Ukip theatricals: the Tory nightmare has barely begun

Nigel Farage has done the easy bit. His coup de théâtre in arranging the defection of a second Tory MP – Mark Reckless - to Ukip a bare month after the first – Douglas Carswell - was brilliantly stage-managed. It delivered the dreamed-of ‘Tory crisis’ headlines in the Sunday papers and there’s now speculation that a third Tory, Chris Kelly, MP for Dudley South, could jump ship too.

The latest polls show Ukip advancing – or at least, not losing ground – and the Tories still falling way behind where they need to be seven months before a general election.

The most worrying new poll for the Conservatives was one presented to activists at the party conference in Birmingham on Sunday by former party donor Lord Ashcroft. With a larger than usual sample of more than 8,000 electors, it showed a six per cent Labour lead. It puts Labour on 36 per cent to the Tories’ 30 per cent with Ukip on 19 per cent and the Lib Dems way down on six per cent.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

• The Mole: Tories panic over Ukip jumpers
• Robert Chesshyre: Little Englanders are wrong about Europe

The Labour lead represents a swing of more than six per cent since the 2010 general election, enough to put Ed Miliband into Downing Street with a substantial majority, according to Political Betting.

This morning a new ComRes/ITV News poll of the 40 most marginal Labour-Conservative constituencies shows Labour holding an 11- point lead over the Conservatives. At the 2010 general election the two parties were tied on 37 per cent across these 40 seats - so the swing is 5.5 per cent.

Back to Farage. Equally theatrical was Ukip’s decision to hold its party conference at Doncaster Racecourse in the constituency of Labour’s chief whip and just down the road from leader Ed Miliband’s seat. The threat was explicit: we can do to Labour what we have shown we can do to the Tories.

But can they really challenge Labour in its northern heartland?

The first test will be the Heywood and Middleton by-election in Greater Manchester on 9 October, the same day as the Clacton by-election where Douglas Carswell is expected to be re-elected in Ukip colours. Whereas Clacton looks like a stroll for Ukip, the Heywood and Middleton poll, caused by the death of the well-regarded Jim Dobbin who died on a political visit to Poland, will be anything but.

Dobbin had a majority of almost 6,000 at the 2010 general election. In May’s local elections, Labour won 16 of the 20 seats being contested with 46 per cent of the vote: Ukip’s 17 per cent yielded them no councillors.

The Conservatives with 21 per cent and Lib Dems on ten per cent can expect to be squeezed as they were back in February in Wythenshawe, half an hour’s drive round the M60. But Farage’s forces flopped on that occasion after talking up their chances against Labour and they could suffer the same fate on 9 October, taking some of the shine off the expected Clacton walkover.

Nonetheless, Labour are taking the Ukip threat seriously. A sure sign of that is the timing: by Westminster convention the party that holds the seat sets the by-election date and Labour opted to hold it as quickly as possible (indeed they were criticised for announcing it before Dobbin’s funeral had even been held).

Following Ed Miliband’s pledge to boost NHS spending in his conference speech, the Labour candidate Liz McKinnes will doubtless make the health service the centrepiece of her campaign. Like her predecessor, she is a health scientist, developing techniques and equipment used by doctors. “I work for the NHS and have a strong commitment to the public sector,” she says.

Ukip will be fielding John Bickley, the same candidate who stood in Wythenshawe. He describes himself as a former Labour supporter who was brought up on a council estate in Middleton. “That’s a bit strange,” blogs Channel Four’s Michael Crick, “for he claimed in Wythenshawe that he’d been brought up on a council estate there!

“The two claims can be reconciled, of course, but it seems terribly lucky that Ukip have a candidate brought up in the only two northwest seats to have had by-elections this year!”

Heywood and Middleton is one of two constituencies within the borough of Rochdale and the first row of the campaign has centred on allegations of sex abuse in the city. Rochdale’s Labour MP Simon Danzcuk has criticised a Ukip leaflet that claims Labour betrayed “white working-class girls” in Rochdale who were raped by gangs of men. Danczuk said this “shameful opportunism” demonstrated complete ignorance of child abuse.

“We’ve seen grooming gangs in Oxford, in Peterborough and in Rochdale when it was run by the Liberal Democrats so this is a really ignorant and desperate attempt to win some votes,” said Danczuk.

“They [Ukip] have nothing to offer for the victims of abuse, nothing to say about how we face up to years of failure across the country to protect children. They’re just playing politics at a time when the wounds of these events are still healing in our borough.”

A Labour victory in Heywood and Middleton, with Ukip coming in second, would give the Tories a consolation prize – because it will underline their message that Ukip only really hurts the Conservatives: ‘Vote Farage, Get Miliband’. By switching to Ukip, one-time Tory supporters could help elect a Labour government which has ruled out an EU referendum.

That message will be heavily deployed in Rochester and Strood, where the defection of Tory MP Mark Reckless to Ukip means another by-election, expected to be held in November. Standing as a Tory, Reckless had a majority just shy of 10,000 over Labour in 2010. A projection by Electoral Calculus suggests he was facing a tougher fight next May.

The Tories showed in Newark in June that they can mobilise to win a by-election. Furious at Reckless’s defection, the party will throw everything into keeping Rochester, kitchen sink included.

But if the 2010 Tory vote were to be split equally between Ukipper Reckless and the Tory candidate, it’s conceivable that Labour could come through the middle with the help of Lib Dem switchers.

That is the Tory nightmare.