IS DOUGLAS CARSWELL A PLANT?
Douglas Carswell’s attitude to the £3.2 million which UKIP is entitled to under the so-called ‘Short Money’ rules is, on the face of it, inexplicable.
It could be that he is deliberately using his position to damage UKIP but another possible explanation is the old adage “there is no fool like a clever fool”.
Douglas Carswell appears to be ideologically a Thatcherite ultra who objects to taxpayers’ money being spent on almost anything but in particular on politics. In some ways this might be considered to be commendable, but is obviously a profoundly impractical idea when he represents a party like UKIP which must seriously need that money. I gather UKIP may have spent something in the order of £10 million on the General Election compared to the much bigger Conservative Party, with far greater brand awareness and electoral credibility, which apparently has spent over £60 million.
The Short Money payments would also be extremely useful for UKIP to be used as part of the organisation and preparation for the In/Out EU Referendum. In short the decision to reject it caused by Carswell’s intransigence can only be described as obtuse.
It is however interesting that Douglas Carswell had a track record of being a thorn in David Cameron’s side. Also when he went over to UKIP and caused a by-election, it was interesting that the Conservatives didn’t put in a big hitter against David Carswell, but instead put in a virtually unknown actor, who, despite their polling research on the English nationalist sentiments of many residents of Clacton, didn’t raise the English nationalist issue at all, either in the by-election or in the General Election. Could it be that the leaders of the Conservative Party wanted the highly disruptive, egotistical, ideological obsessive Carswell disrupting the ranks of their enemy? It would surely have been feasible to encourage him to jump and with “plausible deniability” to enable him to get re-elected.
In case it might be said that ‘surely nobody would be that devious?’ I am aware of cases where outside of politics exactly that has been done where people who are trouble are given excellent references for them to go and work for competitors. In one particularly repellent case, a teacher, who had been caught, as it was put, “interfering with small boys” whilst working for a State school, in the days of the Greater London Education Authority, being given an excellent reference to get him out and to get him working in the private sector, with a view to damaging the private sector’s reputation once he was caught there!
Whether it is so or not however having Douglas Carswell in UKIP has certainly been an un-mixed blessing for the Europhile Conservative Party’s leadership!
The only point it gives me significant reservations about this theory is the fact that David Cameron himself doesn’t appear to be sufficiently clued up and or, indeed, sufficiently Machiavellian to have done such a thing. Could it however be significant that this all happened whilst that Wizard of Oz, Lynton Crosby, was in town?