Brian Micklethwait argues that no (overt) pact is needed between the Brexit Party and the Conservatives in order to get a Parliament of leavers. The Brexit Party can make the pact unilaterally:
all Brexit voters need to know who to vote for in their particular constituency, come the day, to ensure Brexit. So, the Brexit Party just needs to tell them. If the Brexit Party campaigns for Conservative Brexiters who’ll win, but for its own candidates when they are more likely to win, the Brexit Party will get its deal.
Meanwhile Boris might do well to avoid a pact:
in the event of such public collaboration, there was and is a crucial slice of Conservative but only Leave-ish voters in the affluent south who would have been put off voting Leave, and would who would now be put off voting Conservative and would switch to the LibDems
It might just work.
I think this works, but I never was any good at seeing three chess moves ahead. Consider what follows to be me thinking aloud.
The difficulty arises when the Brexit party has to decide whether to put up candidates for all 650 parliamentary seats.
If the Brexit Party DOES put up a candidate for every seat, it then will be in the difficult position of having to tell its likely voters not to vote for its own candidates. The voters may not get the message. Or they may get the message but not obey, particularly if they have come to BXP from Labour and have an inbred dislike of Tories.
The Brexit Party activists – party activists are always an ornery lot – may defy the order of their own party leadership that they should “throw the match”. The BXP candidates who are being sidelined may publicly object, causing an intra-Brexit Party split.
But if the Brexit Party does NOT put up a candidate for every seat, then the reverse happens: The Conservative Party activists may defy the order of their own party leadership to throw the match. The Conservative candidates who are being sidelined may publicly object, causing an intra-Conservative Party split.
In addition, what is going on becomes obvious to all sides. Seeing that a de-facto alliance is in place, the Remainers will be incentivised to make an alliance of their own.
What I have said does not necessarily undo Brian Micklethwait’s point. The swings I list above could all occur but not the extent that it would negate the advantages to the Brexit cause of the Brexit Party making a unilateral decision not to contest seats held by Tory Brexiteers, or to contest them in a deliberately lacklustre manner.
This assumes that a General Election precedes the UK separating from the EU.
If there is a GE prior to Brexit Day, then clearly the only issue at the election is going to be Brexit. The old-fashioned Party loyalties of the voters are likely to dissolve, and who knows what the result will be? Given the vagaries of the First Past The Post system when there are more than 2 serious candidates, the overall result will be a real crapshoot. No-one could reliably predict what kind of government would emerge.
To avoid the crapshoot, it would seem essential to have some kind of cooperation between Brexit-favoring candidates. Perhaps the best solution would be to have an agreement among the Brexit-favoring candidates that, if elected, they will all resign on the Day After Brexit, triggering a new round of elections once Elvis has left the building.
If the election happens after Brexit, then there would be no role for The Brexit Party, and both Conservatives & Labour would have to face the reality that most of their former supporters are disgusted with their record of deceit and incompetence over the last 3 years. And nobody has a coherent plan for what to do on the Day After Brexit. Tough to predict the result of that election!
I have always thought the purge of the Tory parliamentary party would have to be external as well as internal.
A party so newly formed has a ready-made excuse for not running candidates in every single seat. This will make no difference in Maidenhead, where May will concede nothing, but the Guido commenters are very eager that a decent Brexit party candidate run against Theresa May and will probably welcome a real contest! I think that one is baked in. The OP plan may work in ‘enough’ cases.
if Brexit is accompanied by an election win, I do not anticipate Dominic and Boris standing around wondering what to do next. Boris has to write a draft of the Queen’s speech before October 14th and he probably already had some idea what would be in it when he chose that date.
There is one other possible advantage of not having an explicit pact between the Tories and the Brexit party – although to say that it falls into the category of “jam on it” and should not be expected is to put it mildly – so mildly that I will not object to mockery of this comment.
Ordinarily, the largest party – if a majority or if able to survive a vote in the house – provides the government and its leader is the PM. The second largest party then provides “her majesty’s loyal opposition” and its leader is “the leader of the opposition” – but maybe not if the two campaigned in explicit electoral alliance.
It would be an unusual future in which, day in and day out, the BBC ten o’clock news were obliged to report (at suitable length) Boris’ boasting of his hard Brexit, and then obliged to report (also at suitable length), Nigel’s lambasting it for not being hard enough, before being able to report the views they agreed with.
OK I’ve woken up again. 🙂 Let’s concentrate on Brexit surviving the upcoming (we hope) election, defeating futures of an opposite grimness.
This would indeed be hilarious.