Having already conceded defeat to Ukip ahead of Thursday’s Rochester by-election (the most recent poll put Nigel Farage’s party 12 points ahead), the Tories are now focused on damage limitation. They aim to cut Conservative defector Mark Reckless’s lead to single digits and to turn attention to the performance of Labour, which is set to finish a distant third. Their hope is that defeat in Rochester is now “priced in” and will fail to trigger the crisis that the opposition wanted.
In response, Labour is preparing its rebuttal. Expect the party to remind voters just how much David Cameron staked on victory in the seat. The PM vowed to “throw the kitchen sink” at Ukip (kicking Reckless’s “fat arse” in the process) with all Conservative MPs ordered to visit at least three times and all cabinet ministers to visit at least five (not all have obliged). The common view among the Tories was that while defeat to the popular Douglas Carswell in the Clacton by-election was inevitable, victory over Reckless was eminently achievable. “Losing is not an option,” one government figure declared.
With the reverse now the case, the Tories are seeking to present their performance as adequate compared to that of Labour whose vote has fallen from 28.5 per cent in 2010 to 17 per cent. A Conservative source told the Observer: “Our vote is holding up OK. We are at 30 per cent, maybe even 33 per cent. It is not bad. Ukip are in the 40s. But Labour have absolutely capitulated and collapsed in a seat that they held until 2010. There are at least as many questions for Ed Miliband as for us. We are fairly relaxed about the whole thing, as I think it is priced in at this stage.”
Labour rejects all of this. As one aide pointed out to me, far from “holding up”, the Tories’ vote has collapsed from 49 per cent in 2010 to 32 per cent in the most recent poll. “They want to make this about us, it’s all about them,” he said, deriding “spin to the point of gibberish”. Labour sources also point out that it is not true to say the party held the seat until 2010. Had the constituency been fought on its current boundaries in 2005, Bob Marshall-Andrews (who represented the predecessor seat of Medway) would have lost.
An aide described Rochester as a “landslide victory seat”, adding “we know we’re not looking at a landslide victory”. Despite its well-regarded candidate Naushabah Khan, the party argues that it was inevitable that its vote would be squeezed, with the usual two-horse by-election dynamic magnified by Reckless’s high-profile defection. “If we get 10 per cent we’ll be doing well”, I was told. In response to those who say it should have devoted more resources to the by-election, the party argues that it is focused on the marginal seats it needs to win a majority (and in which it remains ahead).
But while Labour is determined to define Rochester as a Conservative failure, Cameron’s party may not be as unnerved as it hoped. Tory MPs have been reassured by national polls putting them neck-and-neck with the opposition and by a Lord Ashcroft survey showing they would win the seat at a general election. But that the Conservatives are now prepared to tolerate defeat to not one but two Ukip defectors is further evidence of their diminished ambitions. And the fear remains that there could be more to come.