On the Johnson Farage Dilemma

[danieldwilliam]

These remarks were thought about before Farage decided that discretion was the better part of valour. I’m mainly posting them up here because they are too long for a Facebook comment typed on a touchscreen on a smartphone and because Patrick Hadfield asked me to expand on a shorter comment I’d made.

At the time of thinking (mid to late last night) there were suggestions that both Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson would stand in the Newark by-election. My initial thoughts were that this would be a hilarious contest to watch from another country and that I couldn’t decide which would put the wind up the Cameron government more, Nigel Farage MP, or Boris Johnson MP redux.

Then I got to thinking that a bit of crude game theory suggested that whilst both men were in the state of  probably-going-to-stand neither man would. It’s a sort of version of the Prisoners’ Dilemma This unpacks thus…

Both Johnson and Farage would like very much to be MP’s . Both gain considerable advantage from the threat they pose as potential MP’s. Johnson because he is seen as a likely and strong challenger to Cameron as Tory leader and Farage, well for much the same reason but in a more roundabout way. However, neither needs to be an MP *now* in order to translate that advantage into a stronger position and / or the ultimate achievement of their goals later. The advantage they have *now* is that they are perceived as being likely to win later. There will be another chance, a better chance, later.

Clearly losing a by-election in a secure centre-right seat would significantly damage the perception that they are likely to win later. Perhaps to the point where it destroys both their current threat and the chance of them securing their ultimate ambition. Johnson would have to return to the mayoral challenge of stealing Ken Livingston’s policies and Farage would return to being the sort of person I avoid in the pub whilst muttering the words Dunning-Kruger to myself.

The pay-off to winning Newark now is not much greater than the pay for winning another seat later. The cost of losing Newark now is considerable, perhaps making it impossible to win another seat later. Newark is a tricky seat for both men *if* the other one is standing.

The thing most likely to prevent each man winning the Newark by-election is if the other man is standing against him – and thus splitting the “honest, plain speaking, hail fellow well met, man-of-the-people iconoclast” vote. So, whilst Johnson might stand if Farage wasn’t and Farage might stand if Johnson wasn’t the threat that losing poses to both men’s ambition is such that neither can risk standing against the other. Absent some coordinating cartel or signalling mechanism and a way of rewarding the other chap for doing the decent thing, a protracted will they won’t they dance is likely to end up with both men giving Newark the swerve and continuing to keep their powder dry and their fleet in being.

I’m not sure how the very quick Farage stand down affects Johnson’s decision to run or not.  Problematically for him, he’s on record as saying he wouldn’t cut short his term as Mayor of London to seek re-election and the Conservative candidate in Newark has been selected for some time. I expect he’ll also keep his powder dry and his promises kept.

Comments

[matgb]

Y'know, that hadn't occured (partially, of course, Yorkshire based Devonian, still not actually even visited Scotland despite many invites).

However, the odds are tiny as a) they're unlikely to get any seats, let alone enough to be worth it and b) they won't want to compromise stuff and know they benefit from the protest even more than the LDs did and c) the Tories wouldn't want a coalition at all if they can avoid it.

I can see them agreeing to a confidence and supply agreement with a minority Tory administration insisting on a referendum and a few other basic things in return for votes on key issues like the budget. But in order for that to be even viable, they'd need at least 5 MPs, which is, well, unlikely, they don't have a single target seat except possibly Eastleigh.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Ah yeah, first past the post... UKIP are unlikely to reach the post aren't they. Much more likely to just split the Tory vote and let Labour in.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Yeah – they need to get somewhere above 15% nationally, probably closer to 18%, to stand a good chance of picking up seats. They might be able to generate some local concentration and pick up some seats on a lower national vote share but so far there vote seems fairly evenly spread around the country.

I think one of the things they will be looking for on 22nd May is whether they are getting a geographic concentration and whether this is translating into local council seats – which are correlated with winning Westminster seats later.

