Douglas Carswell—Cameron's first man?

Douglas Carswell is not like other MPs. Few members would ever show up in Portcullis House sporting Converse boots and a tattered backpack. But the last time I met him there, that’s what he was wearing, talking animatedly about his new book on the relationship between technology and democracy.

And now Carswell, the MP for Clacton in Essex, has defected from the Conservative party to Ukip. (Only one MP has ever crossed from the Tories to Ukip—another MP in an Essex seat, Bob Spink, back in 2008.) In his resignation speech today, he complained that the Conservative party was failing to bring about proper change in Britain, that it was hopelessly wedded to the EU and the stagnating continent. "In Westminster, who among our so-called leaders, is prepared to envisage real change?" he asked, rhetorically.

Carswell is an outlier, a big-thinker, perhaps something of an idealist, who believes vigorously in the scrubbed independence of the individual. He has taken a big, spectacular leap on a point of principle. How will he land?

Probably quite well. He now faces a by-election, which it looks likely he will win. Ladbrokes has him down as the 1/3 odds-on favourite to take the seat. The Conservatives are at 5/2, Labour at tens and Lib Dems a distant fourth. Ukip, it seems, will have its first elected MP.

The consequences for the Westminster parties will perhaps be more significant. Labour will revel in the news, taking it as yet more evidence of—as they see it—David Cameron’s weakness, although Ed Miliband’s tweet: "Douglas Carswell’s defection is not just a blow to David Cameron. It shows the Tory Party too divided to stand up for hard-working families" was perhaps a somewhat confused initial response.

The Conservative party will be deeply unsettled by all this, and by the nasty little question that it will now have to confront—are any other of its MPs  preparing to cross over? Back in 2012, Prospectprofiled Ukip’s then-Treasurer, Stuart Wheeler, discussing at length the potential harm that Ukip might do to the Conservative party. He made a comment in the course of the interview that seems now to resonate with substantial significance. “I have written to five different Eurosceptic Conservative MPs inviting each of them to have lunch with me, alone, without knowing who the others were,” Wheeler told Prospect in that interview. All five of the MPs he invited accepted his invitation, said Wheeler, adding that they were all “very friendly”.

It might fairly be assumed that Carswell was one of those five Eurosceptic Conservative MPs courted by Wheeler. It is intriguing to consider who the other four might be and now, having seen one go, whether they might feel compelled to do the same. To borrow from the language of the cold war: is Carswell Cameron's first man?