Ukip

Quite naturally, the mood in the hall at the Ukip conference in Doncaster is far more upbeat than anything Labour could muster. This is an insurgent party on the brink of getting its own MP and that is spooking the Conservatives no end. So the party with a realistic chance of taking power next May seems depressed, while this party is full of beans. A series of speeches from policy spokespeople was intended to show that Ukip doesn’t just have one face representing it. This year’s conference is intended to show that Nigel Farage’s party really has grown up and has grown far beyond just his leadership. So those policy

Ukip’s party conference is underway in Doncaster. The party is hoping for an event that runs more smoothly than last year, where Nigel Farage sacked Godfrey Bloom for hitting a journalist and calling women ‘sluts’. It certainly has more in its favour this time around, with Tory defector Douglas Carswell to address the conference ahead of what looks like a victory in the Clacton by-election. But there are also rumours that two more Conservative MPs are about to defect. Adam Holloway’s name was winging round the lobby today, but he says he won’t be going anywhere because he is terrified of the prospect of a Labour government. He said: ‘I’d much

Ukip have been approaching potential defectors and offering to pay for a poll in their constituency that shows how well they’d do as a Ukip candidate, Coffee House has learned. Since boasting last week that they had a few more MPs who might defect to the party, Ukip have been trying again with some Conservatives they believe to be vulnerable. They approached one with what the MP describes as a ‘carrot-and-stick’ approach. ‘The pitch was you’re a great guy and we’ll pay for a poll with you as hypothetical Ukip candidate if you defect,’ said the MP, who didn’t want to be named. ‘The stick was we’ll soon select a

We asked Daniel Hannan, Lord Tebbit and historian Andrew Roberts what – if anything – David Cameron could do to rescue his party. Here’s what they had to say: Daniel Hannan, MEP At this stage in the Parliament, there are no legislative tricks to pull out of the hat. In any case, as far as policy goes, David Cameron has got the basics right: lower spending, welfare reform, free schools, support for enterprise. But it all risks being thrown away because of a divided Centre-Right vote. Ukip will do to the Conservatives what the SDP did to Labour 30 years ago. Our first-past-the-post system doesn’t allow space for two competing parties

Where is this burning point of principle that drove Douglas Carswell into the arms of Ukip? I’ve read lots about his defection, and I’m still none the wiser. We’re told that he was talking to Farage for almost a year, which would have overlapped with the time he told me that the Tories need to unite behind Cameron because he was the only one promising an in-out referendum. What has changed? Carswell says that Cameron is not serious about Europe. The Prime Minister has become the only leader in the continent to promise an in-out referendum. I’m not sure how much more serious one can be. Should he lay out,

I rejoiced at the news of Douglas Carswell’s defection to Ukip. Not because I’m a Ukip supporter (I haven’t made up my mind) but because it highlights the slippery dishonesty of the Tories’ modernisation programme – ‘the political equivalent of botox’, as Charles Moore puts it in today’s Telegraph: The pattern of the leader’s actions conveys a message to party workers: they are the problem. Not surprisingly, they tend to leave. Instead of being a renewal, modernisation has become a hollowing out. Douglas Carswell, by contrast, is authentically a moderniser. At the heart of Carswell’s vision for Britain lies the expansion of the franchise and political accountability. He believes that digital technology can create social cohesion and

Stuart Wheeler has just been boasting on Sky News that two more Conservative MPs are ‘seriously considering’ defecting to Ukip. Wheeler has been the broker in any potential defections, wining and dining potential converts before asking if they want a meeting with Nigel Farage. Not all of them have said yes to that second offer. It is, though, plausible that there are MPs who are still not rock solid in their decision to back the Tories all the way to the next election. The result of the Clacton by-election, how David Cameron plays the Europe question and how he manages the party over the next few months will determine whether

Anyone who would rather not live in a Britain run by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls should be dismayed at Carswell’s defection to Ukip. He is an original, intelligent and eloquent MP who has done much to help the Prime Minister form the more radical parts of his agenda. For a while, I thought that this was his game plan: to avoid frontbench positions, and engage constructive opposition – which is democratic tugging of the party leader from the vantage point of the backbenches. I defended him against critics who said he was an attention-seeker whose ego would one day explode. Today, it’s harder to defend him. He was elected to a

So Nigel, where’s your flood? You know, the one involving Bulgarians and Romanians that you predicted last year. That deluge? You got it wrong, didn’t you? Ner-ner-di-ner-ner. It must be very tempting for people who don’t like Nigel Farage to spend today chuckling, scrolling through the ONS website and waving their mouse with a satisfied flourish at the finding that the number of people from these countries who are employed in the UK has risen by 13,000 from the same period last year, when transitional controls were still in place. The Ukip leader had predicted 5,000 a week, but his forecasts look as good as David Silvester’s attempts at dabbling in

That Nigel Farage was planning to stand in South Thanet was one of the worst kept secrets in politics. But Ukip turns out to be the worst secret keeper in politics, too, with confirmation of the party leader’s intentions dribbling out on a Friday afternoon at the end of a rather newsy week. The meticulously well-sourced Jim Pickard at the FT reports local Ukip activists confirming that Farage is on their shortlist of candidates to run under the party’s banner. But the party’s spokeswoman has been stonewalling him, presumably because the Friday afternoon of an unusually newsy August week isn’t quite the right time for exciting Ukip constituency fireworks. The

So Boris Johnson is standing for parliament next year, triggering speculation about what would happen if David Cameron lost the election. Could we have Ed Miliband as prime minister, followed by Boris Johnson? Jon Stewart would have a field decade. Boris is easily the most popular Conservative politician around, both inside and outside the party, and is the only one to have genuine appeal with the public. People go up to him to shake his hand in the street, rather than just vomit everywhere, as is the case with most other Tories. Both he and Nigel Farage are jovial figures whose cheery, bumbling persona enables us to forgive any private

I have described David Cameron’s posturing on immigration today as vacuous and cynical, for that is exactly what it is. Cynical because once again he seems determined to fool the British people into believing that we can seriously have our own immigration policy whilst remaining inside the EU. We can’t. Vacuous because his policy solution seems to consist of tinkering around the edges of the problem instead of dealing with it head on. Under his government, net migration levels per annum remain in the hundreds of thousands, with citizens from twenty-seven other nations allowed to come and go as they please. What Britain really needs is a tough, solid, Australian-style immigration system.

Talk to most Tory strategists about Ukip and Ed Miliband and they say something along the lines of ‘Vote Farage, get Miliband’. They hope that this will deter people from voting Ukip or win back those Ukip supporters who are not irreconcilable to the Tories. The Telegraph has news that Labour’s private polling confirms the Tory view: Ed Miliband will win Downing Street if Ukip polls 9 per cent of voters, which it is more than capable of doing on current projections. The Tories, I suspect, will be fairly pleased that Labour has published this information. It reinforces what we’ve known all along: an unpopular left-wing party will win power

Ukip are holding an action day in Thurrock today. Their tails are up at the moment because a recent poll of marginal seats by Lord Ashcroft put them in first in Thurrock on 36%. The party also leads in Thanet South, according to this round of polling. Ukip very kindly offered me the chance to interview its candidate in Thurrock, Tim Aker MEP (pictured above). I declined due to diary commitments; but I did submit some written questions which I thought might prove relevant if Aker was indeed elected to parliament. I haven’t heard anything back from Ukip, so I reproduce them here for readers of Coffee House to consider: