United Kingdom Independence Party MP Douglas Carswell has hinted that after the Brexit vote the door may now be open to him rejoining the Conservative Party after his defection in 2014.
The lone UKIP MP in Westminster may defect back to the Tory party before the next general election having helped neutralise the party in the 2015 election and attempting to during the EU referendum campaign.
The new Conservative government under Prime Minister Theresa May may have put the Tories back on a footing he feels comfortable with, including ostensible support for Brexit, Carswell said in a new interview Politics Home reports.
“I suspect the next general election will be in 2020, who knows what the world will look like then?” Carswell said, adding, “I support the Government because it’s a Brexit government. I’m waiting to see what the Autumn Statement and the Budget will be, but I suspect I’ll vote with the Government on the supply resolutions. I want this government to be a success.”
The new attitude toward his former party is somewhat different from previous statements he made before the Brexit vote in which he told press that, “I’m not going to become a Conservative again.”
Mr. Carswell used the interview to again attack Mr. Farage:
“When you’re asking people to vote for you, you’re bringing people together. You attract them, and if you want to attract people it’s helpful not to be repellent,” he said and slammed the election strategy of Mr. Farage claiming it was not focussed enough on local issues, but rather on immigration and the European Union.
In fact the opposite was true, however Mr. Carswell may not have realised having only visited South Thanet to help Mr. Farage for just over one hour on one single day during the campaign. The Thanet campaign was based on local priorities, and the UKIP group even developed a local plan surrounding rejuvination of the area and rebuilding Manston Airport.
One source close to the campaign told Breitbart London: “To suggest that Nigel’s campaign wasn’t hyperlocal is just another Carswellian lie. At that time, Manston was a synonym for UKIP and Farage, and the real reason behind Mr. Farage’s loss was Mr. Carswell’s friends in the Conservative Party breaking election spending rules and indeed Mr. Carswell’s insistence that UKIP use an election system developed by a Tory friend of his.
“At the time, UKIP was offered for free a version of the software that helped Donald Trump win the U.S. presidency. Mr. Carswell rejected it in favour of a jumped up Excel spreadsheet that gave him access to all the UKIP data in the country, including South Thanet data. What did he and his Tory staff do with that data? We may never know”.
Nigel Farage has expressed bewilderment as to why Carswell joined Ukip in the first place saying, ““I don’t understand why he would join a party like ours, with me as leader, and then disagree with the way I do things, and want to sack not just me, but every party officer, everybody in this office.”
Owen Bennett, author of the “Brexit Club” went as far as to claim that Carswell had joined UKIP to infiltrate the party and to “neutralize” the growing popularity of Farage. Carswell himself said during the summer one of the only reasons he hadn’t quit the party was because he thought he would lose another by-election in his constituency.