‘In order to reconnect with our supporters, we need to break up the coalition,’ pleads former minister

David Cameron is under pressure from his backbenchers to break up the coalition and harden his message on immigration after Ukip took its first seat from the party in the Clacton byelection.

The prime minister was urged to change strategy after losing Clacton by more than 12,000 votes to one of his former MPs, Douglas Carswell, who defected in August over unhappiness about the EU and a lack of political reform.

Sir Edward Leigh, a former minister, said breaking up the coalition would be one way of showing fed-up Conservative voters that Cameron was serious about addressing their concerns, instead of being shackled to the Liberal Democrats.

“For both our sakes, in order to reconnect with our supporters, we need to break up the coalition,” he wrote on the ConservativeHome website. “It would send another signal to our former voters that we mean it on protecting the armed forces, promoting marriage, and tackling waste in our country’s massive social and health bureaucracy: a big ask.

“Every Conservative MP is desperate to stop [Ed] Miliband getting into No 10 – to once again open the immigration taps and lose control of the deficit. Let’s convince our people that voting Tory will give them a real Conservative government that intends to get down to business. Above all, let’s not insult the heartfelt Conservatives who were trying to give us a lesson in Clacton. Let’s convince them that the lesson is learned.”

Meanwhile, Bernard Jenkin, another senior backbencher, said the main parties had got into this position by “ignoring very important constitutional issues”.

In doing so, they have been “delivering this country to a despair about Westminster village politics”, he told the BBC’s World at One. Jenkin called for “far less fudging and obscuring the issues” as well as getting a grip on immigration from the EU and cutting taxes. “We’ve talked about these things and not delivered them,” he said.

An even bigger test for the Conservatives will come at the byelection triggered by Mark Reckless, the former Tory MP for Rochester and Strood, who defected the day before the Conservative party conference.

Cameron and the Tory leadership fear yet more defections before the election in seven months, although the party whip, Greg Hands, says he is confident there will not be any more.

The risk of more Conservative MPs leaving the party was underlined by Mark Pritchard, a Eurosceptic backbencher, who admitted he had considered the move but was glad he had not done so.

He told BBC News: “When I really looked into the detail, I came to the conclusion that if I really want to renegotiate the United Kingdom’s relationship with Europe, the only party that can deliver that is the Conservative party.

“My consideration was some time ago. It was pre the commitment by the prime minister in his Bloomberg speech that the UK would finally after nearly 40 years have its say on our relationship with Europe … So I’m glad I didn’t go to Ukip because it would have been foolish because several months later the prime minister gave that commitment.”