DC01UK: Hertsmere steps into history

Well, possibly. Data centres are the cotton mills and steel foundries of our day. Vast, industrial-scale facilities that are right at the heart of the fourth industrial revolution. And one might be built right here, next to the motorway in South Mimms.

One of DC01UK's visualisations of their proposed data centre in South Mimms, Hertfordshire.
One of those visualisations that developers churn out. More here.

We’ll admit to a certain childish excitement about this. Mysterious developers want to build Europe’s largest data centre right here in Hertsmere. The developer applied for planning permission in September of last year and last week the council granted outline permission for the development. We suspect they’re as excited as we are, although there’s some doubt as to how involved Hertsmere can now be, given the special status of this development. We’ll be keeping an eye on this project and we’ll provide as much detail as we can as it progresses but, to begin with, here’s what we know so far:

Are you serious? On the green belt? The data centre, if built, will be on green belt land to the East of South Mimms services, right next to the M25. The developers are in luck, though: this is exactly the kind of relatively-unloved green belt that the government has recently been calling ‘grey belt‘. You might expect a plan to build on 85 acres of agricultural land in a district that has a history of green belt belligerence to produce an angry reaction (like the one that held up the Radlett Railfreight terminal for years) but when even Peter Waine, chair of the Hertfordshire branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, speaking to the BBC, can’t muster more than: “It may not be the most wonderful and beautiful green belt but it is green belt…” Here at Radlett Wire, at the other end of Hertsmere, we get the strong feeling this particular chunk of green belt may not be long for this world.

Map showing the area to the East of South Mimms services in Hertsfordshire, between Potters Bar and the M25 motorway. Marked on the map is the proposed site of a large data centre.
Inside the red outline

It’s going to be huge. The claim, in the news stories and press releases, that DC01UK will be the largest data centre in Europe looks defensible. Europe’s largest running data centre is presently in Portugal. It covers about 800,000 square feet and the proposed South Mimms operation is aiming for two million square feet. But there’s another project, in Newport, Wales, that’s also aiming for two million and, anyway, the critical measurement – especially for the local community – is probably not square feet. Planners and architects use a measure they call gross external area (GEA), which is more useful. It’s the total area of a building, including all floors, measured from the outside. It’s the critical measurement used for rating, council tax and planning. DC01UK’s GEA is 187,000 square metres, slightly more than the 185,000 square metres (2,000,000 square feet) that will be devoted to computers. And as we’ll explain, there are other important numbers – relating to water and electricity use and to pollution – that we should understand and keep an eye on.

But size isn’t everything. If completed – and if not eclipsed by other projects along the way – this puts DC01UK just inside the top ten biggest data centres in the world, but it’s an extremely volatile market, and brutal and connected directly to the financial performance of the companies that use these facilities. Data centre capacity is a commodity – like bauxite or wheat. The biggest firms (Google, Amazon…) build and run their own but most data centre capacity is bought and sold by intermediaries or brokers. A business that needs servers for a new app is concerned only with cost; margins must be hair-thin, effiency constantly improving. So, honestly, how this plays out, between now and the proposed opening date in 2030 is anybody’s guess. Whatever happens, as you’d expect, this enormous facility is already well-and-truly dwarfed by the biggest. A single Chinese data centre, operated by China Telecom, is already over five times bigger than DC01UK and sits on a campus called the Inner Mongolia Information Park in Hohhot, China alongside several other enormous facilities (truly visible from space). Also, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the seventh largest data centre in the world is buried in the side of a mountain in Utah and is operated by the United States National Security Agency. It’s safe to say that, although you’ve never heard of it, it knows a fair amount about you.

A visualisation of a data centre proposed for land near South Mimms in Hertsmere, UK. A modern, two-story industrial building is surrounding by planting.
Another one of those visualisations.

