Nicking his job? Tory rebels want Nigel Farage (left) to replace Nick Clegg as Deputy PM in a Ukip pact

Tory MPs are putting pressure on David Cameron to offer Cabinet positions to Ukip as part of a pre-Election ‘peace deal’ with Nigel Farage.

With Ukip’s Douglas Carswell predicted to romp home in next month’s Clacton by-election – triggered by his bombshell defection from the Conservatives – rebel Tory Eurosceptics want a formal pact with Ukip which would offer both Mr Farage and Mr Carswell the chance of ministerial office.

The move comes as Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg today makes a public call for the Prime Minister to reserve two Cabinet seats for Ukip – or sit back and watch Ed Miliband move into Downing Street.

In an article on these pages, Mr Rees-Mogg says Mr Farage could become Deputy Prime Minister while another Ukip MP could be Minister for Europe.

‘The obvious answer is for the Tories and Ukip to do a pre-election deal,’ he writes. ‘It is said that the two leaders do not like each other, but Coalition has shown that Ministers from separate parties can work effectively with each other.’

Tory MPs were rocked by the poll in last week’s Mail on Sunday that gave Mr Carswell a 44-point lead in the seat – enough to secure him a majority of more than 15,000.

Local surveys also put Mr Farage ahead in South Thanet, where he has been selected as the General Election candidate.

Ukip is targeting a further ten seats where it will concentrate most of its campaigning firepower.

Now Tory MP Adam Afriyie, who last year infuriated No 10 by forcing a vote calling for an early referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, is understood to privately hope Mr Cameron will agree to ‘unite the family of the Right’.

Under one plan, Tory MPs who support Britain’s withdrawal from the EU would not be faced by a Ukip candidate at the General Election: in return, Mr Farage would be promised a small quota of Cabinet positions.

Bombshell: The defection of Clacton MP Douglas Carswell (right) has sent ripples through Westminster Tories

Up to 100 Conservative MPs are preparing to defy Mr Cameron by declaring in their personal manifestos at next May’s Election that they will vote to leave the EU even if the Prime Minister manages to negotiate concessions for Britain from Brussels.

In the North and Midlands, the Tory-Ukip pact would aim to neutralise the threat from Labour to the Conservatives. Meanwhile, Ukip would be given a free run in some Labour-held seats.

One source said: ‘The idea would be that in Labour-held seats up North, where the Tories have no chance of winning, we would instruct Tory voters to back Ukip. In return, Ukip would not put up candidates in seats where a Tory candidate is within, say, 2,000 votes of the sitting Labour MP.

‘There are a lot of seats in the Midlands and parts of the North where Ukip standing and putting up a strong show will simply let Labour in, so there’s a hell of a lot at stake.’

Tory MP Andrew Brigden said the party needs 'to sup with the devil to stop Ed Miliband from getting No 10'

Mr Afriyie’s allies are considering a formal representation to No 10 if the party loses badly in Clacton. Last night Tory MP Andrew Bridgen, one of 16 Tory MPs to back Mr Afriyie’s early referendum vote, warned that the party was heading for defeat at the General Election unless a pact with Ukip was brokered.

‘I’m afraid we need to sup with the devil to stop Ed Miliband from getting the keys to No 10,’ he said.

One Labour source said the party’s private polling projections indicated that Ukip could win as many as six seats off the Conservatives, which would be enough to give Labour a comfortable governing majority despite its small opinion poll lead over the Tories.

However, last night, another Tory MP said: ‘Look, it’s obvious what Farage’s game is. He wants a Miliband / Labour government so that the whole situation blows up, the Right reforms and eventually we definitely come out of Europe.’

Mr Afriyie was not available for comment last night.

Now PM's own backbenchers tear into 'puce-faced' Cameron over failure to get grip on immigration

By BRENDAN CARLIN, POLITICAL REPORTER

Furious: The Prime Minister was given a dressing down by his own MPs including Philip Davies

David Cameron has been given a humiliating dressing-down by his own MPs over the ‘failure’ to get a grip on immigration.

