Douglas Carswell: Ukip’s only honourable member
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Version 0 of 1. A few short days before the special conference at which Jeremy Corbyn will be anointed leader of the Labour party, I stand in a queue for coffee at the House of Commons with Douglas Carswell, Ukip’s only MP. It’s quite a long queue, and while we wait, we discuss Corbyn’s imminent elevation, about which it would be something of an understatement to say Carswell is excited. “The Corbynistas are part of something big,” he says, cheeks pinking. “You might call it a European-wide phenomenon. But I think it’s even bigger than that. They’ll hate me for saying this, but they’ve a lot in common with those in America who support Donald Trump. Both are dissatisfied with the status quo. Both are fed up with a corporatist economy and a parasitical political elite. Both are backward-looking. Both believe this one man can fix everything. What we must ask ourselves is: what is it that the political system has done that has allowed them to get as far as they have?” As the line inches forward, this question hangs in the air, unanswered. Carswell has momentarily stopped speaking, and for the time being, I don’t press him. It seems neither one of us is prepared to tackle The System without the aid of caffeine. Carswell sees Cornbyn as a miraculous double whammy, politically speaking. On the one hand, he thinks Corbyn’s leadership will, in the end, “see off Fabianism for ever”, the very idea of which fills him with undisguised glee. On the other, there is the prospect that the Labour leader will boost what he calls the “tapestry” of opposition to Europe in the build-up to the EU referendum (Carswell takes succour from the fact that although Corbyn, under pressure from the media, has rowed back from his once-stated view that the Union’s treatment of Greece is justification for a potential exit, some of the shadow cabinet are clearly more cool on Europe than their predecessors: John McDonnell, the new shadow chancellor, has said, for instance, that Labour will only take a view on the EU referendum once David Cameron has presented his reform package). Won’t it be odd to make common cause – should such a thing indeed happen – with someone whose politics are so radically different from his own? (By now, we’re sitting down, macchiatos in hand.) “Well, I get on very well with Jeremy. Weirdly enough, my mobile was on the green bench beside me before the recess, and he leaned across and said: ‘Someone has left their phone here.’ He could hardly believe it when I told him it was mine because there were all these stickers on it, put there by my six-year-old. Look, my politics are 180 degrees different to his. But this is the point. If we’re a self-governing democracy [ie if Britain votes to leave the EU], voters can then decide if they want Corbynism or not. The key thing is that all the people in the No campaign want a better relationship with Europe, not that they have one single blueprint of how Britain should be governed.” Does Carswell really think the referendum is, from his side, winnable? “Oh, yes. Of course it is.” The government won’t, he insists, play with a straight bat: the entire machinery of Whitehall will be deployed to try and keep Britain in, civil servants being, in his view, major fans of bureaucracy. “But what the Sir Humphreys want is going to have a lot less impact than it would once have done. People are much less deferential than before. We are behind in the polls, but it’s a gap that can be closed. A year before the Scottish referendum, the SNP were about 20 points behind; we’re about a year out, and the margin is much narrower. I’m confident. The No campaign is attracting people to run it who will make it clear that voting against the EU is not a reactionary thing, that we simply want to govern ourselves that we might better integrate with the world beyond Europe.” What about Nigel Farage? The leader of Carswell’s party may not be the official face of the No campaign, but given his toxic image, his mere association with it could prove fatal. He is dismissive. “Ukip is doing what a political party should do, which is to mobilise support and deliver leaflets and hold rallies. But don’t assume that Ukip appealing to the Ukip base precludes a broad No campaign that appeals to non-Ukip voters. A referendum isn’t the same as an election campaign. You can’t win a referendum with 37% of the vote, as Cameron did the election. By definition, we need a coalition.” Events, he thinks, are about to start moving very quickly. “A few weeks ago, we might have scoffed at the idea that the Schengen agreement [the treaty that abolished Europe’s border controls] was under threat. But now there are countries closing their borders. The project is in a state of flux.” His voice, already urgent, now has new energy. “For most of human history, people have come along with a plan, a dogma or a religion: an excuse to try and tell other people how to live their lives. But we are coming to a world where it is no longer credible for an elite to organise social and economic affairs by grand design. A party that has that at its core – the plan being to have no plan – would be genuinely radical.” But where he sees a sensational historic opportunity, I see only confusion. Press him on where on earth the bewildered voter is supposed to place his or her faith now, and he doesn’t even namecheck his own party. Yes, Carswell believes Corbyn will shortly lead Labour over the cliff edge, and for the Conservative party, he has nothing but disdain: “It just doesn’t do, in office, the things it ought to.” But he seems not really to expect anyone to put their faith in Ukip either: certainly, the ideas he expounds seem not wholly to belong to it. “We need a political system that recognises that the world is best arranged by evolution,” he says. “We need a radicalism that is based, not on what politicians promise to do for us, but on their promising