Conservative Party strategists are busy considering ways to pre-empt any overtures to Nick Clegg by whomever is elected Labour Party leader in September.
The influential Tory commentator and blogger Tim Montgomerie’s Conservative Home polled 2,000 party grassroots activists on their support for a “non-aggression
pact” with their junior coalition partner’s candidates.
“A Labour leader who offers Mr Clegg ‘a better deal’ than the Conservatives, either now or in the next Parliament, is seen by Tory Party members as the greatest threat to the coalition”, said Mr Montgomerie in The Times.
He noted that while almost 75 per cent of Conservative Party members believed the coalition is “good for the nation”, some 60 per cent believe Prime Minister David Cameron has already conceded too much to them as the price for Number 10.
Members “resoundingly reject a full merger of the two parties” with 88 per cent spurning the idea of fielding joint “coalition” candidates.
Canvassed as to a middle way between fighting together and fighting each other in every seat 55 per cent of respondents were open to the idea of giving each other a “free pass” in seats where candidates are first and second placed.
Mr Montgomerie said there was a risk of Tories being displaced by either the UKIP or even a brand new centre-right party in constituencies conceded by the Conservatives to their junior partners.
A series of polls in recent days and weeks, ranging from Populus to YouGov, show the Lib Dems continue their projected downward trajectory and that this even under an assumed alternative vote system.
But the attraction for Tories of such a pact, according to Mr Montgomerie, is that it would “ensure that at least half Mr Clegg’s parliamentary party was bound tightly into the coalition’s success, freeing up campaigning resources for the anti-Labour battleground” and making it almost impossible to for the Lib Dems to put a Labour leader into Number 10.
