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George Eaton: David Cameron’s reponse to Ukip defection is crucial

The biggest error that the Tories could make would be to mistake the noise for a signal and to shift Rightwards
Crucial response: David Cameron (Picture: EPA)
George Eaton
1 September 2014

While in opposition, David Cameron kept a picture of Harold Macmillan above his desk in Westminster. As Parliament reconvenes after the summer recess, the Prime Minister will have had cause to reflect again on the truth of his political hero’s most renowned dictum: that it is “Events, dear boy, events” that are most likely to disrupt the business of government.

Last Thursday, Conservative HQ sent out an invitation to party activists to attend a drinks reception with Douglas Carswell this month. Hours later he became the first Tory MP to defect to Ukip. By Sunday, an opinion poll giving him a 44-point lead over his former party had all but confirmed that he will become the first person to win election to Parliament under the Farageists’ purple banner.

When Ukip triumphed in the European elections in May, Conservative strategists consoled themselves with the belief that this would be the party’s high-water mark. As the General Election approached and as the economy continued to recover, the expectation was that those voters led astray by Nigel Farage would begin to return to the Tory fold.

The defection has destroyed that calculation. As one Conservative minister admits to me: “We’re tearing up all our forecasts.” With Carswell a permanent presence on the Commons benches, it will become far harder to dismiss the party as a vehicle of protest. “If you vote Ukip, you get Ukip” is the message Farage will relentlessly deliver to his audience.

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But less significant than the defection itself could be how Cameron responds to it. He will face immediate demands to form an electoral pact with Ukip, to table extravagant renegotiation demands to the new EU council president Donald Tusk (and to campaign for withdrawal if he fails), as well as to stiffen his stance on immigration. “This is a chance for us to flex our muscles again,” one senior Eurosceptic tells me.

In response, the Prime Minister should hold his nerve. A pact with Ukip would risk further toxifying the Tory brand (53 per cent of the public have a negative view of the party) and, as his failure to block the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker as head of the European Commission demonstrated, EU leaders do not give in to blackmail diplomacy. The biggest error that the Conservatives could make would be to mistake the noise for a signal and to shift Rightwards, alienating the centrist voters they need, not least in London, if they are ever to win a majority again.

Labour, meanwhile, is divided between those who view Ukip’s rise with equanimity as a helping hand to victory in 2015 and those fearful of the threat the party already poses to the opposition. One shadow cabinet minister complains to me that Labour is still “recklessly complacent” over Ukip. Recent polling by Lord Ashcroft put Farage’s party in first place in Thurrock (the opposition’s number- two target seat) and in second place in Great Yarmouth (another target), pushing Labour into third.

If Ukip achieves its ambition of becoming a truly national party, capable of winning seats off both Labour and the Tories, the result will be to make further hung parliaments even more likely. Not the least irony is that such an outcome would only entrench the “broken promises” and cynical compromises of government that Farage has so profited from.

George Eaton is political editor of the New Statesman