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Red Box

Sunday, October 12

Good morning and welcome to your Sunday morning political briefing with me, Tim Shipman.

In this week's edition

  • Ukip raises its ambitions to 25 seats next May
  • Miliband fights back on immigration
  • Tories defy Cameron to hold talks with Ukip
  • Voters prefer current coalition to Labour majority - poll
  • Brooks Newmark's mea culpa

Any tips or feedback tweet us @TimesRedBox.

Top News
Rise of Ukip
Growing aspirations, soaring expectations, looming defections

When I arrived in Clacton on Friday morning Douglas Carswell took one look at my dishevelled state and handed me a Red Bull. Ukip’s first elected MP had been up all night. But those of us who endured Scotland, three party conferences and two by-elections feel as if we’ve been up all autumn. But there’s no end in sight to the political news, so grab a high caffeine drink and sit tight.

The zeitgeist is Ukip’s to ride. The party now hopes to win up to 25 seats in May and possibly to eclipse the Lib Dems, according to an internal analysis of private polling data. A senior party figure said: “It’s not impossible that we could have as many seats as the Lib Dems.”

One striking thing about the political coverage in the Sunday papers is that forests the size of the average politician’s ego have been laid waste to create the newsprint to cover Ukip, while there’s barely the back of a postcard on the Lib Dems, whose conference finished as recently as Wednesday.

Meanwhile Carswell told The Sunday Times that a Labour defection may be approaching. An unnamed MP called him on Friday to discuss “coming over”, he said. “It’s looking very promising.” Carswell is on the Andrew Marr show shortly.

Mainstream pollsters think that ten to 12 MPs is the upper limit of Ukip’s realistic Westminster ambitions. A dozen is also the best guess of the Tory defector Mark Reckless, in an interview with the Observer. But in these mystifying political times, in which Ukip appeared to close a 19 point gap in Heywood & Middleton in a week, it feels as if anything is possible.

John Curtice told me he could believe the 25 figure only if Ukip can consistently hit 20 per cent in national polls. As if on cue, Survation pops up with a national survey showing them on 25 per cent, just six points behind both Labour and the Tories. That would give Farage 128 MPs! Ukip are on 16 and 17 per cent in two other polls.

Lord Ashcroft, the Tory peer and pollster, said the key to Ukip fortunes is Rochester, where Reckless is seeking re-election. “I do not think you can discount any possibility if Reckless wins,” he said. The Mail on Sunday reports that the Tories want the Olympic hero James Cracknell to run against Reckless. But will he agree? Remember the fate of the Bread actor Giles Watling in Clacton.

The Tories will announce this week that the Rochester by-election will be held in late November: the 20th looks most likely. David Cameron will visit the town this week.

Nigel Farage predicted further defections as he and Carswell campaigned yesterday in Rochester. Ukip’s leader has also written a column about giving both Cameron and Ed Miliband “hum-dinging headaches on a single memorable night”. He will be talking to Andrew Neil on Sunday Politics.

Tweet

Now this is funny: Clacton resident who told a TV reporters: "Yes, I voted UKIP. The Tory MP's done nothing for years"

Richard Benyon
@RichardBenyonMP View Tweet
Labour leadership
Miliband fights back

Ed Miliband was 617 votes from a major crisis on Friday morning, but he’s attempting a fightback now against the narrative that Labour has ignored its working class voters and demeaned their concerns about immigration.

The Labour leader has penned a piece for the Observer acknowledging that the party needs to say more about immigration and “understand many of the people turning to Ukip because of disappointment with Conservative and [past] Labour governments”.

That said, there are few details beyond the themes of forcing people to “earn the right” to state benefits and face English language tests before taking up jobs: these are paths Labour has trodden before. And John Mann is unimpressed that a leader seeking to get out of his comfort zone has run straight to his favourite newspaper. He pointed out on Twitter. “How many copies of the Observer are sold each week in Heywood and Middleton and Clacton?” Chuka Umunna will be on Sky’s Murnaghan show today to explain more. Harriet Harman talks to Andrew Marr.

Miliband will be cheered by today’s Opinium survey, which puts Labour seven points ahead, but YouGov has the gap at just 2 per cent and makes dire reading for Miliband personally. Over half (54 per cent) of voters nationwide feel Labour would fare better without him, while just 6 per cent say it would benefit from him staying. Just 13 per cent of Labour voters favour of him staying. Miliband is also judged to be almost as bad as Michael Foot.

The Blair-era minister Brian Wilson, writing in the Scottish edition of The Sunday Times, drew a further parallel with Foot, comparing Heywood & Middleton to the Darlington by-election shortly before the 1983 general election.

