I know an anti-Tory pact won’t work

I appeared on Radio 4 with Shirley Williams recently and as we were leaving I asked her if she thought Labour might split if Jeremy Corbyn were re-elected. Would the history of the SDP, which she helped set up in 1981, put off Labour moderates from trying something similar?

She thought it might, but suggested an alternative, which was a ‘non-aggression pact’ between all the left-of-centre parties. ‘We can unite around the issues we agree on and get the Tories out,’ she said. I didn’t have time to explore this in detail, but I think she meant some kind of tactical voting alliance whereby supporters of Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens — possibly even the Welsh and Scottish Nationalists — would agree to vote for the left-of-centre candidate in their constituency who had the best hope of defeating the Tory candidate at the next election.

I’m interested in this idea because I proposed something similar in 2014, except what I had in mind was an anti-Labour pact. It seems preposterous now, but back then I thought there was a real danger that Ed Miliband would end up as our next prime minister and launched a ‘Unite the Right’ campaign to try to avoid this ghastly prospect. The plan was to persuade Conservative and Ukip supporters to put aside their differences and vote for whichever right-of–centre-candidate had the best hope of winning in each seat.

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After about a year of trying to get this campaign off the ground I-concluded it wasn’t going to work and I suspect an anti-Tory alliance would founder for the same reasons.

The best counter-argument, which was made to me by several senior figures in the Conservative party, was that a formal alliance with Ukip would be so toxic that any votes the party gained on its right flank would be more than offset by losses in the centre ground.