Death tax move and welfare cuts: Tories panic over Ukip jumpers

David Cameron and the Tory high command have launched a search-and-destroy operation against would-be Ukip defectors after turncoat Mark Reckless jumped ship on Saturday. But the tough questions are being asked by former Cameron aides about Cameron’s own leadership.

Fearful that a third defector is going to leave for Ukip – Chris Kelly and Adam Holloway are the gossip-mongers’ current favourites - Cameron and his team are panicking, pushing out populist measures in a bid to shore up party support.

Chancellor George Osborne has already grabbed the headlines with a ‘death tax’ cut which will enable wealthier pensioners to leave more money to their children when they die (it will affect relatively few people) and today he is expected to promise a fresh attack on benefit scroungers in his speech on the economy.

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Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor, told Radio 4’s Today programme that the attack on scroungers was designed to challenge “not just the Labour Party” but also the Tories’ coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats. But the Mole suspects the welfare curbs are meant to appeal to the right-wing Tory grass-roots supporters who are contemplating voting for Ukip in the May 2015 general election.

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The Tory high command have good reason to panic after the opening of their party conference – the last before the general election – was sabotaged by the double whammy of the Reckless defection and the resignation of Brooks Newmark as Minister for Civil Society for “sexting” himself in his paisley PJs to an undercover journalist at the Daily Mirror, posing as a nubile lovely called Sophie Wittams (no – you could not make it up).

The Tories may not be able to stop Douglas Carswell winning the by-election he has triggered at Clacton on 9 October but they have drawn a line in the sand at the ancient castle at Rochester in Kent where Reckless’s defection will trigger another by-election, probably in November.

Tory party workers verbally roughed up Reckless in a Rochester pub so much so that he abandoned a walkabout photo-op with his new boss, Nigel Farage. Conservative Party chairman Grant Shapps said Reckless had “lied and lied and lied again” when he had denied to party officials that he was thinking of defecting.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister told a rally of grass-roots activists hosted by Conservative Home last night that the party was going to “throw everything we can” at defectors to Ukip - “we are coming for you”.

And Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, used his pithy column in the Daily Telegraph this morning to warn other would-be defectors contemplating jumping “headlong into the silage” that they are “nutters” who can only help Ed Miliband.

All this is perplexing for Cameron’s former aides, who see Cameron drifting further and further away from the modernising agenda he set himself when he defeated a right-wing challenge by David Davis to win the party leadership in 2005.

Cameron’s first chief of staff, Alex Dean, now a communications consultant, told Sky News that Cameron’s judgment had been called into question by the two resignations at the weekend. Not least because Cameron had appointed Brooks Newmark - as a founder of Women2Win – to answer the charge that Cameron’s leadership was too much of a lads’ club and lacked appeal for women.

Cameron’s former speech writer, Daily Mail journalist Ian Birrell, went further on the Andrew Marr Show, saying Cameron had “gone too far onto Ukip territory” and the “shifts and lurches” in strategy had made things worse.

“Ukip isn’t about Europe or immigration,” sais Birrell. “It is about disconnect – it is a disbelief that politicians can be trusted. When you come into office saying one thing and you shift ground a bit or substantially on ‘greenery’ and Europe, it gives voters one more cause for concern. Actually it helps Ukip.”

The modernisation of the Tory party – in particular the embracing of gay marriage - is blamed for driving more grass- roots supporters into the arms of Farage and Ukip. But Birrell said to those like David Davis, who are touring the party conference calling for a further right-wing lurch to counter Ukip, that at the 2010 general election Cameron’s modernisation agenda had delivered the biggest number of Tory seats since 1931.

Cameron has got his own keynote speech to deliver on Wednesday when he has to choose which way to jump – more modernisation or more populist right-wing measures to tempt the Ukippers?