.

Ukip is mad, bad and nasty. Its ill-doing is intentional. It is nothing like the Conservative party. Its aims are hugely different from those of the Tories, and profoundly wrong. For any former Tory voter, supporting Ukip is an act of idiocy and of betrayal, and unforgivable. Ukip people are not (in Michael Howard’s term) ‘gadflies’, they are scorpions.

Dangerous as it is to draw concluding thoughts from an event which, at the time of writing, has not concluded, I am not encouraged by the way the Conservative party gathered at Bournemouth is approaching this tremendous threat to the party’s recovery. John Redwood set the tone at the outset by expressing (in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph) more sorrow than anger at Ukip’s progress.

Mr Redwood seems to have set himself the task of sweet-talking disaffected Tories back into the fold. He was at pains to identify himself and his party with Ukip’s anti-EU stance. The subtext of what he said was as plain as it was calculated: ‘If you want what Ukip wants, you will find that the Conservative party offers the best chance of achieving it for you. Voting Ukip actually imperils Ukip’s own political goals, for it splits the right-wing vote.’

Mr Redwood is a thoughtful man and I have always admired his stubborn respect for argument, but on this issue he is wrong. He risks feeding the crocodile. Finding elements in Ukip’s programme with which he can agree, he hopes to make of these shared opinions a bridge across which errant Tory voters may return to the fold; but there is a vast gulf between the two parties and they are in mortal combat for the same voters.