to get out of the way. Look around you! Why do we live in a world where the people in this place believe that they know what’s best for my children, or anyone’s? Is there a giant computer upstairs that allows them to see into the future? McDonald’s allows its menu to be decided by trial and error. It sees how a product sells, and then it rolls it out. But politicians just think up the menus and roll them out.” He goes on in this vein for a while, his jaw, clenched at the best of times, tight with indignation. Isn’t it dispiriting, I ask, having all these ideas and yet no place truly to put them, no party capable of making them a reality? (Ukip, it seems to me, is as keen as any other to tell people how they should lead their lives – which is, perhaps, why he hasn’t mentioned it). But, no. He looks genuinely amazed at the thought. “Not at all! Twenty years ago, it would have been awful. But now I’ve got the internet. I blog every day. I tweet. The great thing is that I can communicate all these ideas directly.” Related: To Farage the opportunist, the EU referendum is his chance for glory | Simon Jenkins W hile I prefer Carswell’s intellectual independence to the smarm and obfuscation I more often encounter in politicians, his many contradictions mean that, in the end, he is far harder to fathom. Where they have naked ambition, he has a kind of muddled zeal. It is, for instance, all but impossible to work out why he joined Ukip. Charles Moore, the former editor of the Telegraph and an admirer of his, once said that “many of his [Tory] colleagues regard him as a lunatic” – which makes it sound like Ukip might be his perfect home. But the truth is that he has little in common with its Little Englander leader and those members – the “eccentric” stars of BBC documentaries – who long for some prelapsarian past untainted by the political correctness and mass immigration they believe have conspired to ruin their faded seaside towns. Carswell, who is 44 but seems rather older, grew up in Uganda, a country he mentions often in conversation. His parents were doctors, his Scottish father, who was employed by Idi Amin’s government and who diagnosed the country’s first Aids cases, having apparently been one of several models for Dr Nicholas Garrigan in Giles Foden’s novel, The Last King of Scotland. “My family moved there before I was born. One of my first memories is of the Entebbe raid [the hostage-rescue operation carried out by the Israel Defence Forces on a hijacked plane at Entebbe aiport in 1974].” Why did his parents want to live there? The country was in the hands of a monstrous dictator. “I’m assuming it was because it’s an amazing country.” So did he feel like an expat, or was Uganda home? “It was home. It was where I belonged.” When he was sent to Britain to attend boarding school – he went to Charterhouse – he felt “there was something rather alien about it … I remember seeing snow for the first time, and having to be taught how to use a telephone box”. So he was homesick? Now he’s impatient. “I got the best of both worlds. The real impact of Uganda on my life is that it made me realise that modernity is progress. So many people who’ve only lived in the west have this nonsensical idea that somehow the past is better. In Uganda in the 70s, modernity was in retreat. The borders were shut, the Asians were out; it went backwards dramatically and it was horrible. It’s much better now. You no longer see kwashiorkor [malnourishment] on the streets, there are mobile phones, it’s prospering. I believe modernity represents progress, that science and technology make the world a better place.” He quotes Kipling. “What should they know of England, who only England know?” After school, Carswell took a gap year, during which he sold T-shirts on a market stall in France, and waited tables at a hotel in Switzerland. He read history at the University of East Anglia, took an MA in imperial history at King’s College, London, worked for a digital satellite network in Rome, and finally ended up in the City. In 2001, he stood against Tony Blair in Sedgefield, an experience that taught him a lot. “You’ve got to hand it to Blair. On the night of the count, he went straight up to the chairman of the local Conservative Association and asked him about his wife’s back. I thought: wow. He was the prime minister, and yet he could still think in those terms.” He sniggers. “We, on the other hand, had William Hague.” In the run-up to winning his own seat – he was elected the Conservative member for Harwich in 2005, and for Clacton in 2010 – he began working for the policy unit that was putting together a strategy for the 2005 election, and some of his ideas, notably directly elected police chiefs, did make it into the manifesto. But frustration quickly set in. “I came to realise that the Conservative party is not really interested in change. It exists in order to garner votes to allow the small clique that runs it to stay in power.” How did it feel to lose faith in the Tories? “It was quite something to realise: I’m not really Conservative at all, or not in the sense that I want things to stay as they are. But I wasn’t prepared to sit around feeling bitter and twisted. There are so many people in this building who are bitter and twisted.” The months before he announced his move to Ukip last year were anxious. But he thought: “I could be miserable for years, or I could try this other high-risk approach… There’s something tragic about people who avoid doing what they ought to have done. I had supper the other day with a former home secretary and I found it really sad. They told me that if they could do it again, they would do it differently. It was really sad.” How much grief did he get when he finally made his move? “Remarkably little. Some people in the constituency were a bit huffy. But I was putting it to the voters [rather than simply crossing the floor, Carswell stood down so there would be a byelection] and you can’t argue with that.” He’d