TAKING AIM AT UKIP

ONE day, in August 2014, we were all in a meeting at Chequers. The comms chief, Craig Oliver, who had been scrolling through his BlackBerry, suddenly turned a bit red. ‘Sorry to interrupt but [Tory MP] Douglas Carswell has just popped up on my screen,’ he said. ‘He seems to be in the middle of defecting.’ We piled into the duty clerk’s small office — and there was Carswell on TV with Nigel Farage, vowing to stand for Ukip. We knew this would have a terrible effect on MPs’ morale. We needed to steady the ship — and we also needed a candidate to put up against Carswell. Boris? His text back gave us a firm reply: ‘F*** off.’ The next month, [Tory MP] Mark Reckless defected to Ukip. Would there be a stream of them? Five of us made lists of MPs we thought could be Ukip material, then we divided up the calls. These were not easy conversations. ‘Er, hello. Were you thinking of jumping ship?’ Would they even tell us the truth? When we asked, some were understanding, some furious. You couldn’t really blame them.