The Tories’ hope that the UKIP vote will gradually subside is proven otherwise by events in 2012. The omnishambles Budget is seen at Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) as a significant factor in UKIP’s inexorable rise. ‘It made us look like a bunch of people who didn’t know what we were doing: those who were disillusioned with us went to UKIP instead of Labour and haven’t come back.’ Gay marriage is the other big recruiter at the time, leading to a second spike, CCHQ believes. Inside Number 10, UKIP is a regular item of discussion at the 8.30 a.m. and 4 p.m. meetings in Cameron’s office. The thinking remains that ‘there is very little we can do about this. Trying to chase it down the alleyway isn’t going to work because of their “we hate the establishment” appeal.’
The events of 2012 force Number 10 into a rethink. The results of this are first seen at the Eastleigh by-election in February 2013, triggered by the resignation of sitting Lib Dem MP Chris Huhne following his guilty plea for hiding a speeding offence a decade before. CCHQ throws everything it has into the campaign to win the seat and stop UKIP, even running a candidate that one top Conservative would describe as ‘very UKIPy’. Yet the Lib Dems retain the seat, their first by-election victory under Clegg since the formation of the coalition. It is the closest by-election amongst the top three candidates in over ninety years with UKIP beating the Conservatives into third place, polling 27.8% (only 4% behind the Lib Dems). Conservative woes are magnified two months later at the South Shields by-election, triggered by the resignation of David Miliband, who is departing for a new life in the US. As expected, Labour retain the seat with 50.4% of the vote, but UKIP come second with 24.2%, and the Conservatives drop to third with a miserable 11.5%. This is traumatic for the party, because it shows that UKIP can poll highly even where they had no candidate in 2010, and in the north-east of England, not thought to be a traditionally strong area for them.
Number 10 and CCHQ change tack again and devise a new strategy, ‘to neutralise the negatives’. This involves not saying anything that is patronising or dismissive about UKIP members: ‘Cameron is internalising this: he knows that he shouldn’t call them “fruitcakes” and is shifting off all that rhetorically,’ says an aide. Cameron now understands that if UKIP voters are insulted, they may never come back. Policies that are causing UKIP’s surge in popularity are to be shelved. Gay marriage has gone too far down the line, so is rushed onto the statute book: ‘There is a realisation that it is a divisive issue, and that we have now to mend things,’ says an insider. Another says: ‘We’ve got it, we’re stopping doing the stuff that’s aggravating our supporters and making them go to UKIP. We’re taking trouble not to rub people’s faces in it ever again like on gay marriage.’
UKIP’s popularity, however, still shows no signs of declining. Farage is handed a golden calf: the imminent ending of transitional controls on migrants from Romania and Bulgaria, imposed when they joined the EU in 2007. By 2011/12 with the prospect of the restrictions being lifted, UKIP predict that large numbers of Romanians and Bulgarians will take advantage of work and opportunities not offered in their own countries. Suspicion is fanned elsewhere that an influx of immigration from across the EU is not fired purely by economic reasons: the number of non-UK EU benefit claimants has risen to over 300,000.10 The government look at ways to see if it can limit the free movement of people, which is a core article of the EU, but are disappointed when their lawyers say there is no possibility. UKIP is thus able to roll together three toxic concepts – the EU, immigration, and benefit cheats – into a single argument. It is a potent mix for Farage.
Pressure mounts on Cameron to take action. Conservative MPs are demanding that he announce that there will be a referendum on Britain remaining within the EU. Fearing he will be bounced into offering a referendum after the May 2014 European elections, which CCHQ is estimating will be a very bad result for the party, he decides to get on the front foot. Hence the Bloomberg speech, delivered in January 2013 (see Chapter 21). Cameron is clear that it will not be a UKIP speech, and that the party will never ‘out-UKIP UKIP’, and he opens with a ‘paean of praise’ for European unity, as one of his team put it. The decision to announce an in/out referendum in the next parliament is not without internal critics. To Europhile Ken Clarke, ‘the decision to announce the referendum is a reaction to UKIP, the Mail, Telegraph and Murdoch press. It was also rather foolish of David Cameron and Theresa May to take worries about hordes of Bulgarians and Romanians hitting our shores so seriously, which allowed Farage to conflate immigration and the EU.’11 Cameron’s critics are not only on the right of the party.