Who will own the data centre? Guess what: we don’t know. We know a bit about the company set up to see it through planning, DC01UK, but nothing about the facility’s final user nor even its ultimate owner. This project is, according to Computer Weekly, a joint venture with local house-builder Griggs and Chiltern Green Energy, neither of which – I hope they won’t mind me saying – are what you’d call giants of the information age. The Register, a UK tech news web site, says it will ultimately be used by one of the ‘hyperscalers’ (industry jargon for the handful of tech giants in a position to make use of such a huge facility) but that the usual suspects – Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta – all declined to comment. This is not surprising. The big firms are typically secretive about their data centres – these are, to state the obvious, business-critical, round-the-clock facilities and ‘uptime‘ must be protected at all costs. Amazon, in particular, treats its data centres as if they were national security assets and goes to great lengths to hide them. There’s only one project described on DC01UK’s web site and there’s no ‘about us’ page. We expect it’ll be some time before we know who the final client is.

There’s some history in this area. DC01UK was incorporated in 2022 and was originally called Hilfield Battery Storage so we assume it’s connected with the application to build a battery storage farm on Hilfield Farm in Aldenham, rejected last year after a public inquiry. One thing is clear: the deal-making has begun. Vast facilities like DC01UK don’t just show up in districts like ours – they’re incentivised to do so. Tax breaks, subsidies, promises about transport, housing and infrastructure, cut-throat competition between regions – all will play a part in this project. We don’t know enough about any of this yet – and the actors are secretive, but we suspect there will be people in Hertsmere who already know substantially more than us – we’d love to hear from you in the comments!

What’s so exciting about data centres? Aren’t they just big, dumb warehouses for information? Data centres have been a big deal for a long time, since the first of the really huge online businesses began to build their own all around the world. But the pressure to provide new data centre capacity has recently exploded (last year Goldman Sachs estimated a 160% increase in demand). It’s become a very big story in the business and technology press and now it’s crossed over into the mainstream media and social media – and it’s all because of artificial intelligence (AI). AI needs an enormous amount of computing power – both in training new models and in running queries against them once they’re live. Typing a query into ChatGPT will usually use at least ten times more computing power – and thus electricity – than a Google search. And the industry really didn’t see this coming. It’s really only a couple of years since it dawned on the tech firms and on their investors that they were going to need many times more computing power than previously projected. So the rush is on.

Governments and local authorities have noticed this massive new opportunity and are rushing at it. Three weeks ago Keir Starmer launched his AI action plan, which he says will ‘deliver a decade of national renewal’. We should probably also acknowledge the boldness of Hertsmere here. Council leader (and head of something called the Hertfordshire Growth Board) Jeremy Newmark has obviously moved quickly. Apart from the obvious explosive dynamism of the AI industry he’ll be aware that, here in Britain, the government has committed to a completely new and much more aggressive orientation on economic growth – and to change planning procedures to speed up development. More specifically, data centres have been reclassified as critical national infrastructure and will have special status when it comes to planning inquiries. In fact, developments recognised as nationally significant infrastructure projects have had special status since the then Labour government created the status in 2008. In this regime, the local authority is not the lead planning authority – just a ‘statutory consultee’. DC01UK may already be on the fast track.

But could anything hold it up? Short answer: yes. And it probably won’t be planning. Even in the couple of weeks since we learnt about the project, the terms of the explosion in data centre capacity have changed completely. Less than a week before Hertsmere’s DC01UK announcement a new Chinese-built AI model called Deepseek R1 was launched. To say that it caused an epic freak-out at every level of the AI ecology would not be an overstatement. The freak-out centred on the fact that this new software was almost as efficient as the leading American models although it had been built on simpler technology – and much more cheaply. It was a huge shock, challenging the fundamentals of the emerging industry. As it dawned on the company’s competitors that a rich and useful AI model could be built using a fraction of the resources, that their assumptions about the progress of the technology could be all wrong, share prices tumbled, projects were cancelled or paused, projections and forecasts altered. So, could this global chaos change the trajectory of the South Mimms project? Cause it to be cancelled or scaled back? It really could. At Hertsmere Council everyone will have their fingers crossed.

In the next post, more about the crazy business of powering (and cooling) a modern data centre.

