Prime Minister David Cameron should have learned long ago that he is not the man to speak to Scotland about the Union. His essentially vacuous persona does not gel with Scots. Worse, it lightens the weight of the serious things to be said in favour of the Union.
Fate has now intervened to reward him for his blindness.
Earlier today – and dominating the lunchtime news – the Conservative MP for Clacton in Essex, Douglas Carswell, has resigned his seat and left the Conservative and Unionist party.
He has switched his allegiance to UKIP, which he intends to represent at the resulting Clacton by-election.
Carswell has taken this action in opposition to the United Kingdom’s continuing membership of the EU; and in anger at what he says is the covert determination of a conspiracy between the EU and the Conservative party to keep the United Kingdom within the EU.
Carswell asserts that the plan is to give the United Kingdom just enough apparent change in the EU to encourage people to believe that Cameron has been successful in his negotiations for its reform – and to vote to stay in the EU in the referendum the Prime Minister has pledged for 2017 – provided his party is returned to government in May 2014. The departing Carswell described this move as ‘change for no change.’
This is a major PR coup for UKIP and its leader Nigel Farage. It will keep the EU referendum issue boiling in the headlines in the run up to the May 2015 Genera Election; and if Mr Carswell – an uncomfortably persistent free thinker – wins the by-election, he will become – to even further note – UKIP’s first MP.
More immediately for Mr Cameron, this particular defection will be managed to overshadow in media coverage whatever he has to say later today to the Scottish CBI – which is already, in the chokingly repetitive way of media management these days, heavily trailed.
But who is remotely interested in reading it now, even if they were before – which is unlikely.
