Now that Ukip has bagged a seat that the Tories thought they could win, other would-be defectors may well be having a good long think about their chances. The fact that Mark Reckless only won Rochester with a 2,920 majority over the Conservatives may well lead wavering MPs to conclude that it isn’t safe to go over as their seats will be vulnerable once again in 2015. But then again they might conclude that all bets are off anyway, given Reckless wasn’t even supposed to win this seat.
Michael Gove yesterday claimed he was 100% certain that there would be no more defections from his party to Nigel Farage’s tribe. But he would say that, wouldn’t he, even if it risks making him look a bit of a chump when someone does defect. One of the reasons he did say it was that Gove has spoken to every potential defector and can therefore produce evidence that they lied to him by saying they would not leave the Tories. But that didn’t work as well as the party had hoped in Rochester.
Nigel Farage told Today that he’d love for there to be more by-elections, but Ukip sources have been briefing this morning that defections might not come till after Christmas when MPs have spent time with their families. I’d take this line with a pinch of salt, though, as it’s exactly what Douglas Carswell said to me 24 hours before Mark Reckless appeared on the stage at the Ukip conference and announced he was joining the party.
Mark Pritchard has this morning writtenyfor ITV on why he’s not defecting. Other MPs who could defect include John Baron and Philip Hollobone. Baron seems to be pushing his campaign for proper compensation for nuclear test veterans as hard as possible while Number 10 is terrified he might jump. He received a very mollifying answer from the PM who told him to ‘best with me’ (in other words, please don’t defect yet) when Baron told him at PMQs that he was raising this for the third time. You could hear the frustration in the MP’s voice that he has been pushing on this issue for so long, and an ignored MP is a dangerous prospect these days. He raised it again at the 1922 Committee meeting on Wednesday night.
Baron may well get what he wants, which is good news for the test veterans, who are treated the worst in this country out of all test veterans worldwide. But this will make him an extremely expensive MP to keep. One minister with an eye on government spending jokes ‘how much is he going to cost us to keep?’ Some might wonder if spending millions to keep John Baron in the Tory party is worth it, given he has been a key player in so many rebellions. They should remember that he has also been a key player in the party finally adopting a pledge for an EU referendum in 2017 and it was his campaign for legislation guaranteeing this vote that led to Number 10 eventually accepting that an EU referendum bill.
Of course, it might not be a Tory. There is a rumour that Ukip thinks it might be able to lure Austin Mitchell over from Labour. He retires at the next election anyway but his Great Grimsby seat is already a good prospect for Ukip and the debacle over Emily Thornberry’s White Van Man tweet would be a useful trigger for Mitchell.
Based on the early autumn defections, the announcements, if there are more to come, will take us by surprise. We may also be surprised by strange Ukip press conferences where the party appears to announce far less than spinners had led the media to believe, as was the case at the end of the Tory conference where what was widely expected to be a defection turned out to be a man slighted by William Hague increasing his donation to the party. It is still not clear whether someone had bottled out of defecting at the last minute.
But it is safe to say that unlike Michael Gove (who lost £50 last night after betting the Tories would win), no- one can be 100% certain of what’s going to happen between now and the General Election, or indeed what will happen on polling day itself. A fascinating time for political observers, but a terrifying time for politicians.
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