Deal With It

The only candidates for whom the Conservatives will be standing aside in 2015 will be Lib Dem incumbents, possibly called "Conservative & Liberal Democrat" in an echo of those termed "Conservative & National Liberal", and before that "Conservative & Liberal Unionist", who repeatedly turned the Tory machine into a vehicle of Liberalism even as they were subsumed into it organisationally, a serially recurring pattern which is about to be repeated.

This has all been arranged, and there is nothing that Conservative activists could do about it even if they wanted to. So that's UKIP told. In any case, Labour's commitment to an In/Out referendum, explicitly ruled out by the Conservatives, would make UKIP's contesting of the General Election a politically less serious version of the latter-day activities of Arthur Scargill.

As for Dan Hannan's pitch for Eastleigh if Chris Huhne were forced to resign, not only is it inconceivable that either Coalition party could win a by-election anywhere at the moment or for the foreseeable future, but it is no less inconceivable that either of them would contest a by-election for one of the other's seats.

That would leave UKIP. But Hannan's signature views on the NHS and a number of other matters are wildly at variance with the policies of UKIP, and would cause it the utmost political embarrassment if expressed by a by-election candidate, the first time that almost anyone outside the largely American readership of Telegraph Blogs or the almost entirely American audience of Fox News would ever have heard of him.

And frankly, UKIP activists in the South East must despise Dan Hannan. I am not saying that I do. I do not; I merely disagree with him on many, many issues, although I always find him a good read. But UKIP activists in the South East, from their own point of view, must really and truly despise him.