Michael Gove embarked on a charm offensive on his own MPs yesterday in an effort to prevent further defections to Ukip.
The Tory chief whip took Mark Reckless for a private lunch in the Strangers’ Dining Room in the House of Commons. The Tory the MP for Rochester and Strood is one of the closest friends of Douglas Carswell, who last week announced that he was jumping ship to Ukip and triggering a by-election in his Clacton constituency.
Mr Reckless has odds of 3-1 to become the next Tory to switch sides, although last week he publicly denied that he was planning to do so.
Mr Gove’s willingness to try to mollify the serial rebel is a sign of just how concerned the Conservatives are about the prospect of further defections. They fear that a by-election victory for Mr Carswell will embolden other Conservatives to follow suit.
The former education secretary has backed away from a confrontation with his party by making it clear that campaigning against the former Tory in Clacton will be voluntary.
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He wrote to Conservative MPs this week to inform them that they will merely be “encouraged to assist” in the battle. Those fighting to hang on to marginal seats were told that requests for leave of absence would be met with a “sensitive” response.
This approach contrasts starkly with a recent contest in Newark, where all MPs were ordered to visit the constituency at least three times in the run-up to a by-election in June. Some Conservative MPs had already made clear that they would refuse to campaign against Mr Carswell, their former colleague.
The gentle tone of the request from Mr Gove reflects the party’s realism about its slim prospects of victory in Clacton next month, where polls have given Ukip an early lead of 32 to 44 points. Senior Tories have decided not to waste too much time and money on the fight. “By-elections are expensive and we’re clearly not going to spend a vast amount on this,” one figure conceded.
Mr Carswell was dragged into a row last night over the use of constituents’ personal information, with one legal expert warning that he could have breached data protection laws.
The Conservatives claimed that the ex-MP had accessed the party’s “Merlin” database of voters three weeks before switching sides.
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Mr Carswell told The Times that he had looked at the programme in the run-up to his defection last week in order to “see what I was up against”. He vehemently denied that he had taken any information from the system.
“Any data that the Conservative party gathered while I was a member of the Conservative party is, was and must remain the property of the Conservative party.” He said that the suggestion that he had taken such information was “desperate briefing from within the Tory machine” and was extremely regrettable.
The former MP did say, however, that he planned to use his own private data gathered during nine years as a Conservative MP. He insisted that he would not be sharing this with Ukip.
Dr Paul Bernal, a lecturer in IT law at the University of East Anglia, warned that Mr Carswell could be breaking the law. While the issue is a grey area, he said that it could be difficult for the former MP to argue that there was a difference between him using the data himself and sharing it with Ukip.
“His own purpose and Ukip’s purpose are currently inseparable,” he said. “If I was one of his constituents and gave him that information and I didn’t want to shift to Ukip, then I would object.”