The Prime Minister was ‘puce-faced’ as Tory MPs queued up to challenge his record on reducing the flow of immigrants into the UK and demand answers to what he was going to do about it.

He was openly contradicted after praising Home Secretary Theresa May for doing a ‘good job’ on the controversial issue.

Outspoken Tory backbencher Philip Davies rounded on Mr Cameron, saying: ‘I don’t think she’s done a good job at all!’

The row came at a private meeting of Tory MPs last week, held amid growing chaos in Calais where migrants are mounting increasingly frantic attempts to board cross-Channel ferries or hide in UK-bound vehicles. It also followed new figures casting doubt on Mr Cameron’s stated ambition to cut net migration to below 100,000 by next May.

Official statistics show net migration (the difference between those arriving in the UK and those leaving) was 243,000 in the year to March, up nearly 70,000 on the previous year.

At the meeting, ex-Minister John Redwood demanded to know ‘what should we now say about our current immigration target?’

And Mr Davies, MP for Shipley in West Yorkshire, made a thinly veiled suggestion that the Prime Minister, MP for well-to-do Witney in Oxfordshire, was out of touch with other parts of the country.

He said: ‘I don’t know about Oxfordshire or Surrey, but where I represent there’s a big problem with immigration. This latest set of figures is disastrous. Why can’t you just tell the public that you cannot control immigration while we’re still in the EU?’

Witnesses said Mr Cameron turned ‘a deep shade of puce’ as Mr Davies spoke.

A second North of England MP also challenged the Prime Minister. Brigg and Goole MP Andrew Percy told Mr Cameron that immigration was the ‘number one issue’ for local Tory voters.

Crisis: Increasingly desperate migrants have converged on Calais wanting to cross the Channel via the port

Number 10 sources last night denied there was a row, adding: ‘These meetings are an important forum to exchange views.’

Meanwhile, former Tory Party leader Michael Howard yesterday warned France that it needed to ‘get its act together’ and deal with asylum seekers in Calais rather than blaming Britain. The party grandee, Home Secretary from 1993-1997 and now Lord Howard, said the mayor of Calais, Natacha Bouchart, was ‘directing her frustration and her anger at the wrong target’ by demanding that London ‘take responsibility’.

‘The general principle which every member state of the European Union has subscribed to is that refugees, people fleeing persecution, should apply for asylum in the first safe country they reach,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Calais was last night braced for violence as the town prepared for a march today by French nationalists against the migrants.

‘We don’t care where they go but we don’t want them in our country,’ one protester said. Denis Gaudin, Calais sub-prefect, said there was a ‘fraught climate’.

Why I believe we MUST give Clegg's job to Nigel... and get in bed with Ukip

COMMENT by JACOB REES-MOGG, CONSERVATIVE MP FOR NORTH-EAST SOMERSET

In many ways the current Government has been highly successful. It has begun the long process of restoring sound money, made major reforms to a number of public services and managed to begin restructuring the bloated Welfare Bill.

Unfortunately, this is not reflected in the opinion polls.

Between them, the (small ‘c’) conservative parties have nearly 50 per cent, while the two major forces of the Left are on 42.5 per cent.

Give Clegg's job to Nigel Farage: Jacob Rees-Mogg (pictured) comes out fighting in today's Mail on Sunday

About two-thirds of Ukip supporters are former Conservatives. Thus the split in the Tory family – demonstrated by Douglas Carswell’s defection last month – makes it difficult for the Coalition to win an Election, potentially paving the way for Ed Miliband to win despite having little more than one-third of the vote.

The obvious answer is for the Tories and Ukip to do a pre-Election deal.

In a first-past-the-post system there is no prospect of doing a post-Election pact; each party takes too many of its voters from the same pool so there would not be enough combined MPs to form a coalition.

