How deal could deliver majority
Nigel Farage appears to be in a generous mood. He is offering Boris Johnson an electoral pact that would ensure the Prime Minister secured a pro-Brexit majority in an early general election.
To achieve this, the Brexit Party would stand down in many a Conservative-held seat, especially where the local MP was a hard-line Brexiteer.
in return, the Conservatives would give the Brexit Party a free run in leave-inclined labour-held seats, that Mr Farage’s party would hope to be able to win.
The offer does come with strings – Mr Johnson would have to commit to leaving the eU without a deal – but that might seem preferable to the Tory leader rather than the risk that Brexit might not be delivered at all.The logic of Mr Farage’s offer is impeccable.
A plethora of polls released over the weekend on average put the Conservatives seven points ahead of labour. However, the party looks set to lose valuable seats to both a revived liberal Democrat party as well as the SNP in Scotland.
As a result, even if the Conservatives perform better in leave-voting areas, that seven-point national lead could still leave Mr Johnson a half dozen seats or so agonisingly short of a majority.
Meanwhile, support for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party still stands at a hefty 14 per cent. if, though, all these voters switched instead to the Tories, Mr Johnson would command a majority of well over 100 seats as Mr Farage claimed in a newspaper interview yesterday.
Joining the two pro-Brexit forces via a pact would, therefore, seem to make perfect sense. Mr Johnson would have to pay the price in that some of those seats would be held by the Brexit Party rather than Conservatives, but that might seem a sacrifice worth making to avoid the risk of no Brexit. Not all Conservative voters would be happy with such a pact, however.
Some opposed to leaving without a deal might opt instead for one of the opposition parties or decide not to vote at all. Some Brexit Party voters too, would not necessarily follow Mr Farage’s lead. They might switch back to Ukip or stay at home.
indeed, a recent poll by Deltapoll suggested that if the Brexit Party stood its candidates down in return for the Conservatives committing themselves to a no deal Brexit, support for the Conservatives would increase by six points, much less than the Brexit Party’s tally. Meanwhile, support for both labour and the liberal Democrats would also be two points higher. Consequently, the net impact of the manoeuvre nationally might be no more than a twopoint swing to the Conservatives.
Crucially, though, a Brexit Party/Tory pact would have most impact in those places that voted most heavily for leave in 2016 – and for Ukip in 2015, when it secured 13 per cent of the vote under Mr Farage’s.
even if the effect of a pact nationally were to be as limited as Deltapoll suggests, there are 22 labour-held seats that, given the parties’ current standing, could well evade Mr Johnson’s grasp, but could be delivered by a Conservative/Brexit Party alliance.
As Mr Farage has suggested, all but one of these is in the North, the Midlands or Wales. Most have hitherto been considered relatively safe labour territory – only four elected a Conservative MP in either 2010 or 2015. These would presumably be the kind of seat where the Brexit Party leader would want his party to represent the pro-Brexit Alliance.
Winning these 22 seats would be enough to give the Prime Minister a safe overall majority, in tandem with the Brexit Party, of nearly 40. While that might be well short of the 100 seat majority that Mr Farage is promising, it might still be regarded by those who want Brexit delivered as a bargain well worth making.