He said: “If Labour lost, Michael would have retired. Labour won by a few hundred votes, Michael Foot remained as leader and catastrophe ensued. It may be that Heywood and Middleton will be looked back on as Ed Miliband’s Darlington.”

A former minister said MPs want to oust Miliband but have “no candidate” to replace him. They are frustrated that Alan Johnson, the former home secretary who began his working life as a postman, won’t offer himself as an interim leader. “The postman won’t do it,” the minister said.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Johnson, who was briefly Miliband’s shadow chancellor, said that he “hated” being on the front bench in opposition.

Andrew MacKinlay, the former Labour MP, has openly called for Miliband to step down, describing him in the Mail on Sunday as a “complete disaster”. Previous Labour leaders, including Foot and Neil Kinnock, were each ahead in the polls at one time, he writes. “The reason they both lost to Margaret Thatcher was because voters could not imagine either man standing in front of No 10. Ed has the same problem.”

Miliband is safe, but Labour now resembles a couple in a loveless marriage hoping that a baby can bring them back together. If the election does not deliver a bouncing newborn majority in May it is going to get very messy indeed.

Rise of Ukip
Tories defy Cameron to talk truces with Ukip

Continuing the theme of woe for the main parties, David Cameron’s writ runs ineffectively through the ranks of his own backbenchers. Tory MPs are forming unofficial “non-aggression” pacts with Ukip to focus resources on beating Labour, despite Cameron’s ban on deals with Nigel Farage’s party.

Martin Vickers, the MP for Cleethorpes, said he had held “tentative” talks, in which Ukip suggested letting the Tories run unopposed in his seat in exchange for the Conservatives agreeing not to field a candidate in neighbouring Great Grimsby.

Vickers said that the talks “fizzled out”. But asked if there is now a non-aggression pact, he said: “That’s what’s happening.”

Another MP said: “I’m just going to come to an arrangement locally. I might drop Tory branding from my leaflets to make it easier for Ukip supporters to back me. In return I’ll make sure my people leave Ukip alone next door.”

Lord Tebbit, the former cabinet minister, said that “false pride” is “all that stands in the way” of an electoral pact with Ukip.

Douglas Carswell voiced support for an election pact and said he won’t campaign against Eurosceptic Tories such as Zac Goldsmith.

He said: “I’ve got a lot of friends in the Conservative party. They’re still people I’m proud to call my friends. I will not be able to campaign in one or two seats.”

But Nigel Farage rejected any prospect of pacts, suggesting that he would have to hide from his own activists “for my own safety” if he did a deal. A senior Tory source said: “It is not going to happen.”

Boris Johnson is on Marr. I wonder whether he agrees.

Poll
Which government would you prefer after the next election?
The road to 2015
Voters narrowly prefer current coalition to Labour majority

YouGov’s most recent regular polling put Labour 5 per cent ahead of the Tories - but we added a follow-up question exclusively for Red Box, writes YouGov’s Stephan Shakespeare. We asked: "If you had to choose, which would you prefer to see after the next election, a second coalition government led by David Cameron and Nick Clegg, or a Labour government led by Ed Miliband?"

Cameron plus Clegg achieves a 2 per cent lead. It's probably impossible now for coalition parties to go into the election indicating an intention to continue their partnership, but on this evidence, that would give Cameron a better chance of staying in No 10. Current likely Lib Dem voters prefer the coalition by 61 to 21 per cent, while those who voted Lib Dem in 2010 and have now abandoned the party swing the other way at 26 to 50 per cent.

As the second group is more numerous than the first, however, calculations suggest that the Lib Dems might gain votes overall if continued partnership were made the explicit proposition. Those who say they will vote Ukip prefer the current coalition to a Miliband government by 35 to 19 per cent.​

YouGov
The Number
150
Years since Britain experienced a comparable decline in real-terms earnings, according to the TUC
Brooks Newmark
Downfall of a risk taker

Those who know Brooks Newmark well and like his laconic and diligent approach to politics say that his downfall is a tragedy for Westminster as well as for himself. Others will just be poring over his latest sexting incident in the Sun on Sunday, wondering whether he owns a variety of different pyjamas.

This is the second time he has been caught sending images of his honourable member, but this time it’s an actual woman on the receiving end of his attentions after he was previously stung by an undercover (male) reporter.

If Newmark’s resignation statement is a masterpiece of contorted logic - accepting all the blame himself before then seeking to blame (you guessed it) the media, his remarkable piece in the Mail on Sunday reveals someone more self-aware.

