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The Conservative party will select their candidate to take on defector Douglas Carswell in the Clacton byelection on Thursday evening, as Ukip seek to capitalise on a backlash against a former Tory MP who urged his party to turn its back on the town.
Residents of the Essex seaside constituency will get the chance to choose the Conservative candidate at a US-style open primary. However, the party is putting up only two contenders vetted by the local association, despite having initially said it would field four hopefuls.
One is Giles Watling, a director and actor living in Frinton, who played the vicar in the 1980s television sitcom Bread and whose website describes him as a keen sailor who owns two small yachts. The other is Sue Lissimore, a Colchester councillor who has roots in Clacton and works for her family's electrical business.
Ukip is portraying the party as out-of-touch after Matthew Parris, a former Tory MP, wrote an article in the Times suggesting the Conservatives should not put too much effort into wooing the people of Clacton. His article, which concluded the town and its people were "going nowhere", has not gone down well in the area.
Carswell, who has a lead of 44 points in one poll, said he did not want to "have a pop" at Parris, but added: "I think it's very sad that the party I spent twentysomething years being a part [had its] selection meetings chaired by someone who clearly holds those views."
The Ukip candidate said he was trying to counter the view that Nigel Farage's party was backward-looking and reactionary – by offering a sense of hope in contrast to the "absurdly patronising" attitude of those at the top the Conservative party towards those who they stereotype as "white van Essex man".
"Look around you, the customer hasn't got what it asked for," Carswell said. "There is a sense of alienation. I don't want to harbour that sense of alienation and stoke it up. I am trying to say to some very pessimistic people, let's do this together, let's change things. On one of my leaflets, underneath the Matthew Parris article, I've actually got the slogan: Don't get angry, let's change things."
Clacton has been identified by the Manchester University academic Matthew Goodwin as the seat in England most likely to be receptive to Ukip because it has "lots of pensioners, lots of voters without a degree, lots of voters with no educational qualifications and higher than average levels of economic disadvantage and unemployment".
Labour is third in the polls, about seven points behind the Conservatives. But Tim Young, the party's candidate and another Colchester councillor who was born in Clacton, said his focus on the cost of living and the coalition's failures on the NHS was gaining support with voters.
He was scornful of Carswell's anti-establishment position, arguing that the former Tory had voted for coalition measures that had left people worse off. Young said he was stressing the rightwing nature of Ukip's policies and its record of "spreading fear" about immigration.
Asked why Labour is not performing better in the town and the south in general, he said: "There are issues in the south, but Clacton is a wide and diverse constituency. If you go to places like Frinton, places like that are not typically urban and lots of deprivation. It isn't a natural Labour seat. It's somewhere where Labour can get a lot of votes but I wouldn't pick it out as natural Labour territory …The cost-of-living is resonating without a doubt. People are on their uppers here."
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