Suzanne Evans has confessed she faces calls to leave UKIP “on an hourly basis”, revealing how unpopular her decision to back Douglas Carswell’s campaign to undermine Nigel Farage has made her.
Replying to a Twitter user who asked if she would “come back into the fold” of the Conservative Party, the 52-year-old replied cryptically that “there are plenty who are just gagging for it”, posting a tweet from a UKIP supporter asking for her to be booted out and stating that she receives such messages “on an hourly basis”.
Evans was a key ally of Douglas Carswell, who defected to UKIP from the Tory Party in order to undermine Nigel Farage’s leadership of the campaign to take Britain out of the European Union – a plan he concocted with the help of Tory MEP Daniel Hannan.
Carswell has now left UKIP, along with fellow defector Mark Reckless, leaving Evans desperately short of allies. Neither Carswell nor Reckless, who won seats in Westminster and the Welsh Assembly under the UKIP banner, will now submit themselves to byelections, despite insisting on them when they first left the Tory Party.
Reckless has now rejoined the Tory Party, while rumours suggest Carswell will do so ahead of the General Election in 2020.
“Virtually every bad story about UKIP that’s emerged for the last two and a half years has come as a result of splits with Douglas Carswell and a tiny handful of people that were his key supporters,” Farage told the BBC following his resignation.
“I think everybody now in UKIP with a senior position agrees with the manifesto, understands how important immigration is as an issue to British voters … for two and a half years we’ve had Douglas Carswell trying to get rid of that policy. That’s ended.”
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