Why are the Conservatives so serene after losing the Clacton by-election and seeing their vote collapse in Heywood and Middleton? It is not that the party has finally decided endless fighting is no longer a good idea, but that it is holding its breath for the Rochester and Strood by-election. If Mark Reckless, the second Ukip defector, wins this, then the meltdown in David Cameron’s party will make the Labour response this week look positively icy.
The Tories had quickly accepted Douglas Carswell would win in Clacton and so there was little excuse for even their more febrile factions to panic. But the party believes it has a good chance of winning, partly because it’s only the 271st friendliest seat for Ukip, and partly because Reckless does not have Carswell’s personal popularity.
They must keep Rochester in order to deter other would-be defectors. If a seat as tricky to win as this falls to Nigel Farage’s party, then other wavering MPs may well decide Ukip can make even apparently safe Tory seats entirely unsafe, and jump ship.
So it’s no surprise the party plans to fight this by-election hard. It has to. Some are boasting of an aggressive campaign to wear Reckless down psychologically, surmising that he’s far less robust an individual than Carswell (he has already sounded rather ratty in local radio interviews). Former colleagues also claim Reckless is too socially awkward to appeal to voters without the Tory brand, with one former ally saying ‘he regards voters like they are some sort of specimen in a science lab’. But Tory sources deny the campaign will be so personal. The official plan is for the Tories to contrast their serious offer for the country with a ‘circus from Ukip, with Farage having a pint’. They also think their postal primary to select a candidate will grab constituents’ attention.
This will be a lengthy by-election campaign, with polling day planned for late November, because a drawn-out fight might wear Ukip down. MPs are so keen to visit the constituency that whips have decided they won’t bother forcing backbenchers to make at least three visits, as they have done in previous campaigns. Grant Shapps’ cheesy-yet-effective platoon of young activists, Team 2015, will also be putting in a good show with their branded T-shirts and by-election romances. Many members feel personally betrayed by Reckless, who had until recently been promising to join them on their ‘road trips’. The Clacton by-election showed the Tories conceding defeat from the very day of campaigning: this is much more like the Newark by-election, where the party united to save Patrick Mercer’s former seat from Nigel Farage.
So the Tories are keen for a good dirty fight. But can they really win? One campaign machine insider points out Ukip won’t be splitting its resources between two constituencies as it did with Clacton and Heywood – and Farage’s party still did incredibly well in both seats.
Other former colleagues of Reckless feel he has been rather underestimated by the party. He apparently loves door knocking far more than many smoother Tory types, and impressed many with his organisational abilities in the EU Budget revolt. He may also benefit from personal attacks: if you’re a voter in Rochester who hates Westminster and you see the members of the Establishment lashing out at the man representing the anti-politics party, you may conclude the Ukip candidate is onto something.
And there’s the small matter of the Tory squeeze message of ‘vote Ukip, get Miliband’, which seems to have had only a limited effect on voters who think one mainstream party is as bad as the other. It contains the arrogant assumption would-be Ukip defectors still really belong to the Conservatives, if only someone could knock them out of the silly phase they’re going through. One MP who is normally very supportive of CCHQ says ‘that message has limited traction and didn’t come across very well from Grant Shapps on Friday morning’.
So what if these weaknesses in the Tory campaign combine to produce a Ukip victory? One senior party figure says it’ll be the end of ‘the increasingly lightweight’ Shapps, as the Tory leadership is already putting great pressure on the party chairman. But even worse than a scalp in the government, it will lead to frenzied demands from backbenchers for David Cameron to announce a seriously radical policy on freedom of movement in the European Union. The Prime Minister merely told his party conference that he would get what Britain needed, but already MPs such as Bernard Jenkin are demanding more. If Cameron hasn’t produced something before polling day in Rochester, he will have little choice but to announce something hefty after a defeat, or face prolonged trouble from his backbenches.
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