Nadine Dorries: I want to be a joint Tory/Ukip candidate

Nadine Dorries has given an interview to The Spectator this week in which she reveals that she will be holding talks with her constituency association about a joint Tory/Ukip endorsement for the 2015 election. She tells the magazine ‘I will be having that kind of conversation with my association’, and adds:

‘There are members in my association who approached me recently who are confused. They have always been Conservative and will never change their allegiance but feel very much as though they have a huge amount of empathy with Ukip. I feel it would be a travesty if Ukip came in and took the seats off our councillors or indeed me when actually their policies and their beliefs are very much Ukip. Because what we have done, we have thrown clothes off and they have picked them up and put them on.’

She also draws parallels between the state of the Conservative party now and its fortunes in 1997:

‘[Voters] hated us because the Labour party promise, the vision, the song “Things Can Only Get Better” had a purchase on people’s imagination, and in their hearts that I see being replicated by Ukip today.’