It wasn’t her fault. It was those damn social conservatives.

That’s who Danielle Smith says helped make up her mind to abandon the Wildrose ship she captained and then head off into the waiting arms of Toryland.

OK, Smith doesn’t use the word “damn” but, as the head defector drives home to High River Thursday morning, she talks about the final straw breaking her back as Wildrose leader.

Go back to mid-November in Red Deer.

It’s the Wildrose annual gabfest. A policy is up for a vote.

It’s a statement the party accepts the year before but this time the vote is whether it should become Wildrose policy.

It says the party will recognize the rights of all Albertans and will defend a list of those rights spelled out in provincial law, including sexual orientation.

Smith says Thursday she was “very proud” of the wording but the majority vote it down and stick with recognizing all Albertans have equal rights, without naming those rights.

At the time Smith doesn’t make a stink.

On Thursday she pauses for many seconds as she speaks about the vote. Smith is upset and moved to tears.

“I was gravely disappointed. I was facing a backlash within my own party,” she says.

“It really was a turning point. It was one thing that made it impossible for me to continue as leader. After five years of fighting this battle to get acceptance of a more mainstream position I thought we had won that battle.”

“But our members organized to vote against a direction I had set. We had our members make a decision to go in exactly the opposite direction I wanted to go.”

“I found out afterwards there was a group who came specifically to vote it down to teach me and some of my caucus colleagues a lesson about having walked in the gay pride parade.”

“And I just thought: Wow. After all this, we still have a vocal faction in our party who would rather fight internally and be destructive on these issues.”

“I’ve always been very respectful of the social conservatives in my party and my movement. I’ve just asked for the same in return.”

Smith says she “was fighting a losing battle” within Wildrose and she had to “be allowed to be who I am on these issues.”

Instead, what Smith says she saw was “a party dominated by those who don’t want to continue the evolution to become a more broad-based mainstream party.”

After the vote, Smith says some moderates quit the executive. Others quit the party altogether. Moderate candidates wouldn’t run.

She mentions a blog attacking her as not fit to be Wildrose leader because she wasn’t pro-life or was too aggressive on gay rights.

“That to me is the ongoing battle I fought in the Wildrose. I tried very, very hard to move the party to a socially mainstream position.”

“I then had to make a choice.”

Smith says the Wildrose always had two choices, to become “the NDP of the right” or to be “a fiscally conservative, socially mainstream party capable of forming government.”

“It may well be there’s room for a very staunch right-wing party that elects a handful of people and sees their role as the conscience of the right. But that was never the party I wanted to lead.”

So she sat down with Premier Prentice about ten days ago.

Smith still insists Wildrose, the party she led and left along with the other defectors known as the Ugly Eight, should let all their members vote on whether to come over to the Progressive Conservatives and join her and the gang.

Smith actually expects Wildrosers would decide to kill their party off because it’s not like a party convention where “the most radical elements show up and choose the policy direction.”

Smith still sees what she and the Ugly Eight did as just “putting an end to the civil war in the conservative family.”

She says the move to the PCs was hush-hush because, by Wildrose party rules, it would have taken four months to deal with the issue and the official opposition and the government couldn’t be in limbo for 120 days.

So the bargain was cooked up in top secret style, with MLA Rob Anderson handling the Wildrose end.

The party’s MLAs only saw the surrender last weekend.

In less than a week we have the mass defections and the anger.

Smith is unrepentant and believes there is no need to repent.

“I firmly believe I’m making the right decision,” says Smith.

“We’ve won. We finally have a premier who believes in the things we believe in.”

Won? Then why do so many of those who supported you feel they’ve lost?

rick.bell@sunmedia.ca