Battling the EU: Cameron is at loggerheads with Europhiles such as Germany's Angela Merkel

Now there are obstacles in the way of a pre-Election pact, but these are more emotional than rational.

It is said that the two leaders do not like each other, but Coalition has shown that Ministers from separate parties can work effectively with each other, and there is no obvious personal animosity between David Cameron and Nick Clegg or George Osborne and Danny Alexander. It is in the nature of politics that leaders attack each other, but that ought not unduly to upset a thick-skinned statesman.

Despite being held back by Coalition, the Prime Minister has still delivered some important Eurosceptic gains.

He vetoed the fiscal compact, voted against Mr Juncker, managed to cut the EU budget and enshrined in law a referendum lock on future treaties. Against this he is idiosyncratically supporting the European Arrest Warrant, which is a notable aspect of the creation of a federal Europe.

Nonetheless, this leaves the balance in his favour even if he seems sometimes to have responded to pressure.

What is certain is that his promise of an in/out referendum if returned in 2015 is sincere and can only happen if he wins.

This means that Ukip can achieve its main policy objective only if the Tories win the Election – yet it is the principal obstacle to this happening.

Sheer bloody mindedness is stopping the conservative family from dominating the UK political scene to achieve what all of us want. Regrettably, the Clacton by-election will make it worse, as positions become more entrenched. Therefore, some people have started suggesting that nothing can be done until after an Election at which point there will be some re-alignment of the Right.

This seems a defeatist view.

David Cameron has the opportunity to solve the problem now if he is generous.

The undoubted talents and charisma of Nigel Farage should be recognised.

He appeals to not only traditional Conservative members but also to those who have felt disenfranchised, people who feel that politicians are part of a too-cosy establishment while Ukip is shaking it up.

Universal appeal: London mayor Boris Johnson appears to have a lure for those who have never voted Tory

In some respects he appeals in a way that Boris Johnson does to those with Conservative values who are not necessarily Tory.

Prior to the Election such an offer needs to help Ukip in its ambition to win parliamentary seats. This could start with the House of Lords where, in spite of its recent electoral success, no new Ukip peer has been created.

It needs to be followed by deals in individual seats. There are a number vacant because of retirement, which may be suitable, as well as the ones where the Conservatives cannot expect to win and where Ukip is making inroads against Labour.

After the Election, if this strategy were adopted, there would be four Cabinet posts available through the removal of the Liberal Democrats.

Nigel Farage would be a much preferable Deputy Prime Minister to any true Conservative than Nick Clegg, while replacing Vince Cable with someone from Ukip would have a pleasant irony.

Charisma: Nigel Farage has undoubtable talents, writes Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg today

Perhaps as a sign of good faith even the Minister for Europe could be a Ukip MP.

If the Prime Minister were to do this he would suddenly have taken charge of events, no longer could his critics say – as Sir Walter Raleigh said of Elizabeth I – that he ‘did it all by halves’.

He would have gone further than he needed to go, rather than leaving the impression of being pushed unwillingly into something, and it would provide the launch pad for a General Election.

In the current atmosphere where politicians are so distrusted, it would act as a guarantee of how a future Conservative Government would be run because it would be beholden to a second party.

The promise of a referendum would clearly be of an unbreakable nature in coalition with Ukip, while the tone of the EU renegotiation would be considerably stronger.

It would have to be taken more seriously within the EU if a party that wanted to leave were in the Government. It would also be a recognition that all political parties are coalitions covering a range of views.

Historically, one of the strengths of the Tory Party has been its ability to stretch from Rab Butler to Enoch Powell in so civilized a way that Powell supported Butler’s leadership ambitions.

Narrowing the base with a third of potential supporters in another similar party is a sure way to defeat.

Generosity, courage and sense pave the path to victory.

Sadly, I doubt this will be done in time, so I am looking forward to some fair weather in Clacton for a spot of canvassing against a respected erstwhile colleague.