A response to my UKIP-supporting readers Another 48 hours of campaigning across my vast, soggy, Home Counties patch, with speeches at Amersham (Bucks), Pulborough (West Sussex) and Seaford (East Sussex), and I’m sticking to my prediction that David Cameron will win the election with a working majority. People are desperate to get rid of a government that has left our country diminished, our Treasury empty, our credit exhausted and our parliamentary system de-legitimised.
It’s conceivable that, in some Northern cities, the LibDems will be the chief beneficiaries of the anti-Labour mood. In Scotland, for all I know, the Nats might stand to gain. But in most of the country, the alternative to Labour is the Conservative Party.
Seaford is a Ukippy town, and many of that party’s supporters came to my public meeting there this morning, which was also attended by the Conservative candidate for Lewes, Jason Sugarman. They were a well-behaved and courteous lot, the Ukippers, and it spoke well of them that they were prepared to come and listen to alternative points of view.
Of course, they kept asking me why I wouldn’t join them, the same question that is so often raised in these comment threads. (Indeed, some of the questioners may be the same people). Let me, again, give you my answer.
Malcolm Pearson, the UKIP leader, is a good man: a sincere, incorruptible, disinterested patriot. He was a loyal friend to me for more than a decade when he sat as a Tory, and I am determined that his change of party should not prejudice our friendship. Still, Malcolm won’t mind my saying that he has no chance of entering Downing Street on 7 May. There are only two possible Prime Ministers: David Cameron and Gordon Brown.
Voting UKIP in a place like Seaford means boosting the prospects of its Euro-fanatical LibDem MP, Norman Baker, who reneged on his promise of a referendum, and who argues that the EU “is central to the UK’s economic prosperity”. Voting UKIP, in Seaford as in many other constituencies, means putting a federalist into parliament. It risks prolonging the tenure of this incompetent, wastrel, cowardly Labour regime