[matgb]

Thing is, the "splitting the vote" thing is a lot less common than people think (especially than Tories think) and is less likely to apply in tighter marginals. In safe Tory seats I expect UKIP to do well, possibly even take a few of them, but in the really tight marginals I expect them to fall back after the dust has settled at the end of the month, the Tories will know where they need to push and who they need to push and will attempt to squeeze them a lot.

The real question then is how sticky their vote is (there's a technical term but I forget what it is) and how many of their voters would otherwise simply not have voted, which appears to be a reasonable proportion. I really don't picture a 1983 style meltdown, but I've been wrong in the past—a Canadian style Tory wipeout would be amusing but horrific in the longer term, if we must have a right wing party of Govt full of idiots, I'd rather it was the current Tories than a Tory/UKIP merger like the Canadians now have.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I’m not sure that the amount of vote splitting has to be large to cost the Tories a few dozen seats.

For a start it’s not a problem they’ve faced so I wonder how good they will actually turn out to be at not splitting the vote.


Only one way to find out - wait for the election and see what the result is.

[matgb]

Traditionally, Tories have been harder to squeeze than Labour, but it's (in England at least) normally only been Lib Dems trying to squeeze them and a lot of Tories used to view the LDs as Labour-lite. But they are squeezable. Assuming that the only UKIP voters that are squeezable anyway are people that used to vote Tory, then in tight marginals I suspect most will switch back to the Toris if UKIP did relatively badly there in the Euro vote and the local Tories are on the ball enough to get that message strongly across.

However, the media and a lot of Stupid Party members will assume that all UKIP voters in a given seat would otherwise have voted Tory and therefore that any seat the Tories lost by a smaller margin than the UKIP vote was lost due to vote splitting—this will palbably be Not True for many of them but not all of them. As an example, the Totnes 1997 result is one I know well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totnes_%28UK_Parliament_constituency%29

Totnes is a safe Tory seat, always has been, but that result makes it look like a tight marginal, because 2K Tories were so fed up with Steen they voted for the Local Conservative, a well known local businessman (in Brixham, the largest of the towns in the seat). The LDs threw the kitchen sink at that one in 2001 and look where it got them (guess where I grew up BTW).

There will be some seats where the vote is split and it makes a difference. But the number of them will be far smaller than a lot of pundits, including academic types, will acknowledge, because a lot of UKIP voters wouldn't have otherwise voted Tory, many wouldn't have voted at all, etc. It'll be interesting to watch tho. Especially where I now live, which might even become a 4-way marginal, almost unheard of in modern England.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

And I'm quite certain the closer we get to the election, the more and more stories will come out exposing UKIP to be a collection of genuinely vile people, which will hurt them quite badly. I mean, the ConDems are mad if they haven't been stockpiling intel about them for a few years now.

And given the crap UKIP members are coming out with left right and center, there has to be a lot of juicy party-destroying crap under a few stones.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I'm sure we will see lots of stories exposing / painting UKIP candidates as vile people.

I'm not sure this will hurt them much electorally. I think many people who vote for UKIP quite like the fact that the media and the established parties are having a go at them. It proves that they, the voters, are right.

http://liberalconspiracy.org/2014/04/27/why-blaming-the-media-or-calling-them-racist-wont-deal-with-the-ukip-problem/


What vile things could UKIP have done, out of power, that members of the Labour, Liberal Democrats and Conservative Parties haven't done whilst in power.

Jings, we've just had a party leader of an established party arrested for murder.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

And I can't make up my mind if the timing for that arrest is designed to hurt him in the polls by his enemies, or if his own side might have dobbed him in themselves, in order to help him in the polls.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

It seems to be linked to the recorded evidence coming out of the Boston Colleage recordings of former IRA members released after they had died.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Yep. I wonder if the recorded testimony of an IRA killer will be enough to charge him.

I mean, I strongly suspect Gerry Adams has a lot of blood on his hands. But they've always avoided going after him until now.