Pollsters and canvassers agree that as many as 40% of voters still have to decide. Don’t-knows have often been considered to be ‘shy Tories’, squeamish about declaring their preference but who will return to the fold come the election. But pollsters who have pressed their don’t-knows report that, if anything, they may be more inclined to vote Labour. So many of those don’t-knows may be employed in the elaborate ritual of tactical voting, biding their time, waiting to be sure where to put their cross. They may even choose Reform.
In either case, the results for the Tories may be even worse than the polls are predicting.
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Both major parties are instigating last minute strategic changes to their election game-plans. In undisguised panic, the Conservatives are withdrawing not only party helpers but in some cases the candidates themselves from seats they expected to hold only a couple of weeks ago. Big fish like James Cleverly (Braintree), with majorities of 20,000+, are suddenly under threat, and all resources are deployed to save them.
This, my dears, is in spite of these big fish being the very people who have brought the party to its present farcical catastrophe.
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Since Nigel Farage nominated himselfas Reform’s candidate in Clacton, the standing of his party has soared.
But look at the seats in East Anglia where Reform’s numbers are most prominent: Clacton, South West Norfolk, Gt Yarmouth, Basildon… Reform isn’t sweeping the country. Reform is mostly sweeping those parts of the country abandoned by government. It may be regrettable if 15% of our fellow countrymen are so impoverished of soul as to back the kind of policies Reform advocates, but we might be regretfully satisfied to learn that’s all there is.
Besides, one could argue that votes for another small party is another step towards proportional representation, in spite of Keir Starmer this week turning the idea down this week.
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The trouble is, writing about Reform is like dog shit on your shoe. Once you’ve stepped in it, you can’t get rid of it. So now we have the Clacton Tory candidate, Giles Watling, adding his legitimate three penn’orth on Nigel Farage and his cynicism.
“It could not be clearer that this campaign is not about Mr Farage wanting to represent Clacton – he doesn’t give two hoots about our constituency,” he says. “This is all about Nigel and his personal political ambitions – ambitions that he is using us as cannon fodder to help him achieve.”
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East Suffolk Council is run by a rainbow coalition of Liberal Democrats, Greens and independents. The culture is collegiate. The parties work well together. But this week, a senior LibDem councillor backed the Green candidate in Waveney Valley where his own party has no chance of winning. As a result, he has been expelled from the party.
Councillor David Beavan is deputy leader of the council and is highly regarded by his constituents in Southwold. He has been a member of the party for 55 years. The party’s rules state that members are not permitted to support other parties. So a man who has served his party and his community well for all those years is thrown out for having the temerity to suggest that Liberal Democrats might not have exclusive rights to wisdom.
This is a critical moment for our democracy. The Tories tried hard to destroy it, and as they languish in the polls a new and even more extreme opportunist organisation stands ready to continue their work. For years, the LibDems have claimed to stand for proportional representation, a cause which is in our own DNA here at East Anglia Bylines. But PR works on co-operation, recognition of other parties’ strengths. Like Councillor Beavan, the public increasingly hold in contempt those parties who are so presumptuous as to believe they have all the answers and cannot be wrong. Honesty in public life should be at the top of our priorities, and arrogant and cretinous reactions like this are part of the problem.
A final word from Councillor Beavan: “If I wanted to be dictated to by party officials, I would have joined the Communist Party”.
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Meanwhile it looks like nip and tuck for Mr Beavan’s recommended Waveney Valley Green candidate, Adrian Ramsay. The race has been led throughout by Tories and Greens, and the Greens accept the vote is tightening – which seems to be supported by an MRP poll from We Think. It gives them 29.0% and the Tories 29.5%. The party acknowledges that this reflects their present canvass returns.
This is the party’s number one target at this election, and having put so much into it and coming so close the party is scouring the byways for those last few tactical votes.
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It is a sad indictment of what is claimed to be our ‘natural party of government’ that there have been occasions of late when the honesty of the Conservatives has been called into question. However, these doubts could hardly be extended to their candidate in Colchester, the former Olympic rower James Cracknell. In a somewhat forthright video picked up by the Evening Standard, he says: “Two weeks out from the Olympics and if we are competing against the Conservative Party, my teammates and I would be saying they are a ‘shower of shit’.
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One who might well share that view – though we can be quite sure it would be expressed in different vocabulary – is former Conservative attorney general Dominic Grieve, who was thrown out of the party by Boris Johnson for having the temerity to be decent, honest and prepared to speak his mind: none of which would hold much appeal for Mr Johnson.
Mr Grieve is another of the political celebrities wheeled in by James Bagge (aka the Turnip Taliban) who, after leaving the local South West Norfolk Conservative Party, has chosen to fight Liz Truss as an independent. “Bagge’s victory in South West Norfolk could be the beginning of a tide turning against populism and mediocrity in our politics,” says Grieve.
