Tory MPs return to Westminster for the first time in more than a month with just one thing on their minds.
Forget David Cameron's much-trailed statement on new anti-terror laws (which appear to be unravelling before they are announced this afternoon). Forget the threat of war in the Ukraine. What is really focusing Tory backbenchers’ minds is the threat to their own seats from Nigel Farage's resurgent Ukip.
Following yesterday’s release of a Survation poll showing Douglas Carswell is heading for a landslide victory in Clacton after defecting from the Tories to Ukip, The Independent is now reporting that up to 100 Tory MPs are ready to commit themselves in their personal manifestos at the next general election to voting for Britain to leave the EU – ‘Brexit’ - just as Ukip wants.
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The Independent’s political editor, Andrew Grice, says this amounts to a vote of No Confidence in Cameron's hopes of negotiating a better European deal for Britain before an in/out referendum in 2017.
The real importance of this story, however, is that such pledges could pave the way for an electoral pact at local level with Ukip. As The Mole reported on Friday, David Cameron is dead set against such a pact. The way things are going, he could be powerless to stop it.
Ukip will be in the position where it can challenge any Tory MP to say whether he or she will sign up to the pledge to vote for Brexit. If the Tory agrees, Ukip won’t stand against them. If the Tory refuses, Ukip will put up a candidate and risk splitting the right-of-centre vote. In some seats, this could result in a Labour victory.
Of course, such a pact won’t be welcomed by those Ukip candidates who will be required to step aside.
But they will have to lump it. Nigel Farage’s objective is to seize a handful of seats in the general election, enough to form a power-sharing wedge in a hung parliament. He would rather concentrate on winnable seats than spread the Ukip effort too thinly. If some Ukip candidates get their toes trodden on, that will be a small price to pay.
Right on cue, the Tory grassroots website ConservativeHome, financed by Lord Ashcroft, has today produced its own wish list of policies for the 2015 general election – and it includes a pledge to restore British control over its own borders. Quite simply, such a pledge cannot be fulfilled without Britain leaving the EU, because Jean Claude-Juncker, the incoming EU Commission president, has made it clear to David Cameron that the free movement of people across Europe is non-negotiable.
In the meantime, Cameron will update MPs today on his talks with the EU Council at the weekend. He has come back with all sorts of claims that he is on track for getting what he wants in future negotiations because Donald Tusk, the Polish Prime Minister, has been named as the new president of the Council of Ministers – and Tusk is a man Cameron sees as an ally.
The Sunday Telegraph headlined the story of Tusk’s appointment as ‘Victory in EU for Cameron’, which will be regarded by the 100 Tory rebels as a bit premature to say the least.
There is some good news for Cameron today – and that’s that Carswell’s defection does not appear to have opened the floodgates as had been predicted.
But as Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor, said this morning, while Tory leaders "are not seeing a great trail of Tory MPs joining Ukip … they are seeing every other sign of the deep anxiety in the Tory Party about their fate at the next election".
Most telling of all, said Robinson, is the announcement by little-known Tory MP Chris Kelly that he is not going to contest the next election. Kelly won the super marginal seat of Dudley South with a majority of 3,856 at the 2010 election.
As Mike Smithson at Political Betting points out, this makes him the eighth first-time Tory MP who entered the Commons in 2010 to give up Westminster politics after only one five-year term. This is bad news for Tory HQ because “one of the electoral dynamics that we have seen is that first-time incumbents do better than the national average for their parties when they seek to retain their seats for the first time”.
Of course, Cameron could always adopt the blustering approach to would-be deserters of Sir Nicholas Soames, grandson of Sir Winston Churchill, who has attacked Carswell for "rank disloyalty to a party that gave him a place in Parliament". Yes, but… A leader in the Daily Mail today points out that Sir Nicholas’s grandfather crossed the floor not once but twice.
