Party On

It will be interesting to see the Tory MPs against whom UKIP will apparently not be fielding candidates. Someone should ask them about their wholesale denunciation of Margaret Thatcher over Europe, taxation, grammar schools, and so forth. But since they cannot have been identified as in agreement with UKIP on these issues by reference to the voting record of the House, and indeed may yet never have been returned to it, how, exactly, has UKIP identified them? They are probably not members of UKIP, but only in the way that Konni Zilliacus or John Platts-Mills was not actually a member of the Communist Party.

If I were Head of Strategy for the Lib Dems, and if the Lib Dems were opportunistic and duplicitous rather than the cuddly and high-minded souls that we sweet children know them to be, then leaflets would be going out in those constituencies, identifying the Tory candidates as for all practical purposes members of organisationally and politically an entirely different party from the one listed next to their names on the ballot papers, and as publicly recognised as such by that other party. The same would be happening in Wansbeck. I am truly taken aback that Ian Lavery is still a member of the Labour Party. He doesn't sneeze without Arthur Scargill's permission, so it is quite clear that, much like the NUM itself, he has been deliberately kept in Labour rather than the SLP as part of a stay-behind network. And then there are all the other alleged Hard Leftists "exposed" in last week's Sunday Times.

Alternatively, there is the Buckingham Strategy. There, a former Tory MEP, who went on to help found the Pro-Euro Conservatives before joining the Lib Dems, is standing as an "Independent", there being no Lib Dem candidate in the Speaker's constituency. In all fairness, he is quite right that people who primarily want to vote against sleaze have no reason to vote for UKIP. But, while these days it is no longer possible to adopt designations such as "One Nation Conservative" or "Social Democrat" for ballot paper purposes, if the Lib Dems can organise such a candidate in Buckingham, then they could doubtless do so elsewhere to draw away votes from a UKIP-endorsed Tory, or a Murdoch-unendorsed Labourite, or whoever.

Just as well that the Lib Dems are such cuddly and high-minded souls. Isn't it, children...?