UKIP winning in Thurrock and South Thanet, rogue poll in Rochester & Strood

Two separate polls have put UKIP ahead in Thurrock and South Thanet.

A Lord Ashcroft poll predicts a victory for Tim Aker who, if he wins, will have become a councillor, MEP and then an MP in just 12 months.

Party	Poll %
UKIP	35%
Labour	30%
Conservative	28%

A Survation poll predicts a whopping 7% majority for Nigel Farage in South Thanet. The poll also found that a third of residents in the constituency have talked to a UKIP activist on the doorstep and 1 in 5 have spoken to Nigel Farage.

Party	Poll %
UKIP	39%
Conservative	32%
Labour	26%

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail are claiming that a secret opinion poll commissioned by UKIP shows Mark Reckless losing his seat to the Tories but the party says it hasn't commissioned such a poll. Reckless tweeted:

Why does @LordAshcroft assume that "don't knows" who voted for me in 2010 as Conservative and in 2014 as UKIP will now vote for my opponent?
— Mark Reckless (@MarkReckless) April 25, 2015

Date set for Mark Reckless court case

Rochster & Strood Conservative Association will get their day in court after filing a claim against UKIP MP, Mark Reckless and UKIP councillor, Chris Irvine for the money they've wasted on leaflets promoting Reckless before he defected to UKIP.

The Conservatives are asking a judge to set the very dangerous precedent that a candidate deciding to switch political parties should have to compensate the party they resign from for the money they've spent promoting them prior to their resignation.

This would be a swift 5 minute judgement in favour of Reckless were it not for their argument that approving campaign expenditure on leaflets two days before he defected was calculated to cost them money when he would have known that the leaflets would have been useless before they were even taken out of the box which, on the face of it, sounds reasonable.

However, as I understand it, Mark Reckless was not an officer of Rochester & Strood Conservative Association and as such, his approval for expenditure would only have been required because it impacted on the legal limit on election spending and not to authorise the spending of the association's funds. We don't vote for political parties in Westminster elections, we vote for the person so what Rochester & Strood Conservative Association actually did (rather than what they thought they were doing) was print leaflets to promote the Mark Reckless personally and to put the Conservative Party's brand on those leaflets.

Was it fair for Mark Reckless not to tell the Conservatives not to print the leaflets and save them some money? Probably not. But politics isn't fair and unfair isn't illegal.

Tories select Tolhurst to lose against Mark Reckless again

The Conservatives have selected Kelly Tolhurst to fight Mark Reckless MP for the Rochester & Strood seat in May.

The Rochester & Strood by-election was UKIP's second by-election victory in 2014 and Tolhurst threw away a 21% Tory majority to lose by almost 3,000 votes, or 7.3%. This is one the Tories will be desperate to take back because Mark Reckless has nothing like the personal vote Douglas Carswell had in Clacton so they'll see it as Conservative -v- UKIP rather than Tolhurst -v- Reckless.

Rochester Tories suing Mark Reckless for cost of leaflets they had to throw away

The Tories in Rochester still haven't got over the fact that Mark Reckless defected to UKIP and then mauled them at the ballot box and have issued a claim against him for costs relating to campaign leaflets they've had to throw away.

Reckless' agent, Chris Irvine, has also been named on the claim for £3,000 to cover the cost of election material that they say was authorised by both Reckless and Irvine as recently as two days before he announced his defection.

It's unlikely that they'll be successful because the principal is quite absurd but it'll make an interesting (and expensive) test case for an ambitious lawyer. You'd think they'd be saving up for the £5,000 fine for exceeding the election spending limit with their postal primary publicity stunt that's surely coming their way once the Electoral Commission have received their election expenses return.

Mark Reckless wins Rochester & Strood for UKIP

Mark Reckless has won the by-election in Rochester & Strood with 42.1% of the vote and will return to parliament as UKIP's second MP.

The majority was less than some predicted but it's just under 3,000 and over 7% which is pretty healthy. The Tories are trying to spin the defeat as a positive and claim that because the margin is smaller than they predicted, they can win the seat back in 2015. It looks like their target seat maths is as dodgy as the maths they used to predict the UKIP margin because Mark Reckless' 2,090 vote majority makes it the 125th largest majority in the country.

