Mark Reckless: Ukip's new defector is ready to take on the Tories

Ukip's brand new campaign HQ in Rochester—one of the towns which makes up the Rochester and Strood constituency previously represented by Tory defector Mark Reckless—hasn't any furniture yet. But the front of the former fantasy memorabilia shop is already painted in the party's plum and custard colouring, and adorned with no fewer than 21 posters for Reckless's fledging campaign for re-election. The crazy hues look rather well-placed among the kitsch little tea shops and boutiques of Rochester high street. It's a stark contrast to the local Conservative association's offices, stranded nearby in the less picturesque town of Brompton, sharing an austere grey box with the local Conservative club.

Mark Reckless, who stood down as the Conservative MP for the constituency and jumped ship to Nigel Farage's party at the end of last month, hopes his political life will undergo a similarly vibrant transformation. Like his great friend Douglas Carswell, who introduced Reckless to Farage before leaving his own constituency in Clacton to join Ukip, Reckless is obsessed with political reform. “What Douglas and I think,” he tells me as we stroll along the High Street on a sunny autumn afternoon, “is that politics hasn't been shook up by competition in the way that our economy or perhaps society has.” In particular, he points to the culture which hands safe seats to powerful and important figures in the main parties: “if you had a job for life and didn't have to do very much to keep it... then perhaps you wouldn't be as good at your job as you are,” he says.

The reasons Reckless gives for leaving the party for whom he stood in three general elections, winning the third in 2010, revolve around the Conservatives not being properly accountable to their grassroots and the wider electorate. The final straw, for him, was an address David Cameron gave to Conservative backbenchers in June, in which Reckless asked why the party wasn't living up to its promises to regain justice and home affairs powers from the EU. “Rather than just saying 'well it was agreed with the Lib Dems,' we had the Prime Minister [make] a sort of passionate defence of the European Arrest Warrant as if it was the only way we could ever catch terrorists,” Reckless exclaims. “I think he was arguing in government against it before, and spoke very passionately as a backbencher on the Home Affairs Committee against it.”

His distaste for Cameron is palpable—he paints the Prime Minister as duplicitous and uninterested in the ordinary voter. “[He isn't] serious about European reform but also reform of the political agenda more generally,” says Reckless. He points to the example of the MP Recall Bill—the government's proposed legislation to allow disgruntled constituents to expel underperforming MPs from Parliament. The bill has been criticised for not going far enough by prominent Conservatives including Zac Goldsmith, and Reckless calls it in its current form “a negation of the direct democracy we promised at the last election.” He thinks Cameron may well deliver his promised 2017 EU membership referendum if he wins a majority, but fears it will be a false choice, in which Cameron will employ “all his PR skills” to frame the question, the terms of the renegotiation and the campaign in such a way that voters will be duped into staying. Reckless thinks reform of the EU—as opposed to exit from it—is impossible, and calls on his former colleagues on the Eurosceptic backbenches to “stand up and be counted” and pick a side on membership of the Union. “To pretend instead that there is some third option where you can remake the EU as you would like it to be is at best a conceit and at worst a deceit,” he says.

But big ideas won't win him the fight ahead by themselves. Tomorrow's two byelections in Clacton and Heywood and Middleton are—barring serious mishap on either side—almost foregone conclusions. Labour are set to defeat Ukip in the latter, with one poll this week giving them a 19-point lead. In the former, Douglas Carswell's impressive personal ratings look set to sweep him to victory—recent polls give Ukip a lead of between 32 and 44 points there. But Rochester and Strood is not Clacton, and Reckless is not Carswell. Reckless's constituency isn't the graveyard of ambition controversially evoked by Matthew Parris in a Times column on Clacton. Anti-politics feeling alone won't sweep anyone to victory here. The constituency may have returned a comfortable majority for Reckless and the Conservatives last time, but the old Medway seat, which it replaced and whose boundaries were similar, was a classic swing seat which followed the political winds.

According to a recent Survation poll, only 25 per cent of Conservative voters said Reckless was a hero for defecting—half of the proportion who said that Carswell was for doing the same. With a nine-point lead as of Sunday, Reckless could well take the seat—possibly attracting more wavering Tories to Ukip—but an effective Conservative campaign could equally snatch it from his grasp. With the Tories promising to “throw everything we can” at the by-election, whose date is not yet set but is likely to take place in late November, the stakes are high on both sides.

So the fight ahead is crucial, though Reckless plays this down, saying only that he would “like to win." But he seems prepared for a hard struggle. He says he'll fight this election much as he has fought the last three: with a hyperlocalised campaign responding more to burning local concerns than national issues. In this, he has an advantage over the Tories. Reckless has spent much of his political career fighting the proposals for an airport in the Thames estuary, something many of his constituents virulently oppose. The Conservatives, on the other hand, will at the next general election be fielding one Mr B. Johnson, the estuary airport's greatest advocate, as a candidate elsewhere. Reckless's aide—coincidentally also Ukip's candidate for the Uxbridge seat which Johnson will fight for the Tories—describes Boris Johnson as “the most hated man in Kent.”

Ukip's campaign has another advantage over the Conservatives', in that the latter do not yet have a candidate, and may not have one for at least another week, by Ukip's estimation. The Tories are reportedly considering holding an “open primary,” which would likely be conducted by post and would mean that any registered voter in the constituency, not just Conservative members, could choose the Conservative candidate from a list. It's a nice idea in that it goes some way towards matching Ukip's direct democracy offer. But it also gives Ukip a head start—they're planning a huge campaign launch on Saturday, and want to bombard the constituency with two or three pieces of campaign literature before the Tories even get going properly. Before the Tories have a candidate, they can only effectively campaign on national issues, so they risk being undercut by Reckless's local knowledge.

Reckless relishes the contest: “I love elections,” he says. “I think they're the purest moment in democratic politics.” He's a dedicated campaigner, delivering a 2.3 per cent swing to the Conservatives in 2001 and a 2.5 per cent swing in 2005 before winning his seat with a 6.6 per cent swing in 2010. He's also an idealist, who before the chairs have even been installed in his office has had the legend “all things are possible if you believe” scrawled on a blackboard on the wall in pink. Voters I talk to on the streets of the constituency suggest there's everything to play for. They range from 61-year-old Pamela Thomas, a former working class Tory (“like Hudson in Upstairs Downstairs”) who says she is “completely up for grabs,” to 19-year-old Catherine Gaston, who likes Labour but can't give a reason beyond her father's voting for them, and appreciating “the guy in charge before... Tony?”

When I ask whether Reckless knows of any other potential defectors within the Conservatives he declines to comment, but it looks like his own troubled switch (Cameron led Tory attacks on him by describing him as a “fat arse”) hasn't shaken him too much. He takes comfort in the views of his constituents. He keeps quotes from them in the “notes” app on his iPhone, which he brings out twice to read from in our conversation. What one constituent said about the personal attacks on him should worry Reckless's old party. "I don't think it's fair at all,” Reckless quotes. He smirks as he reads the next bit: “but that's what Conservatives are all about, isn't it?"

Cameron's footsoldiers had better hope they can persuade Rochester and Strood that's not the case. Their time is running out.