Martin Waller meets the newly appointed Labour candidate who will go up against Thérèse Coffey as MP for Suffolk Coastal. Declaration of interest: the writer is a member of the Labour Party.
When Jenny Riddell-Carpenter was apparently parachuted in by head office as Labour candidate for the constituency of Suffolk Coastal, there was a fair bit of bad-tempered grumbling among some local activists.
No one seemed to have heard of her. The preferred local candidate for some, Tess Gandy, had apparently been snubbed, claiming she had not even been officially informed she had failed to make the grade, but merely had heard it ‘through the grapevine’ while canvassing in her local Lowestoft.
Gandy sent a warm-hearted and gracious welcome to Riddell-Carpenter, though. “She sounds lovely,” says Gandy. “I’m very happy to support.”
But as Rosie Smithson, secretary of Suffolk Coastal, commented: “It doesn’t reflect well on our Party when people are not treated with the respect they deserve.”
And as one local activist put it: “We’ve been consistently disappointed at the lack of proper administration and courtesy from regional office.”
There had also been an unexplained delay in putting any candidate forward, at a time when a May election still seemed a possibility. The timing looked bad.
The suspicion was that the new Prospective Parliamentary Candidate had been put into a seat she was unlikely to win – the majority enjoyed by the current MP, Thérèse Coffey is about 18,000, allowing for boundary changes – with the promise that she might get something a bit more winnable next time. It is how it is done.
Not so, insists Riddell-Carpenter, 37. “I applied to Labour HQ mentioning Suffolk Coastal as my preferred seat. While there are other seats in Suffolk, I made it really clear in my application I was only interested in Suffolk Coastal.”
When she was selected, and the news formally announced on Wednesday last week, “it’s not a process I had any control over. I understand why people might be frustrated that they didn’t have a choice.”
One has to believe her – even if she does work in public relations.
Local roots
Her roots are in Suffolk. After working in the Middle East, her parents relocated to Martlesham Heath, just outside Woodbridge, when she was seven. She is using the family home there for her campaign.
She attended several local schools before moving to London for her degree and an MA at SOAS, the university specialising in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Her candidacy is therefore a genuine and sought-for return to her roots. “There’s nothing like standing on the doorstep having conversations where you grew up.”
Her career in PR started in the dying days of the Brown government, in a consultancy specialising in government relations. She moved to work for a housing association in the Cameron/Osborne years, tackling issues such as the bedroom tax, the looming housing crisis and welfare reform. “It was a highly troubling time for the social housing sector, not that it’s got much better since.”
Riddell-Carpenter is now managing director of Cratus Group, which specialises in corporate affairs and reputation management and national and local government relations. Her husband, Matthew Carpenter, works in social housing in London – on their marriage, both took on the other’s surnames. (The hyphen in Riddell-Carpenter was subsequently added on because people tended to drop one or the other name.)
They plan, if she is elected, to live in either Felixstowe, the biggest town in the constituency, or Woodbridge. Matthew will either continue to work in London and commute part-time or find another job here. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
It must be said that those bridge-crossing skills may not be needed. That majority is a large one to overturn, even if she hopes for a fair few votes picked up from the other progressive parties. “I’ve already had LibDems saying they are voting for me,” she says. “There are people going to vote Labour for the first time in their lives, even those who didn’t vote Labour in 1997.”
She admits: “At the end of the day we have a big battle to fight,” but attempts to sound upbeat. “I one hundred per cent believe there’s never been a better shot at goal in this constituency. I know it’s always been Conservative.”
Riddell-Carpenter sees the Tory incumbent’s weak spot as Coffey’s record of dealing with the unpopular and polluting water industry. “Her track record as Environment Secretary is of letting down a constituency where the jewel in the crown is the coast.
“I understand it’s challenging. I understand all those issues. But the buck stops with you.”
Campaign priorities
As to the issues Riddell-Carpenter plans to prioritise, nationally they are a stable economy, the cost-of-living crisis and the NHS, predictably enough. Locally, she believes the infrastructure of the East of England has long been neglected, with better train and road links needed.
Instead, the Government has prioritised levelling-up with the North and shoring up the “blue wall”, she says.
She is also concerned about education – her father was a supply teacher and worked in a pupil referral unit. Riddell-Carpenter also has a personal interest in social care. Her mother has dementia and is in a care home in Ipswich, and she is aware of the hoops the offspring of the vulnerable elderly have to jump through in accessing care. In fact her mother, a nurse for much of her life, did night shifts in care homes while retraining on the family’s return from the Middle East.
“It took nearly two years to get her to the right social care setting and the right level of support,” she says. East Anglia and Suffolk Coastal have a relatively elderly population and higher than average levels of dementia. “It’s a time bomb that’s only going to get worse.”
Riddell-Carpenter’s official campaign launch is tomorrow, 23 March, at a church in Woodbridge. Also expected, Labour stalwart Harriet Harman, who is moving to the area, Jack Abbott, the Labour candidate for Ipswich, and Iain McNicol, former Labour general secretary and now in the House of Lords.
That uphill battle formally starts then. “If not now, when?” she asks. “If not me, who?”