Mr Bagge claims: “Liz Truss is running scared. She refuses to debate me or attend hustings alongside me. She is knocking on people’s doors with four bodyguards and even her next door neighbour has put up a ‘Vote Bagge’ sign. People around here are embarrassed to be represented by her.”
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It is also claimed by more than one source that Liz Truss and her entourage were thrown out of a fish and chip queue. This fact has greatly impressed the wise men at the Muckrakers. Here we have as representative a group of topers ever to have been given the bum’s rush: they have been thrown out of pubs, restaurants, the World Rhubarb Festival in Wakefield and once after an unfortunate incident in a gentleman’s lavatory in Brighton. But a fish and chip queue is a new one to pin on the wall chart.
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Once again, Liz Truss has displayed that extraordinary lack of self-awareness which has become her trademark shtick. This week she excused herself from a public hustings at Downham Market Methodist church, and the Lynn News reports:
“Reverend Paul Critchley, told the crowd of more than 200 people that the former PM could not attend due to a ‘prior arrangement in another local village’.
“This was met with jeers and applause from the audience, with the Reverend replying: ‘As a thoroughly independent person I have no comment to say’, which was met with laughter.”
Indeed Ms Truss did have a prior engagement: as she herself guilelessly posted on X / Twitter (and has since deleted), she was at the Swaffham Greyhound, watching the England match on TV.
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A new poll is published for the South West Norfolk constituency. Things are looking good for Terry Jermy and the Labour Party, but James Bagge doesn’t feature. Does this mean that nobody is voting for him after all? No, but it is another timely reminder that, though the current MRP polls are much more sophisticated than the old one-size-fits-all approach, they still don’t poll local voters. Findings are weighted according to demographic factors, such as numbers of young and elderly, education, employment and so on. So as in Waveney Valley, Suffolk Coastal or here in South West Norfolk, pressing local issues are not canvassed.
Here, the special issues are the presence on the ballot of a former lord deputy lieutenant of the county confronting the arriviste Truss for the traditional Conservative vote… and of course the presence of the excoriated Ms Truss herself.
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The Labour candidate in Central Suffolk and North Ipswich is or was Kevin Craig, but he was promptly dumped by his party as part of the fall-out over the Tory election date betting scandal. It seems Mr Craig placed a bet on himself to lose, some time ago, and this was thrown up by the Gambling Commission as part of their trawl. It later turns out that, if this is improper, which it might be, then it’s an impropriety which has been shared by at least dozens of other MPs and candidates.
Labour were quick to act, though now the question seems far less clear-cut. In any case, Mr Craig is on the ballot as the Labour candidate, so he will still stand and – as far as the voters are concerned – he is the candidate for that party.
Only a few days before the hoo-ha, Mr Craig had told your diarist that this was “a once in a lifetime chance” for the party to win the seat. It is unclear how true that remains, though Electoral Calculus now gives him a 10% lead over Reform – with the Tories nowhere. If the betting reverberations affect the seat, might that leave Reform as favourites to take it?
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The Conservative candidate in the new Bury St Edmunds seat is Will Tanner, who jumped into the candidacy from being Rishi Sunak’s deputy chief of staff, (a post he is unlikely to publicise widely). According to one report in Politico, Mr Tanner has been exhorting his troops to greater effort by telling them he is in danger of losing. The fact of his apparently going missing during the campaign probably doesn’t help his cause. A new poll will apparently show him trailing Labour’s Peter Prinsley, an NHS consultant.
Politico observes: “More than a few Tory candidates — unhappy with those being parachuted in to ‘safe’ seats — will be quietly sniggering at that”.
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This is probably the last time we shall have the opportunity to write about Tom Hunt (Ipswich).
Let us merely record that he leaves his tenure as the town’s MP rather as he has conducted it. One of his visitors this week has been Suella Braverman, who he showed off round the town. One shopkeeper threw him and his entourage out, another requested them to move because he didn’t want his shop being featured in the picture, and an elderly lady told him to “f*ck off*. And finally, Mr Hunt forgot to appear in his own election picture.
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Give a thought if you will, dear reader, to the plight of the political diarist, whose deadline is next Friday, the day after the election. So everything that has happened up to the close of the polls a few hours beforehand is now irrelevant, and nothing that has happened since makes any sense yet and anyway your diarist has spent all night alternately drinking coffee or neat gin, and last slept 24 hours before.
It is possible that next week’s diary will be as much of a surprise to its writer as to its readership. But do enjoy your election night.
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Thanks this week go to Jesse Knopp and Tiz Broken.
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