Should Cameron worry about the tea-partying UKIP?

By Tim Montgomerie

Yes, says Iain Martin at the Wall Street Journal and Patrick O'Flynn at The Express.

UKIP's newly-recycled leader, Nigel Farage, doesn't have to do much more than be as popular as Lord Pearson, says Iain Martin, to make it very hard for Cameron to win a Commons majority (as they did in May). What's more, he continues, Nigel Farage is a much more competent political leader than his predecessor, the gentlemanly but not-very-saleable Lord Pearson.

In his column in Saturday's Express, O'Flynn states that there is real room for UKIP to grow. He argues that there are very clear gaps in the market:

"There is no law and order party in the legislature."

"Britain has no party that reliably puts Britain first."

"Parliament has no tax-cutting party."

"No party prepared to get a proper grip on immigration."

"No party that will call time on the obscene amount of taxpayers' money being spent on climate change initiatives."

A lot of people share these five perceptions [I don't]. After last week's disappointing EU deal, the votes-for-prisoners humiliation and the news that six prisons will close, a few more right-of-centre voters will be willing to give UKIP a go, particularly in mid-term tests of public opinion. With the BNP in massive debt and burdened by legal challenges (Times report (£)), UKIP is likely to have more of a monopoly of the anti-immigration and flag-waving protest vote.

The Conservative leadership is aware of the danger - particularly on crime. That's why it rushed out today's story to the Daily Mail, promising to deport thousands of foreign prisoners. Unfortunately, as James Kirkup has blogged, the promise doesn't have much meat to it.

My hunch is that, rather than a systematic programme to re-unite the conservative coalition, David Cameron will choose to hug the Liberal Democrats ever more tightly. This embrace is unlikely to produce a formal alliance (although I wouldn't rule that out) but a deeper co-option of Clegg's key policy themes including the environment, localism, civil libertarianism and investment in public services. "Liberal Conservatism" as Cameron promised in the first month of his leadership, in December 2005, isn't going away. Cameron will always do enough to keep the Right quiet but his target voter is the voter who wavers between blue and yellow. At some point, however, there's a danger that he'll start losing more to UKIP and abstention than he'll gain from the Liberal Democrats.