Ukip is mad, bad and nasty, and intends real harm

The Conservative party is handling the United Kingdom Independence party problem in a worrying way. Ukip is not an embarrassment; it is not a distraction; it is not an understandable but naive reaction to the issues of the day; it is not a theoretically appealing movement whose practical consequences could sadly prove perverse. And supporting Ukip is not a forgivable but counterproductive thing for a Tory-minded voter to do.

Ukip is mad, bad and nasty. Its ill-doing is intentional. It is nothing like the Conservative party. Its aims are hugely different from those of the Tories, and profoundly wrong. For any former Tory voter, supporting Ukip is an act of idiocy and of betrayal, and unforgivable. Ukip people are not (in Michael Howard’s term) ‘gadflies’, they are scorpions.

Dangerous as it is to draw concluding thoughts from an event which, at the time of writing, has not concluded, I am not encouraged by the way the Conservative party gathered at Bournemouth is approaching this tremendous threat to the party’s recovery.