Ukip flashing red lights in the Tory and Labour cockpits

Tories from David Cameron down have been bashing the same button this morning: vote Ukip, get Miliband. Their focus groups suggest this will deliver a big chunk of voters back to their silo come the general election.

But one of the many flashing red lights in the cockpits of the two main parties today is that their radar have proved defective.

Not so long ago, the Tories said a phenomenon like the Clacton result was impossible. Labour didn’t see the Heywood result coming. Their own Voter ID work suggested they would hold the seat comfortably. The published polling  – Survation and Ashcroft Polls –  probably saved Labour’s bacon in Heywood by exaggerating Labour’s lead. Any sense that things were as tight as they were and a surge of Ukip support could’ve snatched the Labour seat.

Tories will be wanting to quadruple-check their polling in Rochester and Stroud. They’ve talked of it being a very different seat where they can defeat Ukip. If they lost there it threatens to be a very dark moment. Other  Tory MPs could be incentivised to jump over to Ukip.

We know Ukip’s poll-ratings improve when they’re getting headlines. Senior Cabinet ministers were boasting in the summer that Nigel Farage’s European and local election successes had receded from view. The party’s centre-stage now and could be in blinding lights if it won Rochester.

The Tories will now tell every Tory MP to visit the seat multiple times. This will be like the Newark by-election in terms of effort, and quite possibly even more intense. Mark Reckless can expect a rough ride compared with the mixture of warmth and ambivalence shown to Douglas Carswell.

Enough has changed with the Clacton result to earn it a place in the history books anyway. It is the biggest rise in a party’s support in a by-election ever recorded. It is testimony to the shattered hold the three main parties had on politics. Voters are sniffing out “none of the three above” parties (the Greens might be worth watching on their own march too).

But if they lose Rochester the Tories will feel shaken to the core. The stability of the party, never something you take for granted, could be shaken badly.

On BBC News today the Tory MP Mark Pritchard acknowledged that he had been tempted to join Ukip but had been persuaded to stay with the Tories by the prime minister’s decision to promise an in/out referendum. As a likely “out” voter, he had decided to campaign for the electorate to back David Cameron for PM in 2015 in the hope that they will join him in 2017 in sticking two fingers up to David Cameron’s judgement that the UK should stay in the EU. Some scope for instability there.

The Tory refrain – Ed Miliband is “one step closer” to No. 10, as Grant Shapps put it – is an extraordinary admission for a party of government to make and a sign of how the rule book is being rewritten for new times. (One Labour MP said it might be an idea to invite Grant Shapps to Labour’s parliamentary party meeting on Monday to calm down jittery Labour MPs.)

Will Clacton wake the voters from their slumber, as some Tories see it, and revert to the Tories to keep Labour out of power? In Clacton, at the very beginning of the campaign, I found voters who spontaneously said just that.

But one of the striking thing about Ukip voters is that an awful lot of them don’t see much difference between David Cameron and Ed Miliband and a lot of them are pessimists about their own economic future too. They don’t necessarily buy the idea that things are turning round nationally and certainly don’t think they’re going to benefit from any upturn.

Ed Miliband, speaking  in Heywood, emphasised that the Tories were losing in their own backyard. He said Ukip’s surge was due to “disillusionment” with established political parties and disillusionment with their economic circumstances.

But he hasn’t found a way to deal with these correctly identified phenomena. After his statement to the microphones, he walked away from journalists shouting questions in the way the leader of the defeated party normally does.

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