The Bloomberg speech does absolutely nothing to win back voters from UKIP. In April 2013, UKIP is polling at 13%.12 Matthew Goodwin thinks the reason the offer of a referendum – a major concession to Conservative Eurosceptics – does not dent UKIP support is threefold: Cameron himself is not believed because of his ‘betrayal’ in not having a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty; he is loathed personally; and he is not regarded as a true Conservative by many UKIP voters. They do not thus wish to be led into a referendum by the Conservatives under Cameron, especially as he says he will campaign to remain within a reformed EU. UKIP support is based primarily on instinct and values, and its supporters do not believe Cameron shares them. Lord Ashcroft’s research report, ‘“Are You Serious?” Boris, the Tories and the Voters’, suggests that 57% of UKIP voters believe the Conservatives would have a better chance of winning the next general election with Boris Johnson as leader, with 35% saying that this would make them more likely to vote Conservative.13 It is a disconcerting poll for Cameron’s team.
Although the 2013 local elections see the Tories retain control of most of their councils, they lose control of ten and win only 25% of the vote, their lowest figure since 1995. UKIP is close behind on 22%, with a total of 147 seats, an increase of 139. It is the first time that UKIP can legitimately claim to be a party of nationwide support. Jamie Huntman, a newly elected councillor for UKIP in Essex, captures the mood of UKIP defiance when he says ‘We are hardly clowns and fruitcakes any longer.’14 Number 10 consoles itself that the results are better than expected, but they come under relentless pressure from MPs who express concern that they might not be able to win back UKIP defectors in time for the general election.
Number 10 and CCHQ approach the European elections in May 2014 with real trepidation. They cling to the argument that the Conservatives alone are offering a referendum on remaining in the EU, so voting UKIP makes no logical sense. Some members of the 1922 Committee are seriously considering a vote on ending the coalition, fearing that their supporters are losing patience. They decide to wait until after the European elections before initiating such a vote, which is followed by the Newark by-election on 5 June.
In the run-up to the elections, Clegg seizes the opportunity to hold two televised debates against Farage on Europe to highlight the Lib Dems’ credentials as the party of the EU. Number 10 discusses how to respond. It understands why Clegg wants to take the risk against Farage as his party is only averaging 9% in the opinion polls, so he needs something to give him a lift. They rate Clegg as a debater and hope he might expose holes in UKIP. The debates prove a mixed blessing to the Conservatives. Clegg comes a poor second to Farage, failing to reproduce the magic which had won him so much credit in the first televised election debate in 2010. He fails to land significant punches, either on Farage personally or on UKIP. The debate may even serve to highlight the Conservatives offering a middle way between the EU rejectionism of UKIP and the enthusiastic support of the Lib Dems. In the European elections on 22 May, UKIP emerge as the overall victors, achieving 27.5% of the vote and twenty-four seats. ‘A stunning victory’, says the Independent.15 The Conservatives drop to third place, the first time the party has ever not been in the top two in a national election. But the real losers are the Lib Dems, who retain just one of their twelve MEPs, resulting in fresh calls for Clegg to resign.
