Cameron: Can He See Off the UKIP Threat?

September 29, 2014, 9:27 AM GMT+0

It was a piece of masterly understatement when David Cameron said the start to his party conference had not been ideal. He would have been hoping to find a party that was assembling for the last time before the general election, braced for the fray. Instead, his fellow Conservatives were reeling from a double blow: the enforced resignation of a minister and the second defection of a backbench MP to the ranks of UKIP. Can he snatch victory from the jaws of defeat?

Mr Cameron has known for a long time that winning a majority for his party at the next election would be a tall order. Ever since the Liberal Democrats pulled out of an agreement to redraw the constituency boundaries it was inevitable that the Tories would face a huge underlying disadvantage. Labour needs a much lower share of the overall vote than do the Tories to secure a majority in the House of Commons.

The scale of this disadvantage can be seen by looking at the results of the last two elections. In 2005, Labour secured just over 35% of the vote, enough to return Tony Blair to Downing Street with a comfortable majority of about sixty. In 2010, the Conservatives won just over 36% but fell nearly twenty seats short of being able to govern on their own.

But despite this extra burden, Mr Cameron had begun to have hopes that he might just pull it off. His party enjoys an extraordinary 25 point poll lead over Labour on the issue of handling the economy. He himself is streets ahead of Ed Miliband in terms of credibility as a prime minister. And Labour’s own party conference, in Manchester last week, seemed to add buoyancy to Conservative hopes. It was widely regarded, not just by the media but also by many Labour people themselves, as a lacklustre occasion, lacking the sense of energy that a party on the brink of power would be expected to show. Mr Miliband’s own speech, in which he ‘forgot’ to mention the deficit or immigration, provided a propaganda gift to his opponents that the Tories can only have dreamed of.

Such turns in the political weather made many Conservatives feel that if the wind stayed fair, they might snatch a surprise victory, just as John Major did in 1992. But the wind has not stayed fair.

The resignation of the civil society minister, Brooks Newmark, is the lesser of the two blows that hit the party over the weekend. Mr Newmark is not the first minister to have been caught in a newspaper sting with regard to his private life. Such events are certainly embarrassing but are rarely enough to turn elections.

The other blow is a different matter. The defection of the Tory backbencher, Mark Reckless, to UKIP is the second in barely a month. He was preceded by Douglas Carswell, who has forced a by-election next month in his Clacton constituency, which opinion polls suggest he will win comfortably, making him UKIP’s first ever MP. Mr Reckless will resign and force another by-election later in his Rochester seat. As a Tory he enjoyed a majority of nearly ten thousand, which may give the Conservatives some hope that he can be defeated as UKIP’s candidate in the by-election. But if Clacton creates a momentum, UKIP may be heading for its second MP in Rochester.

There is no doubt that the UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, is playing his hand very cleverly. In both cases he managed to keep the defections under wraps until the moment they would cause greatest difficulty for the Tories. And there is real fear in Conservative ranks that these two may not be the last. If Mr Farage can choreograph a series of by-election victories through the autumn and winter by persuading Tory backbenchers to jump ship one by one, then the effect will be both to sap morale in the Conservative Party and also to encourage more disgruntled Tory MPs to follow suit.

It is, of course, not just the Conservatives who face a threat from UKIP. Mr Farage very deliberately held his own party conference last week at Doncaster racecourse, just down the road from Ed Miliband’s own constituency. The UKIP leader said: ‘We are now parking our tanks on the Labour Party’s lawn’. How powerful those tanks are will become evident early in October when another by-election, caused by the death of a Labour MP, will take place in Heywood and Middleton, in Greater Manchester. Polls suggest UKIP will give Labour a real run for their money in this supposedly safe Labour seat and might even be able to win it.

But even if it did, UKIP is not such a severe headache for Mr Miliband as it is for Mr Cameron. So what might the Prime Minister do to try to ease the pain?

The tactic so far has been to try to frighten Tory voters tempted to flirt with UKIP by making a straightforward point of electoral arithmetic: every vote that UKIP takes from the Tories makes it more likely that Labour is returned to power next May and so remove the chance for a referendum on British membership of the EU which only the Tories are offering. That is what Mr Cameron and his colleagues have been saying ad nauseam and will no doubt continue to say. But it doesn’t seem to be having much effect either with voters or, indeed, with Tory backbenchers. Mr Carswell and Mr Reckless must know that it is true, but it has been insufficient to deter them from taking the course of action they have taken.

This may well be because they simply don’t trust the Prime Minister’s policy of seeking to renegotiate Britain’s terms of membership with the EU and then holding a referendum on the result by the end of 2017. When Mr Cameron first announced this policy early last year he made it crystal clear that he hoped the renegotiations would be successful and that he would then be able to lead the campaign to stay inside the EU in the subsequent referendum. But that’s exactly what the likes of Mr Carswell and Mr Reckless do not want: they believe Britain should leave the EU whatever the outcome of such negotiations.

What’s more, many such eurosceptics believe the renegotiation process will be largely cosmetic rather than substantial. Their suspicions are increased by Mr Cameron’s timetable. The fact that the negotiations have to be completed by 2017 seems to them to suggest it won’t be a serious attempt to change our terms of membership of the EU. That’s because both the Germans and the French have national elections during that year, meaning that neither country will be in a position to risk making serious concessions to the British. Instead, they fear, some face-saving formula will be dreamed up and then Mr Cameron will declare it a glorious victory.

So how might the Prime Minister counter the threat that more Tory MPs might defect to UKIP? Two things have been suggested by his eurosceptic critics. The first is for him to declare publicly something he has not yet been prepared to say explicitly: that if he doesn’t get the negotiation outcome he wants, he’ll be prepared to lead the ‘out’ campaign in the referendum. The second is for him to come clean about what he is and is not trying to renegotiate.

But there is a real difficulty for the Prime Minister in doing either of these things. If he says he’d be prepared to lead the ‘out’ campaign if he doe not get what he wants, he immediately opens himself to the need to say exactly what it is he does want. And if he becomes explicit on that, he faces even greater dangers. In the first place, his critics would almost certainly complain that what he was demanding was not enough to buy them off. But if he went as far as they would like, then Mr Cameron would almost certainly face universal criticism from his European partners that he was demanding far more than they could possibly deliver.

Such is the dilemma facing the Prime Minister in Birmingham this week. What do you think he should do? And do you think he will be able to see off the challenge posed by UKIP or enter history as a single term prime minister?

Let us know your views.