“I was the man who had everything,” he says. “I made a fortune, married a beautiful wife, had five children, and then fulfilled my lifelong ambition… Now my political career is in ruins… I have been battling demons – and losing to them. I craved adrenaline and risk.

“Stress at work drove me to increasingly erratic behaviour... Late at night, I began a series of flirtations in response to approaches from women on social media. Deep inside, I knew I was playing with fire. Now it has consumed me and my family.”

Some will regard this as profoundly sad, others an attempt to spin a positive outcome from the wreckage of his own idiocy. The correct response, I think, is to reflect on the propensity of politics to attract and reward those who like to gamble and the ability of Westminster to chew up and spit out many of the talented people who work there.

I have never met a politician whose greatest strength was not also their most profound weakness. I did not know Brooks Newmark well, but he doesn’t strike me as an exception to that rule.

What The Papers Said

Sunday Telegraph

The paper splashes on details of Owen Paterson’s speech about climate change. The former environment secretary says householders should get used to the idea of two-hour electricity blackouts every day.

William Hague has issued an ultimatum to Ed Miliband on English votes for English laws. Labour has until the end of next month to agree a deal - or the Tories will force a Commons vote. Gordon Brown will be on Murnaghan spelling out his views this morning.


Sunday Times

The Lib Dems have accused the Tories of burying a Home Office report that supports decriminalisation of drugs, reports Marie Woolf. Nick Clegg says he will force Downing Street to publish. Alan Duncan, the PM’s envoy to the Middle East, calls on the government to condemn Israeli settlement-building in Palestinian territories or risk paying a “serious long-term price”.


Mail on Sunday

The former culture secretary Maria Miller is calling for action to prevent teenagers from trading naked photos. There is no news on whether Tory MPs will face similar restrictions... Lord Razzall, the Lib Dem peer, warns the party’s MPs to stop plotting over Nick Clegg’s successor. And Theresa May has decided that police will lose the power to secretly spy on journalists’ phones.


The Observer

Baroness Warsi dampens hopes that her forthcoming book might reveal juicy details about Downing Street in an interview. “David and I have been in touch and he knows that they are no kiss-and-tell memoirs,” she says. Iain Dale, of the aptly named Biteback Publishing, will be disappointed! She also calls for Cameron to back Palestinian statehood. Meanwhile, Cameron’s electoral strategist Lynton Crosby faces further questions about lobbying for tobacco firms as it is revealed that his firm last month tried to find out the government’s internal stance on plain packaging on behalf of clients.


Sun on Sunday

Lord Ashcroft has done some more polling that will cause further jitters at Tory HQ. He finds that just one Ukip voter in ten is happy with Cameron, 90 per cent-plus say they are not feeling the economic recovery and 30 per cent heard nothing about the Tory conference. To which we Westminster lifers say: lucky them.

Top News

Commentary


1. It’s time to fight back against Ukip’s fear-driven agenda
- Matthew d'Ancona, Sunday Telegraph

2. The Tories’ veneer of bravado barely hides their desperation
- Andrew Rawnsley, The Observer

3. The home-flipping ex-banker offering an utterly new politics
- Adam Boulton, Sunday Times

4. A nation’s future… in the hands of one modest town
- James Forsyth, Mail on Sunday

5. Wrong again but - like Ukip - I’m learning
- John Rentoul, Independent on Sunday
Top News
Monday
  • Parliament returns from recess
  • MPs debate motion to recognise Palestine as an independent state
  • John Manzoni takes up role as civil service CEO

Tuesday
  • 2.30pm - Defence select committee holds session on the threat posed by Isis
  • Lord Kelvin Smith holds first meeting of his commission on devolution of powers to Scotland
  • MPs debate Scottish devolution and English votes for English laws
  • Sir Alan Duncan makes speech to RUSI on Israeli settlements

Wednesday
  • 9.30am - Education secretary Nicky Morgan gives evidence to select committee investigation into 'Trojan Horse' extremism allegations
  • 12pm - First PMQs of the parliamentary session

Thursday
  • 10.30am - Home secretary Theresa May gives evidence to Intelligence and Security Committee inquiry into privacy
  • Former PM Gordon Brown leads Commons debate on the UK's relationship with Scotland

Friday
  • MPs debate private members' bill on the EU referendum tabled by Conservative MP Bob Neill
  • Una O'Brien, permanent secretary of the Department of Health, gives evidence at investigation into maternal and neonatal deaths in Morecambe Bay hospitals

This briefing was edited by Alice Ross

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