The Tories came a respectable but still fairly distant second whilst Labour finished in third place more than 25% behind UKIP. The Green Party finished in fourth with 4.22%, just missing the magic 5% that would have kept their deposit and the Lib Dems were relegated to fifth place with 0.87% of the vote and were only spared the embarrassment of losing to the Monster Raving Loony Party (something normally reserved for the English Democrats who didn't stand in this by-election) by 198 votes. Britain First's lowly 9th place with just 56 votes shows that their clever social media propaganda machine hasn't turned them into a credible electoral force.

Well done to all involved in the election campaign, the activists that travelled from all parts of the UK and beyond to campaign for Mark Reckless and of course to Mark Reckless himself for the brave decision to resign following his defection and contest his seat as a UKIP candidate. Your hard work paid off, you have helped to make history.

Candidate	Party	Votes	%
Mark Reckless	UKIP	16,867	42.10%
Kelly Tolhurst	Conservative	13,947	34.81%
Naushabah Khan	Labour	6,713	16.76%
Clive Gregory	Green	1,692	4.22%
Geoff Juby	Lib Dem	349	0.87%
Hairy Knorm Davidson	Loony	151	0.38%
Stephen Goldsbrough	Independent	69	0.17%
Nick Long	People Before Politics	69	0.17%
Jayda Fransen	Britain First	56	0.14%
Mike Barker	Independent	54	0.13%
Charlotte Rose	Independent	43	0.11%
Dave Osborn	Patriotic Socialist	33	0.08%
Christopher Challis	Independent	22	0.05%

Mark Reckless is the bookies' favourite

Tomorrow is election day in Rochester & Strood and the bookies say Mark Reckless is going to walk it for UKIP.

BetVictor have UKIP favourites to win at odds of 1/125 whilst Bet365, Boylesports, Bwin, Paddy Power and William Hill all have UKIP at 1/100. Bet365 have given the Lib Dems odds of 1000/1 - the same odds SkyBet and Ladbrokes have given the Monster Raving Loony Party.

Rochester & Strood Green Party's disrespectful Remembrance Sunday anti-war campaign

The Green Party in Rochester & Strood marked Remembrance Sunday by setting up an anti-war stall to promote their candidate for the by-election being held on the 20th.

Other parties stood down their campaigners for the day as a sign of respect but the Green Party took the opportunity to set out their stall in the constituency. They have been condemned by members of both UKIP and the Conservatives who have described it as ridiculous and disrespectful.

Picture: Breitbart London

Opinium have UKIP on 18%, YouGov on 16% and Mark Reckless is bookies favourite for Rochester

An opinion poll conducted by Opinium for the Observer newspaper puts Labour and the Conservatives level pegging on 33% each with UKIP on 18%.

The poll also found that 31% of people would consider voting UKIP in their constituency if they thought UKIP could win.

Opinium didn't get the ComRes memo and put UKIP in the "other" section again which, as ComRes showed a week ago, results in an artificially low projected vote share for UKIP.

Party	%
Conservative	33%
Labour	33%
UKIP	18%
Lib Dems	6%
Green	4%

A YouGov poll for the Sunday Times also finds the Conservatives and Labour level pegging on 33% with UKIP at 16%.

Party	%
Conservative	33%
Labour	33%
UKIP	16%
Lib Dems	7%
Green	6%

UKIP are currently favourites to win the Rochester & Strood by-election with bookies offering odds of 1/5 for Mark Reckless against 11/2 for the second favourite Conservative and the waste of space Lib Dems 1/10 to lose their deposit.

Budget busting Tory primary in Rochester flops with less than 1 in 10 taking part

The "primary" to select the Conservative candidate for the Rochester & Strood by-election has flopped with just 5,688 people taking part in the budget-busting publicity stunt out of a possible 75,000.

Not only did they get a turnout of less than 1 in 10, those that actually bothered to take part couldn't make their mind up which of the two candidates to vote for with the result that the "winner" beat her opponent by just 0.88%.

At least three lawyers specialising in electoral law have said that this Tory publicity stunt should be classed as election spending and they've almost certainly exceeded the £100k election spending limit already just with this publicity stunt.

Conservative candidate Kelly Tolhurst ... never seen in the same room as Nikki Sinclaire. Just saying!