No tactic has worked against UKIP. The final tack
before the general election is to rely on Lynton Crosby, seen by Conservative MPs and many in the party in the country as much more ‘sound’ on Europe than Cameron himself. Crosby oversees the setting up of professional structures and messaging to allow a more effective response to UKIP. He redoubles the effort to ensure that provocative policies and statements are hidden deep underground. He ensures the rhetoric is warm towards UKIP voters, while at the same time pointing a relentless searchlight on Farage’s personal vulnerabilities and history. At the heart of Crosby’s strategy is placing the Conservatives’ focus squarely upon the long-term economic policy, while insisting that immigration and Europe, which he believes only feed UKIP, are never mentioned. Andrew Cooper receives part of the blame for the article of faith that the UKIP vote would dissipate as a general election approaches, though, as a senior Number 10 aide admits, ‘Frankly we all thought that. It was Lynton who then crystallised our thinking that UKIP support wasn’t going to go away and that we have to remove the negatives that are feeding them.’ Cameron’s long-awaited immigration speech on 28 November 2014 can be seen as part of this strategy of taking the concerns of UKIP supporters seriously, by suggesting that the referendum will be used to extract maximum leverage in the control of immigration.
The Newark by-election of 5 June 2014, occasioned by the resignation of Conservative MP Patrick Mercer after investigations by the Commons Committee on Standards, comes two weeks after the European elections. The party throws the kitchen sink at it: Cameron himself pays four visits to the Nottinghamshire constituency and the party amasses a huge army of volunteers from across the country. The Conservatives retain the seat comfortably with 45% of the vote, although their majority is halved. The reason that UKIP does not do even better than its 25.9% is because it still has not fully recovered from the massive effort it put into the European elections. It lacks the activists or the money to throw at the by-election. CCHQ believes that UKIP will return to single digits in the polls by the end of the summer. But within a few months, a sinister development, apparently out of nowhere, changes everything.
On 28 August, Cameron is enjoying himself with his team at Chequers. They are there for a ‘start of the new-term meeting’, having a long deep think about how to play the nine months leading up to the general election. They are sitting in the upstairs dining room. It has been a decent summer and they are in good heart. Neck and neck at last with Labour, they have a real sense that they at last have momentum, and the stubborn polls are beginning to shift in their favour. One of them picks up a message: ‘I don’t know if this is a spoof, but there’s a story that Douglas Carswell has resigned.’ Cameron immediately senses what this means. Suddenly, all their mobiles start pinging the same message: ‘Carswell’s going to defect to UKIP.’ Cameron breaks up the meeting and they go to watch the television news.
There is a great sense of shock and a deep anger. There had been murmurs that there might be trouble in the autumn, but they have had no intelligence about what Carswell, a known maverick, might be planning. ‘Ten of us ploughed into a small room by the front entrance, fixated by what we are seeing on the television,’ Craig Oliver recalls: ‘it’s almost unnerving how the PM takes good and bad news equally.’16 They begin to debate how they might fight the by-election and what type of candidate they might need. Not putting anyone up against him is an option. The conversation flows back and forth as they examine the options. Feldman is drawn into the debate, as is Crosby. Cameron insists they have to put up a candidate and fight hard to show other would-be defectors the Conservatives will not take it lying down. Crosby texts Boris Johnson to ask if he is interested in standing against Carswell, but the reply comes back at once: ‘Thank you, no.’ Carswell, they quickly learn, has taken with him files about his Clacton constituency, containing micro-detail about how individuals will vote, almost house by house. It will be a hell of a fight, they all realise.
Carswell is regarded as a serious thinker and person. There is a respect for him among Cameron’s team, albeit fairly grudging, as someone who has been consistent in his anti-Europeanism for many years. It is decided that Cameron should release a dignified statement expressing his disappointment – ‘it is obviously deeply regrettable’ – but they also decide he should highlight the crux of what they see as the paradox at the heart of Carswell’s defection: ‘it is also, in my view, counter-productive. If you want a referendum on Britain’s future in the EU – whether we should stay or go – the only way to get that is to have a Conservative government after the next election and that is what until very recently Douglas Carswell himself was saying’.17
Cameron disappears from the discussions to take a call from Theresa May on counter-terrorism, while Crosby returns to London from Chequers by car with Kate Fall and Oliver Dowden. ‘The impact of Carswell was very bad,’ a Number 10 aide recalls. ‘It really affected MPs, who were worrying about the impact of UKIP on their own re-election.’ Farage milks Carswell’s defection and is clearly thrilled by the coup. He then creates genuine concern in the Conservative camp by claiming that more defectors might be revealed in due course.18 Number 10 and CCHQ gear up a couple of notches as they try and work out who he is thinking of, and when the news might come. They assume that Farage is delaying any defections until the party conference, where it will exact maximum damage.