long since ceased to be afraid of the whips. Now MPs can build their own brands via social media, their patronage is far less vital, and their power much diminished. Was he disappointed more MPs didn’t follow him? “Not really. I feel bad about Mark [Reckless, the MP for Rochester and Strood, who did follow him, and subsequently lost his seat]. But it’s not in my nature to plot and conspire.” I still wonder how he felt – and feels now – about Farage, though. Wasn’t he a very good reason not to join Ukip? The two men are so different, the one reflexive and hectoring, the other thoughtful and determinedly polite. You only have to consider their starkly different approaches to immigration to grasp this. While Farage has warned that Syrian refugees may be terrorists in disguise, Carswell says: “I think we can all agree they are escaping from war, and I would cheerfully vote for a motion to allow a quota of refugees. I think we could take more asylum seekers, who are a small proportion of the number of people who come to Britain, if we processed other migrants more effectively. I grew up in a country ruled by a brutal tyrant. I’m the first to recognise that people need asylum.” However, Farage’s knee-jerk responses are, he says, as nothing to Cameron’s flip-flopping. “Where’s the foreign policy? Nothing he has proposed suggests that he knows what he is doing. He’s way out of his depth. He’s unfit. It’s like The Thick of It. We are led by such mediocrities. They’re more interested in the press release than in policy. What would Thatcher or Reagan, Attlee, Wilson or even Blair, have done, confronted with this? Maybe I missed the bit where we went to Turkey to talk about collective action in Syria.” But what does he think of Farage? Finally, the politician kicks in. “I have enormous admiration for Nigel’s sheer…” (a long pause) “… stamina. For nearly two decades, he has stood on his own, fighting elections, sometimes losing his deposit.” Hasn’t that now shaded into crazed egomania? Another pause. “I don’t agree. Great leaders often have a certain robustness. I was careful to look where I was leaping.” Was he disappointed that Farage didn’t, as promised, step down after the election? “You need to talk to Nigel about the, er, resigning thing. Ukip has got a very compelling leader. But we will be stronger and more successful because of the ideas behind him.” Why doesn’t he simply mount a putsch? “I’d be disastrous. I don’t have the patience.” Is he looking forward to Ukip’s conference, which begins at Doncaster Racecourse this week? “Ha! I gave up going to Conservative conference five years ago. But I have to go now, don’t I? If I don’t turn up, I’ll be noticed.” My feeling is that he prefers his constituency to large meetings. His wife and daughter live in London, but his beloved vegetable patch – he makes jam – is in Essex, and he seems disappointed that I’m not able to attend one of his regular £10 fish and chip suppers, at which he makes inspirational speeches (“Reasons Why We Should All Cheer Up”, “Why the World Is Getting Better”). It is clear that he has a real connection with the people he represents, which is perhaps why they returned him to parliament at the 2014 byelection with such a thumping majority. “All people are created equal, and if they do things and live lifestyles that other people think are irrational, that’s because they don’t understand the circumstances that have led them to behave in ways that are, to them, perfectly rational,” he says now, of Jaywick, the ramshackle resort to the west of Clacton where 62% of people are on some kind of benefit. We are led by such mediocrities. They’re more interested in the press release than in policy This seaside village has taught him so much: “Despite the incompetence of the state leviathan, people are full of hope, optimistic. The state is so remote and awful, they rely on each other. The first time I did a debt-counselling session in Jaywick, no one came through the door. Then I held one outside the area, and it was full of people from Jaywick.” They hadn’t wanted their neighbours to see them? “Yes, and from this I learned how stupid it is to go wading into an area with good intentions. It’s about seeing people as individuals, not about doing things to them.” Carswell runs and swims and reads; right now, he is in the middle of Lisa Klaussman’s Fitzgerald-inspired novel, Tigers in Red Weather. But it’s his constituency that seems really to represent his hinterland. When he speaks of it, what you hear is, first, deep interest, and then an awkward kind of pride. Carswell and I speak again, this time on the phone, two days after Corbyn’s victory, the scale of which has amazed him. “Yeah… 59% is pretty… pretty… pretty overwhelming.” There follows a long silence, and then: “I’m surprised. But maybe I shouldn’t be. People are revolting against what they see as a cartel, and weren’t the other candidates all products of that cartel? They spoke and thought in cliches. They couldn’t even give straight answers to straight questions. Perhaps it was a relief for people to hear someone who had a philosophy.” Does he still feel excited by Corbyn, or is reality kicking in? (It certainly is for some in the Labour party.) “I’m excited. Very much so. The Labour party is going to be divided on the issue. The Blairite dogma [on Europe] is in retreat. If you look at the maths, any fragmentation on the left makes it more likely that David Cameron’s new deal [with Europe] will be rejected. So, it’s encouraging.” He sounds almost high. “Yes, actually, I feel exhilarated all round. Isn’t it wonderful that someone who is not telegenic, who is not fashionable, who hasn’t tacked to the breeze all his life, is starting to articulate an alternative? I don’t subscribe to that alternative. But I do want change, and I think this is another sign of the old order coming to an end.” It sounds like a line from a movie trailer: “The cartel is beginning to fracture,” he says, and then he hangs up. |