Nigel Farage faced a furious row yesterday as the man picked as Ukip’s general election contender for Clacton refused to stand aside to let Tory defector Douglas Carswell stand for the party in a by-election.
Farage and other Ukip figures spoke to Roger Lord yesterday in a bid to persuade him to step aside after Carswell resigned as a Conservative MP to join the anti-EU party.
Carswell’s move triggered a by-election in the Essex seat, which he visited with Farage today.
But Lord was insisting that he should be given a chance to fight the seat for Ukip, claiming Carswell would lose the party voters.
He accused Carswell of “jumping ship” because he would have been beaten next year as the Tory candidate. Ukip stressed that its national executive committee had already decided that Carswell was its by-election candidate. The party said it had powers to decide contenders for such polls, while local parties picked the general election contenders.
But asked whether he would still fight for the nomination, Lord told BBC radio: “Absolutely. I have been assured I will get a fair hearing. We are not a party that stands down. We don’t bend, we don’t break. We fight.”
He insisted that the matter was “not over” and warned that Carswell would “pay the consequences” for how he had behaved.
Touring Clacton, Farage said: “The national executive of our party have unanimously voted that Douglas will be the candidate.
“Roger, having put in 17 or 18 years of hard work, is feeling a bit sore. I think we all would in that situation.”
He suggested he could instead fight the Harwich and North Essex seat.
Carswell stressed he had defected to Ukip because he believed there was nothing to differentiate the Conservatives from Labour.
He said: “What would be the difference between Ed Miliband’s gang in number 10 or the current gang? We need change. That’s why I’m doing this.” Farage has predicted more Tory and Labour MPs may join his party if Carswell wins the by-election, with speculation that as many as eight more Conservatives could switch sides.
But Thatcherite John Redwood, MP for Wokingham, dismissed the figure as a “figment of Ukip’s imagination”.
Many Eurosceptic Tory MPs were swift to say they would not defect.
Richmond Park’s Zac Goldsmith said: “Not me. I love UKIP’s emphasis on direct democracy and so on, but they’re hopeless on the environment.”
Mark Reckless MP, a friend of Carswell, said: “If people want a vote for an independent Britain, they need a Conservative government.”
Liam Fox and Nadine Dorries also signalled they would not join Ukip.