  • For comparison, the largest warehouse in the UK – belonging to Amazon.com, natch – also covers around two million square feet. The O2 covers 1,126,270 square feet.
  • It took the addtion of the magical term ‘AI’ to give all this stuff the kind of political salience it needed. When Technology Secretary Peter Kyle announced the change in status for data centres in September the most exciting application he could come up with for these gigantic buildings was storage: “…from photos taken on smartphones to patients’ NHS records and sensitive financial investment information.” Boring! In the few months since then, the AI brainworm has fully infected everyone involved. When Rachel Reeves announced her big ‘growth reset’ in January it was all AI, all the time.
  • Amazon’s policy of secrecy about the location of their data centres even extends to their own staff. According to Peter Judge in Data Center Dynamics: “Only those within Amazon who have a legitimate business need to have such information know the actual location of these data centers…”
  • There’s another huge data centre under construction in Hertfordshire – Google is building the company’s first UK facility in Waltham Cross. Incidentally, the existence of this project may suggest that Google is unlikely to be DC01UK’s ultimate customer.
  • Everyone involved with this project is obviously moving quickly. If the government’s promises about removing barriers to growth are real, this project could almost be a kind of benchmark. The completion date in the press release is a bit unimpressive, though. 2030? Elon Musk claims to have built his new Colossus AI data centre in 19 days (although he did basically just stuff 100,000 NVidia GPUs into an old washing machine factory).
  • Bookmark this page to keep up with our updates on DC01UK. If you’re one of those weirdos who still uses an RSS reader, follow our feed or this Google news alert (RSS explained). We’ll almost certainly be tweeting about this of course.

First mover

There might be a by-election in Hertsmere in the new year. Reform UK is the first to have noticed

Boom. First out the gate. Reform UK is distributing leaflets in Hertsmere in anticipation of a by-election in the new year. Candidate Darren Selkus’s letter to electors says:

If the rumours prove true and Oliver Dowden is granted a peerage in the New Year Honours, it would trigger a by-election right here in Hertsmere. With Labour still in power and the Conservatives in opposition, this presents a unique opportunity for a free vote – a vote for real change, a vote for Reform.

We haven’t heard the rumours Selkus cites, but we have been speculating for a while that Dowden might not relish the prospect of a whole electoral term in opposition.

Front of an election leaflet sent to homes in the Hertsmere constituency by the Reform Party in December 2024. The text reads: '30 years of decline. We are all worse off. When you get the chance, make it count. Vote Reform UK. Invest for a better future tomorrow - for you, your family and Country. Britain is borken. Britain needs reform'. An AI-generated image of London with a red double-decker bus and the Elizabeth Tower in the background.

So, it’s relevant that the Tories have spent the last 14 years packing the red benches; enobling, well, practically anyone, as far as we can tell. The long list of peers they’ve advanced includes the millionaire PPE entrepreneur, the son of a former KGB agent (spending his dad’s money freely in London and in Umbria), the mysterious ‘adviser’ no one can remember and the ‘chief of staff’ who worked for Liz Truss for less than a month. They’ve done this at a greater rate than any government in modern history (we’ve just learnt that these are called malverisation appointments). And it’s not just peers: Conservative governments since 2010 have given ten times more knighthoods and damehoods to MPs in 14 years than Labour did in 13. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to call this out-of-control patronage. They have no shame.

Chart shows number of new peers in the UK House of Lords since 2000
Peer explosion

So will Sir Oliver – who scored his knighthood in the final hours of the Sunak government (and picked it up this week at Windsor Castle) – move along the corridor to the Lords in the new year? We’re not so sure. He’s still a young man and the private sector must beckon (although, of course, he might not have much choice in the matter and there’s nothing to stop a peer of the realm from moonlighting at, say, a Mayfair hedge fund).

The operator

Reform Party Head and shoulders selfie of Parliamentary candidate Darren Selkus, against a hedge

We’re quite impressed by military veteran Darren Selkus. He’s an operator. His communication with electors is savvy (and he says that, if elected, he’ll give his MP’s salary to charity, something that at least one of the party’s new MPs is already doing). He suspects he can increase Reform’s vote share at a by-election because voters have greater freedom when they know they’re not selecting the next government (in his letter he calls it a ‘free vote’).

