Toby Young Toby Young

Unite the right! Email Toby Young at conukip@gmail.com

Whatever the leaders think, we can create a Tory-Ukip pact from the bottom up

Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images 
issue 28 September 2013

The most common objection to a Tory-Ukip pact is that neither David Cameron nor Nigel Farage will touch it. So why waste time discussing it?

But a pact doesn’t need to be endorsed by the leaders of either party to work. What I have in mind is something bottom-up rather than top-down. A unite-the-right website set up by members of both parties that tells people who they should vote for in their constituency to keep out Labour and the Lib Dems.

Take Eastleigh, for instance, a seat currently held by the Lib Dems. Ukip came second at the by-election last year, so the advice would be to vote for Diane James in Eastleigh because she’s the candidate best placed to defeat the incumbent.

Sceptics will say this example is misleading. In the majority of constituencies, the advice will be to vote Conservative, either because there’s a sitting Tory MP or because the Conservatives came second in that seat in 2010.

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