Douglas Carswell: Why I won’t call a by-election
On the Sunday Politics, the Clacton MP said: ‘I’m not submitting myself to the authority, to the whip of a new party. If I was doing so then quite rightly, as I did previously, I would feel obliged to trigger a by-election.’ And anyway, he said, he’d consulted 20,000 constituents by email and had ‘a huge number of responses back’ and ‘all but a handful were overwhelmingly supportive’.
Asked if he would run in 2020 as a Tory, he didn’t rule it out, saying he felt ‘pretty comfortable with being independent’ but added: ‘let’s wait and see.’ Carswell couldn’t resist a sly dig at his former leader (whom he trashes in his recent book), noting that there had been several by-elections where Nigel has had the opportunity to contact the electorate and those ‘didn’t always go according to plan’.
Nigel Farage: Carswell should call a by-election
Interviewed on Sophy Ridge on Sunday, Nigel Farage rejoiced at the news that Douglas Carswell had resigned from Ukip and declared that he had ‘wanted to kick him out back in 2015’, claiming that the MP ‘never ever believed in the principles that Ukip stood for’.
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