Line chart comparing the vote share of populist right parties against that of the winning party in the Hertsmere Parliamentary constituency since 1983. Data here: https://bit.ly/3SDN2JT
Vote share won by parties of the populist right in Hertsmere since 1983

We know this to be true in by-elections – turnout is lower and minority parties can gain share. It’s an intriguing equation. Can an insurgent party have an impact in a home counties seat like ours, between general elections, when the Tories are so firmly embedded? At the July election Selkus won 6,584 votes (just short of 14% of the vote) – more than UKIP at their 2015 high-point and the largest vote for the populist right in the history of the constituency. He must be absolutely beside himself at the prospect of closing the gap at the right-hand end of the chart a bit.

Reform Party leader Nigel Farage smiles broadly and shakes the hand of a man he has met in a darkened street. Farage is wearing mustard-yellow corduroy trousers, a tweed jacket and a red tie.
Trousers as class war

His party’s leader is, by a mile, the most successful British politician of the 21st Century. His relaxed manner, his defiance of silly parliamentary norms and his sure-footed disregard for electoral law have secured for his party a solid and pretty defensible 15% of the national vote. It remains to be seen if a shamelessly, almost defiantly, upper-class character like Farage can get past this percentage while striding around the country in those mustard-yellow cords, though.

More to the point, while the whole hierarchy of his party is drawn from approximately the same gene pool – especially the various braying suits we see on the TV – it’s hard to imagine a breakthrough with the other 85%. Reform is not AfD or FdI or even the Trump GOP. The party’s platform is significantly deeper than it was when it emerged from the Brexit Party but it’s an uninspiring package. There is no exciting radical agenda, no iconoclastic intellectual figurehead, no assault on corporate power in Reform’s future. It’s frankly odd that, having engineered the most consequential constitutional change in recent British history, Farage and his party have no apparent plan to make use of the huge boost to sovereignty produced by Brexit beyond hardening the borders. Their only consolation must be the fact that the two main parties are apparently out of ideas too.

The risk is that the party will exhaust its potential because it’s impossible for this generation of leaders, formed in the anti-immigration and anti-EU campaigns of previous decades, to imagine a modern, emancipatory populist platform (Farage remains obsessed, for instance, with privatising the NHS – not what you’d call a rallying cry for the masses). Still, there’s so much potential for the bigger parties to screw this up that you really never can tell…

The players

We know that Reform aspires to the status of a start-up and the party’s response to the possibility of Dowden’s removal to the Lords is appropriately agile. The established parties probably haven’t even noticed yet. And they’ll almost certainly have to go through another selection process before they can start sending out leaflets. Reform has first-mover advantage.

Labour, when it comes to it, would do well to go with their general election candidate: personable and popular Josh Tapper. His campaign in July was effective and his vote share was among the highest for Labour in the constituency’s history.

To be honest, the Liberals might as well not bother: their 2024 vote share in Hertsmere was close to the party’s 2017 low point (when the candidate was too busy to do any campaigning). To have fallen to fourth place behind Reform in the year of the party’s great revival is just embarrassing.

Grant Shapps, then MP for Welwyn Hatfield and Transport Minister (second from left) and Oliver Dowden, MP for Hertsmere (third from left) line up with employees of Thameslink, holding a huge dummy contactless card at Radlett Station in 2021.
Shapps in Radlett

For the Conservatives, as we keep saying, a by-election in such a peachy seat – one of the safest in Britain – would present an opportunity to bring back one of the big beasts who lost their seats in July. We have no special insight here but surely Grant Shapps must be in with a chance? We would certainly relish having the colourful former web marketing executive and hilariously implausible defence secretary to write about here.

The Greens are bound to show up but their candidate John Humphries (a veteran of two previous general elections in Hertsmere) polled about a third of Selkus’s figure here in July and, although Humphries might also see a by-election boost, the party has essentially disappeared since the election, apparently having no clue what to do with four actual MPs during an actual climate crisis, so we’re not expecting much.