They are not wrong in their guess. On Saturday 27 September, as Cameron’s team are travelling up to the conference in Birmingham, they receive news that Conservative MP Mark Reckless is another defector. ‘I promised to cut immigration while treating people fairly and humanely. I cannot keep that promise as a Conservative. I can keep it as UKIP,’ Reckless announces to loud cheers at UKIP’s conference in Doncaster.19 Craig Oliver is on the train when he hears the news. As he tries to speak to the team from the carriage, his phone keeps cutting out. They all worry that the second defection will knock the entire conference off course and encourage further defections. Cameron is much more affected personally by Reckless’s resignation than that of Carswell: he thinks Reckless is not only illogical but purely self-interested, and is both destructive and malevolent. ‘He despises people who behave like that,’ says an aide. Anger mounts when they learn that a week before he knew he would be defecting, Reckless had allegedly sanctioned the printing of leaflets by his Conservative constituency association, at high cost for the local party.
As soon as Cameron’s team arrive in Birmingham on Saturday evening, they meet in the PM’s hotel suite: ‘I’d always regarded it up till now as the lucky room as it was the place we gathered for the third TV debate in 2010, which he won,’ says Kate Fall.20 Luck is conspicuously absent from the room that night. ‘We’d had a big debate the previous week about whether the PM’s speech should announce lots of good news then or spread it out over the autumn.’ The Reckless story inclines him to want to seek maximum impact from his own speech – ‘to put the explosives on the door’, as he himself says. They spend a lot of time that evening planning what Cameron will say to Andrew Marr in his interview the next morning. They simply do not know whether more resignations will follow on Sunday, Monday, or on Wednesday, the day the PM speaks. Adam Holloway, Peter Bone and Chris Kelly are all names that are mentioned as possible defectors by the team. ‘Both Carswell and Reckless lied to our faces that they weren’t going to defect,’ says one. They decide that Cameron will downplay it as far as he can, so on Sunday morning he tells Marr that ‘these things are frustrating and frankly are counterproductive and rather senseless’.21 Heavy-duty rubbishing is left to party chairman Grant Shapps, who in his opening speech tells delegates at Birmingham: ‘we have been betrayed … We have been let down by somebody who has repeatedly lied to his constituents and to you – who said one thing and did another … He lied and lied and lied again.’22
Cameron’s team are far more contemptuous of Reckless than Carswell, regarding him as ‘a little shit’. Just days before, he had had lunch with Michael Gove, now chief whip, and had sworn he was not going to defe
ct.23 They think he had been swayed by former Conservative financier turned UKIP donor, Stuart Wheeler, who they suspect also influenced Carswell, by leading him to believe that he will lose the constituency to UKIP if he remains a Conservative, and telling him he will have more of a voice for his ideas and enthusiasms if he speaks up from the smaller pond of UKIP. Gove reckons that it is Carswell who persuaded Reckless to follow suit and that the two were a duo.24 Farage’s 2015 book The Purple Revolution later reveals that Reckless’s defection was always part of his master plan.
Carswell’s by-election in Clacton takes place first, on 9 October. Despite a considerable investment of Conservative effort in the constituency, he achieves 59.7% of the vote with a majority of over 12,000. Election specialist John Curtice describes it as the biggest increase in the share of the vote for any party for any by-election in British history (there had been no UKIP candidate standing at the 2010 general election).25 UKIP’s campaign makes much of Cameron’s statement in his party conference speech about UKIP being closed down. An article by Matthew Parris in The Times on 6 September, in which he allegedly insulted Clacton saying it lacked both ‘ambition and drive’, is widely circulated by UKIP as further evidence of the patronising attitude of the Conservative establishment towards the party.
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