g hall

If in the short term it allows UKIP to concentrate on seats that could be winnable then ok but long term it has to be all seats must be fought or as has been said UKIP is just a pressure group.
IT would have been nice if Nige had asked the membership

tamashi

No matter what Nigel did there would be the moaners who complain about it. Lets try a reality check here! UKIP is a small party without a single MP in Westminster. Our aim is to get our country back. If we can achieve that aim by supporting sitting MP's OF ANY PARTY who share this aim then surely that's a good thing.

Also in reality we are talking about a tiny number of seats. UKIP can't fight every seat anyway. I would be interested to know how many "thriving UKIP Constituency Associations are under threat" I'll bet its not many...and even if it was why are we being so parochical.....I'll bet £1,000 there aren't two adjoining constituencies which both have sitting BOO Candidates so just move over a few miles and campaign to your hearts content.

The offer to stand aside is one which shows UKIP will put country above party. The June deadline shows we will NOT stand aside for sitting Mp's who don't have a long term AND ACTIVE commitment to BOO.

I think Nigel has it exactly right!

We will put country ahead of party.
We will not be fooled by last minute conversions.

As regards asking the membership......he didn't ask if he should visit Rumania, he didn't ask if he should write to every Councillor (something else that is getting good coverage), we elected him leader to get on with it, so lets all get behind him and stop the navel gazing

Tom Wilde

I think you may have missed something crucial in Nigel's offer, which is that it is only open to sitting MPs. If he had said, UKIP won't stand against any Tory candidate who joins BOO, then I'd agree with you. The Tories could fireproof vast numbers of candidates that way. But he didn't - he explicitly limited this offer to sitting MPs. That means we're talking about a very limited number of seats.

kernow

Britannist

And that editorial can be read by clicking on :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/m.../06/dl0601.xml

Mikeuk

This is a very interesting(and encouraging) development.

I have today spoken to two people who claim to be 'in the know' on press matters. Both have widely differing interpretations as to what the Telegraph is currently trying to achieve, where precisely it stands in relation to Cameron, and indeed who is currently pulling the strings.

We will need to watch this closely.

BASILDON BOY

Its great publicity and lets get more while we can.

The Torygraph must be trying to pull the tories back to the right?

If they want to use UKIP to scare the tories then lets get the publicity while we can!

__________________
Mike Nattrass MEP is HOT HOT HOT!!!

Britannist

I read somewhere a couple of weeks ago or so that pro-EU and anti-UKIP David Cameron (allegedly) went to the Channel Islands to meet the owners of the Telegraph group, the Barclay brothers, last month.

After the claimed meeting (of David Cameron and the Telegraph group owners) it was noticed by one columnist on another newspaper (Stephen Glover I think it may have been) that the attitude of the Daily Telegraph to the Conservative leader (Cameron) had (according to the columnist) suddenly improved.

It was further reported by this particular newspaper columnist that David Cameron was, apparently, more concerned about hostility (to him) from Jeff Randall, the eurosceptic Daily Telegraph business correspondent, than he was about what Simon Heffer (a critic of David Cameron - particularly his europhilia) wrote about him.

It was, of course, Mr. Randall who dubbed David Cameron "David Camera-on" in a recent article in his popular column.

Also last month (possibly just after the alleged visit of David Cameron to the Barclay Brothers) the anti-EU columnist Christopher Booker - for the first time in 17 years - had one of his articles refused for publication on his weekly half-page in the Sunday Telegraph.

The article had said that the attempt by a group of Etonians (David Cameron, Oliver Letwin and most of the Cameron team) to hi-jack the Conservative Party and trash everything it stood for and all its policies - in the belief that this would make it more popular with the public and in the opinion polls - had failed.

This article by Mr. Booker was reproduced on the EU Referendum blog (with the permission of Mr. Booker) as well as on this forum (and, no doubt, can be found in the archives of both).

Britannist

The following is part of the article by Mr. Christopher Booker, the anti-EU campaigner, which was intended to be published in the Sunday Telegraph of 3.12.2006 but which was refused:

The article started off: "As David Cameron ends his first year as leader of the Opposition, there are clear signs that the greatest gamble in modern British politics has not come off. The little group of ex-public schoolboys who last year hi-jacked the Conservative Party have seemed to gamble on just one strategy. List everything the Party used to stand for – low taxes, the family, rolling back the power of the state, encouraging business, upholding our defences, curbing criminals, common sense – then go for the opposite.

The essence of the gamble has been the belief that, in wooing the support of Lib Dems, would-be greenies, Guardian readers and the supposed "soft centre", they could take their supposed "core" supporters for granted. But as support for Cameron falters, all the evidence seems to suggest that those wished-for new recruits to his "Not The Conservative Party" are not forthcoming, while the Party's former natural supporters are left baffled, dismayed and increasingly angry."

The full article by Mr. Booker was reproduced on the EU Referendum blog (with the permission of Mr. Booker) as well as on this forum (with the approval of Dr. Richard North, the anti-EU campaigner who runs EU Referendum and who carries out some research work on EU matters for Mr. Booker). Please refer to the archive of this forum for the full article by Mr. Booker.

Britannist

Perhaps those up at the top of the Telegraph are aware of the posting I made to this forum the other day :wink: in which I gave a detailed calculation of the number of people who buy the Telegraph who have voted UKIP in the last two-and-a-half years (i.e. including the last EU Election in the middle of 2004). 8)

It works out at 300, 000 (if not more) of the 900, 000 people who buy a weekday copy of the Telegraph . On top of this some other Telegraph readers will have only voted Conservative at the last General Election because their local MP was strongly eurosceptic or totally anti-EU.

The pro-Labour Guardian clearly recognises that many of its purchasers are members of the Liberal Dim party - it is time the pro-Conservative Telegraph realised that at least a third of its readership have/are prepared to vote UKIP in preference to voting Conservative.