Nigel Farage rejects calls for election pact with Tories accusing David Cameron ... - Mirror.co.uk

Nigel Farage today slapped down calls for a pact with David Cameron at the next election - amid desperate pleas from Tory backbenchers to save them from a Labour defeat.

Mr Farage accused the Prime Minister of showing "contempt" for UKIP and its supporters and could not be trusted.

He added: "There isn't going to be a deal between us and the Conservative Party at the next General Election.

"They regard us as members of the lower orders," he added.

But the UKIP leader said he was happy for rabid anti-European MPs, from Labour and the Tories, to run on a joint ticket.

Mr Farage said there are many MPs who take a different view from the Tory leadership on Europe, naming Peter Bone and Jacob Rees-Mogg.

He said: "If either they, or others like them, even Labour MPs, with their local associations, chose to propose running on a joint ticket then I would leave the local Ukip association to have those negotiations ...

"After all we are a party that believes in real localism and doesn't think that the centre is the repository of all wisdom."

Mr Farage suggested there are "a couple of dozen" Conservative MPs with whom his party could come to an agreement at a local level and said they had already held informal discussions with a "handful" of them.

"There are a couple of dozen Tory MPs who hold a range of views on several issues, not just Europe, that are very close to our own," he told BBC Radio 4's The World At One.

"We have had informal discussions with a handful, no more than that."

The development came after backbench rebel Bill Cash pleaded with Mr Farage to "be sensible" and not let Labour win.

Mr Cash said UKIP could cost the Tories 60 seats at the next election - handing the keys to Downing Street to Ed Miliband.

But Mr Farage accused the Tories of being "hopelessly out of date".

He added that Mr Cameron had broken his promise before to hold a referendum on Europe - on the Lisbon Treaty.

"He let us down like a cheap pair of braces," Mr Farage said.

Mr Farage said that he could change his mind - if Mr Cameron blocked all immigration from Romania and Bulgaria.

He said: "If Mr Cameron is bold enough and brave enough to do what the vast majority of this country demands, namely to go to Brussels between now and Christmas and to say 'we simple cannot open the door up unconditionally to the whole of Bulgaria and Romania next year'.

"I have to say that if David Cameron did that then I might rethink completely my attitude towards him, but I don't see any sign of it happening," he added.

 

The Tory leadership was adamant that no-one standing for the party will be allowed to appear on the ballot paper on a joint ticket with UKIP.

Chancellor George Osborne said: "There aren't going to be any deals with UKIP and there are not going to be Conservative-UKIP candidates locally.

"The only candidates who will stand for the Conservative party at the election are Conservative candidates - a sort of statement of the obvious.

"There's a very clear rule in our country, which is that candidates have to be approved by the party and the Conservative party will be fielding Conservative-only candidates."

The Tories also accused UKIP of using "racially insensitive" language - after it emerged an aide had refereed to an Asian reporter as "a female journalist (of some form of ethnic extraction)".

Nick de Bois, secretary of the 1922 backbench committee, said: "There's no room in any walk of life, let alone politics, for this type of racially insensitive language."

The aide, Gawain Towler subsequently apologised to the Evening Standard reporter Kiran Randhawa.

He said: "If in any way Kiran is upset, I'm terribly sorry.

"I'm finding this absolutely absurd because it is so evidently alien to who I am and what I am."

Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, said that Mr Towler was not being racist and that he is married to an Asian woman and that they have a mixed-race daughter.