Tory conference has been much more upbeat than last week’s gloomy offer from Labour. But just in case the party had turned up in a bad mood after the defection of Mark Reckless, MPs were given a series of lines to take which involved them telling any broadcaster unfortunate to ask that the gathering in Birmingham was demonstrating ‘energy’ and ‘positivity’. Those lines to take, leaked to Coffee House, show the party preparing for a week of awkward questions about Ukip taking their voters and overshadowing their conference.
One of the questions is ‘have Mark Reckless and Ukip overshadowed your conference?’ The answer is:
‘I disagree. The country – and the thousands of Conservative activists who are attending this Conference – will be hearing how we are securing a better future for Britain through our long-term economic plan and what that means for hardworking taxpayers over the next five years. For example, we’ve announced how we’re helping first-time buyers achieve the dream and security of owning their own home. It’s policies like these that people will take away from our Conference.
‘A vote for UKIP will simply make it more likely that Ed Miliband becomes Prime Minister and Labour forms a Government. A vote for UKIP will deliver more tax, more borrowing, and more inefficient and ineffective spending. It will see Britain slip back to uncontrolled immigration, unlimited benefits, and the British people will again be denied their say on Europe in a referendum.’
The briefing also says it is ‘frankly illogical for a Eurosceptic to defect to Ukip’ and that the party will be taking the Rochester and Strood by-electon ‘seriously’. Clacton, meanwhile, will be an ‘important by-election’, a ‘tough contest, but we are taking it seriously’.
Another question that CCHQ predicts is ‘does Ukip’s rise mean you won’t win the general election’, with the answer being the usual sort of waffle about long-term economic plans and voting Ukip to get Ed Miliband. ‘There will be no pacts with Ukip at the general election,’ MPs are told to say, something Jacob Rees-Mogg clearly overlooked as he’s spent this week advocating just that pact.
Parliamentarians are told to predict that their conference will ‘demonstrate our energy, positivity and determination to secure a better future for our country’, while last week Labour ‘demonstrated that Ed Miliband thinks he can flop over the line by lazily trying to appeal to Labour’s core supporters’.
Fortunately, this conference does seem to be demonstrating that it has more energy than Labour, but it’s telling that the Tories were sufficiently worried that it wouldn’t that they had to tell their MPs to say over and over again that things are going well.
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