14 Tory lame ducks who could be tempted to join Ukip

With the Rochester and Strood by-election now set for 20 November, Ukip are hoping to follow up their Clacton victory with another triumph – one that will encourage yet more defections from the Conservative ranks.

And Nigel Farage is making it clear to those Tory MPs tempted to join Douglas Carswell (Clacton) and Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) that the rules are changing.

It will no longer be necessary for them to “do a Carswell” by standing down and forcing a by-election. From 7 November, they can simply announce that they are giving up the Conservative whip and will sit in the Commons as Ukip members until the May election.

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That’s because there is, in Farage’s own words, “a long-standing Parliamentary convention” that a by-election is unnecessary in these circumstances if there is less than six months to go before a general election.

Reporting on the new defection strategy, the Daily Telegraph says Farage recognises that the Carswell example "set the bar too high" and might discourage other defectors. So, Carswell “will tell his former colleagues in the Commons tea room that they can simply cross the floor and sit as Ukip MPs until May ... and spend the spring campaigning ‘aggressively’ as a Ukip MP, allowing voters to ‘get used’ to the new party ahead of the 2015 election.”

So, who on the Tory backbenches might be tempted?

I have identified 14 seats where “lame duck” Tory MPs might be tempted to cross the floor.

These are eurosceptic Tories who, based on current polling averages, face a Ukip vote in their constituencies big enough to split the Tory vote and allow Labour to win the seat. A switch to Ukip could save them from the dole queue next May.

I began my number-crunching with the list of 81 Tory eurosceptics who, back in October 2011, defied Conservative whips in a key Commons vote on a motion demanding an EU referendum in 2013.

Comparing these with a list of projected Tory losses in May 2015 put together by the Electoral Calculus website, I have come up with 14 eurosceptic Tory MPs who face losing to Labour by margins of four to 13 per cent in May because of the potential strength of Ukip in their constituencies. They are:

Stuart Andrew (Pudsey)

Dan Byles (Warwickshire North)

Nick de Bois (Enfield North)

Stewart Jackson (Peterborough)

Jason McCartney (Colne Valley)

Karl McCartney (Lincoln)

Nigel Mills (Amber Valley)

Stephen Mosley (City of Chester)

David Nuttall (Bury North)

Matthew Offord (Hendon)

Jacob Rees-Mogg (Somerset NE)

Simon Reevell (Dewsbury)

Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes)

Robin Walker (Worcester)

Of course, not all these men – and they are all men, incidentally – would be prepared to follow the Ukip flag and some might prefer to leave Parliament rather than become reluctant Faragistes.

Some, including Jacob Rees Mogg, have made it clear that they would prefer a local pact with Ukip, whereby if they agree to include in their manifesto a promise to vote to leave the EU whatever new terms might be won in Brussels, then Ukip would agree not to put up a candidate against them in May.

But Farage is playing hard ball, for now at least. He insists that Ukip isn’t a mini-Tory party and that a pact with Tory MPs could hurt Ukip’s hopes of winning over more Labour supporters.

So instead he will make the lame ducks a Godfather-like offer they can’t refuse – defect or face political death. The job prospects for former backbench MPs can be quite bleak.

Farage needs large-scale defections to keep up the momentum of his campaign. As I have argued here before, the first-past-the-post system will make it hard to gain Westminster seats in May.

Farage risks looking foolish if he fails to come up with more defectors - and whatever else they think about him, nobody in Westminster now thinks he’s a fool

Post-Clacton, there has been repeated talk of more defections in the pipeline. The question is almost certainly not whether but when.

An early opportunity will come when the Tories announce their candidate in Rochester and Strood on 23 October following a postal vote. On past form it would be no great surprise if Farage staged another coup de theatre to undermine the Tory campaign.