It’s going to be an interesting year for Hertfordshire. In the local elections in May, we saw catastrophic losses for the Conservatives, as all but one Conservative-controlled council lost out to other parties, returning fewer councillors on the North Herts Council as well as the Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council where they went from the largest party to the smallest.
Changes to the area
Harpenden and Berkhamsted is a new constituency created to reflect changing population patterns across Hertfordshire. Named after its two principal towns, it takes areas from three previous constituencies: from South West Hertfordshire in the West, from Hitchin & Harpenden in the East, and in the centre from Hemel Hempstead.
All three of these areas have been represented by Conservative MPs: since 1950 (South West Hertfordshire), 1997 (Hitchin & Harpenden) and 2005 (Hemel Hempstead), and voters extended this trust in the party to their district councils, with Dacorum having Conservative Rule in some way from 1999-2023. And while the Berkhamsted area is under the Liberal Democrat-run St Albans City and District Council, they too returned Conservative Councillors up until 2022. However, the new constituency shares a boundary on the South with St Albans, where the MP is a LibDem, and to the North by Luton, where Labour hold two constituencies.
The candidates
Every party is represented in this constituency.
The incumbent Conservatives have selected Nigel Gardener to stand here. A recent convert to the Conservative party, he only joined in 2018, having previously stood for the Labour party in the noughties in both domestic and European elections. One of Gardener’s pledges on his website talks about stopping the growth of Luton Airport, whose flight path crosses the constituency. Rishi Sunak seems to like him, having paid a visit to Berkhamsted on 27 May.
The Liberal Democrat Candidate, Victoria Collins plays up her local connections, noting that she lives in West Herts. She is also making a big show of support for the Liberal Democrats’ pledge of Blue Flag Status for rivers, and the freezing of train ticket prices, which matter to the constituency’s large commuting population.
On her website, she talks about her chances in Harpenden, saying “The council elections in May showed that the LibDems can win right across our area…I’m determined to win for our part of Hertfordshire.”
The Labour candidate seems to be fighting an uphill battle. Not just because the LibDems have come second in many elections in the county, but mainly because Labour themselves have identified this seat as a “Non-Battleground” area. This doesn’t seem to be stopping Zara Layne, however, as she’s still drumming up her campaign online, mainly on the effects 14 years of Tory-rule has done to rural communities.
The Green Candidate, Paul de Hoest, is a councillor for Berkhamsted on the Dacorum District Council. His campaigning on his social media shows he’s passionate about reversing biodiversity loss, not just in the region, but in the country as well. But Harpenden and Berkhamsted aren’t one of the 4 seats the Greens are prioritising so there’s not much about what they’d do for the area.
The final major party standing in the area is Reform UK, whose candidate Saba Poursaeedi. He left Labour in 2022 and joined “the only party that will stick up for the working people of this country”. He continues: “No more building on green belt, no more choking up the streets with traffic, no more suffocating small business in red tape and no more compromising our doctor surgeries…” How he’ll do this isn’t explained.
What do the polls say?
At the start of the year polls suggested that this was going to be a safe Conservative victory. Even Survation had the Conservatives winning here, and in April YouGov put this constituency as a Conservative win with 35% of the vote to the Lib Dems 25%.
Since then the polls have shifted.
Four of the five most recent constituency-level (MRP) polls show the seat as a contest between Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. While these polls cannot allow reliably for tactical voting, websites aimed at these voters recommend that anti-Tory voters should vote LibDem. Indeed, the most recent poll agrees, as the Labour vote-share is dropping and the LibDem one soars.
A changing county?
The fact that polls have changed from a safe Conservative win at the start of the campaign to a battle between them and the Liberal Democrats is significant. The decision of the Prime Minister to visit the constituency is a sign of Conservative worry. Prime Minsters don’t usually campaign in seats they expect to win. They go to the swing seats to help out the people standing there.
This shift in the voting pattern is a trend across Hertfordshire, not just in its newest constituency. Politics has been leaning one way for a very long time, but thanks to a combination of ‘liberal’ Londoners finding homes in the nearby countryside to raise families, and 14 years of Tory rule negatively affecting many people’s lives, change is in the air.
It wouldn’t be surprising in this election cycle to see Harpenden & Berkhamsted change hands, along with a number of other constituencies in the county, such as Hitchin or North East Herts. If this happens, we will see if a historically Conservative area stays with left-of-centre parties in local elections over the next 5 years.
Change in the leafy, commuter-belt of Hertfordshire could show how much trouble the Conservatives are in.
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that the Conservatives had lost the majority of their seats at Hertfordshire County Council in the May elections. This is incorrect as there were no county council elections this year and the Conservatives remain the largest party on the county council. The link provided by the author was for the Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council elections and the text has been amended accordingly.
