Cameroons like to remind the disgruntled Tory right of a simple bit of coalition electoral arithmetic: Tories on 34% + LibDems on 8% = 42%, just about enough to form a government again in 2015. Well UKIP have been also been polling between 6% to 10% for over a year now. If those right-of-centre voters could be brought back into the Conservative Party embrace they would have a good chance of forming a majority government. UKIP have no MPs in Westminster under first past the post, they do however have plenty of voters for Westminster elections.

During the 2010 general election readers of this blog raised over £15,000 to “Get Balls Out” by supporting the Tory candidate in Morley & Outwood. On election night Balls survived by a mere thousand or so votes, fewer votes than the UKIP candidate received. UKIP HQ called Guido on the night and said if they had known it was going to be so close they would have stood their candidate down. Perhaps a formal pre-election pact is politically impossible. However the Eurozone is likely to fall apart in the near future, new arrangements will be put in place by the EU radically altering the existing structure. On that basis the government will be entitled to bring the EU referendum promised by both governing parties. If the LibDems refuse to countenance a referendum the Conservatives need only to promise an immediate referendum within a year of the general election to bring about an implicit electoral pact with UKIP.

If you think this is improbable you could be surprised. The Conservative Party’s main internal Thatcherite pressure group, Conservative Way Forward, has quietly changed its constitution to allow UKIP members to join. The unhappy experience of coalition with the LibDems has opened the eyes of many on the Tory right to the electoral logic of coalition with UKIP. Dan Hannan isn’t the only one who wants it to happen…