ComRes poll puts UKIP 13% ahead in Rochester & Strood

A ComRes constituency poll in Rochester & Strood puts UKIP 13% clear of the Conservatives in next month's by-election caused by the defection to UKIP and subsequent resignation of Mark Reckless.

The key statistic that will send Labour into panic mode and proves Cameron's "vote UKIP, get Labour" propaganda to be absolute nonsense is that 39% of people who voted Conservative last election will be voting UKIP, 39% of people who voted Lib Dem last election will be voting UKIP and 30% of people who voted Labour last time will be voting UKIP. We are taking votes off all three of the old parties.

Like we saw in the Heywood & Middleton by-election earlier this month, a vote for the Conservatives is a vote for Labour and don't let David Cameron or the Tory propaganda machine con you into thinking otherwise.

Party	%
UKIP	43%
Conservative	30%
Labour	21%
Green	3%
Lib Dem	3%

Lawyers advise Channel 4 that Conservative "primary" in Rochester is election spending

Two specialist election lawyers have told Channel 4 that the Conservatives' election primary in Rochester should be considered election spending and come out of the £100k spending limit for election campaigns.

David Cameron is believed to have helped come up with the publicity stunt of putting forward two candidates and holding a postal ballot of residents of Rochester & Strood to choose which one should become the Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for the by-election caused by Mark Reckless' resignation when he defected to UKIP. The Conservative Party claims to have been given advice by the Electoral Commission that the money they spend on the primary doesn't count as election spending but UKIP's own legal advice and the advice of these two lawyers contradicts that advice and Channel 4 reckon that the Tories will illegally overspend on the campaign by 100%.

The idea that a party can spend an unlimited amount of money on publicity stunts involving the person who will be adopted as their candidate weeks before an election is just ridiculous. It would mean that Labour could spend millions promoting a union-sponsored candidate whilst the Conservatives could spend Ashcroft's millions doing the same for his sockpuppets.

That's within neither the letter nor the spirit of the law which clearly limits the amount of money that can be spent to stop elections from being bought. Rotten boroughs were abolished in 1832, it's time the Tories entered the 21st Century.

Conservative's Rochester "postal primary" gimmick is an election expense

UKIP have written to the Conservatives asking how they will keep within spending limits for the Rochester & Strood by-election if they go ahead with their "postal primary" publicity stunt.

The Conservatives are planning to send promotional material out to every household in the constituency inviting them to choose from two Conservative candidates to be the Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for the by-election. They don't plan on taking the estimated £40k cost of promoting the successful candidate through this gimmick out of the £100k limit on election spending. UKIP have taken legal advice and been advised that the cost of the primary is an election expense.

Rather than answer the question the Conservatives have described it as "yet another media stunt". The Electoral Commission will no doubt be taking an interest in this one.

Reckless on 9% lead in Rochester & Strood

The Nasty Party's attacks on Mark Reckless that have forced him to move his family out of Rochester and on UKIP members in general look to have backfired on them.

A Survation poll for the Mail of Sunday puts UKIP on 40% in the Rochester & Strood constituency with the Tories 9 points behind on 31%. Labour are third on 25% and the Lib Dems set to lose their deposit with just 2% of the vote.

There are some interesting statistics in the polling that should worry both Labour and the Tories. Only 12% said they would be voting for Reckless because they like him, 70% said they were voting UKIP because they support UKIP's policies and 88% of those who are voting for UKIP said they will vote for UKIP in the general election next year.

Survation has been consistently close to the mark when predicting UKIP success so there will no doubt be a tentative sigh of relief in the Reckless household.

Two more Conservatives defect to UKIP

Two Conservative council candidates in Mark Reckless' constituency have defected to UKIP.

Cllr Paul Monck and Mark Joy have both joined UKIP today. Cllr Monck is a parish councillor on Cuxton Parish Council and Mark Joy was one of the new Conservative candidates selected just a few months ago.

Mark Reckless MP bookies' favourite to defect to UKIP

Conservative MP, Mark Reckless, is odds on favourite to follow Douglas Carswell's lead and defect to UKIP.

Reckless is the MP for Rochester & Strood and the bookies have him as 3/1 favourite to ditch the useless Tories and join the people's army.

It's not beyond the realms of possibility that more Tory MPs will defect to UKIP but if it does happen it's certainly not going to be before they see whether Carswell successfully defends his seat.