  • Here’s our detailed post about the results of the 2024 general election in Hertsmere.
  • Farage has told the press that Reform UK will soon no longer be a private limited company and will even adopt a formal constitution, under which the members could, in theory, remove a leader. We won’t hold our breath.
  • This spreadsheet is the only place you’ll find results for every general election in Hertsmere since the constituency was created in 1983, plus council elections, PCC elections and groovy charts. It’s yours to download and use.
  • Of course, if the rumours that Elon Musk plans to funnel $100M into Reform via the UK subsidiary of his social media business are true then this might alter the party’s prospects a bit.
  • We can’t find anyone offering odds on Shapps’ return to Parliament in Hertsmere but we’d probably put a few quid on it if we could. He’s a local boy, he’s obviously still keen (he’s constantly popping up as ‘former defence minister’ and ‘former transport minister’ in the media and he is keeping his web site up to date).
  • The image of London in that Reform leaflet is one of those really shonky AI-generated ones that were doing the rounds on social media earlier this year. Another practical, cost-saving move from Reform – no need to pay for an image!
  • Speaking of leaflets, whenever you receive an election leaflet through the door you could do posterity a favour and upload it to electionleaflets.org.

The Sir Oliver Dowden sketchy behaviour monitor

Publicity portrait of Oliver Dowden MP, smiling at a desk in front of two big union flags

When we started blogging about Radlett, in the very distant past, Oliver Dowden wasn’t even a thing yet. He’d recently returned to the Tory Party HQ from a period at a vast, global PR company. And it wasn’t just any PR company. It was one of those vampiric outfits that would rather do the dirty, morally complicated – and highly-remunerative – work of laundering the misdeeds of dictatorships and cults than get stuck into promoting a new breakfast cereal.

Sir Oliver’s employer, Hill and Knowlton, famously represented the American tobacco lobby as long ago as the 1950s, helping to muddy the waters as the evidence for the health effects of their products accumulated. It hasn’t got much better since then. The firm has topped the table of firms representing murderous regimes (Indonesia, China, Kuwait and so on…) for decades and used a catalogue of disreputable techniques to help the US government sell the invasion of Iraq to middle America. The story of the firm’s complicated entanglement with the Scientologists and Eli Lilly – the Prozac people – is worthy of a movie (Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Al Pacino – that kind of vibe). We imagine the only reason there hasn’t been one is that the producers would have to get past Hill and Knowlton and the Scientologists to get it made.

We have no idea which accounts Sir Oliver worked on when he was with the firm (and the Scientologists were long gone) but we suspect this period must have been formative for a political operator like him. We also suspect that what he learnt there has informed his own conduct in later years. We’ve lamented in the past just how irritatingly squeaky-clean he’s been during his Parliamentary career. Staying out of trouble and cleaning up after less temperate colleagues and superiors has become his signature move. Search through Sir Oliver’s appearances on the Sunday morning programmes and you’ll find essentially a long string of competent defenses of the indefensible.

Dowden doesn’t make stupid gaffes or originate mendacious laws but he’s exemplary at putting things straight after others have. We feel sure that whoever takes over in November will find a use for the ultimate bagman, although we’re not convinced an operator of Sir Oliver’s calibre will be able to tolerate a minimum of five years of crisis management from the opposition benches. As a politician he’s never known anything other than government and we’d be surprised if he isn’t pretty soon bored with the mundane constituency stuff – he’s certainly already fielding calls from the other side of the revolving door.

Thank you, Sir Oliver

Here at Radlett Wire, we have a lot to thank our MP for. It was his election that revived our interest in this blog in the first place. We’d been writing about the Christmas Lights and the Rod Stewart tribute act at the theatre and the new pet spa up at Battler’s Green farm for a few years and we were honestly bored to death. When diligent-but-boring, five-terms MP James Clappison was brutally despatched to make way for David Cameron’s most trusted SPAD we were kind of excited.

We changed the theme of the blog sharpish and we’ve been keeping an eye on Oliver Dowden ever since. And, to be honest, the people of Radlett seem to be a bit less interested in him than they were in the Christmas lights (did we tell you Anthony Joshua switched them on once?). Our numbers fell of a cliff when we made the change and they’ve never really recovered. If we had a single commercial thought in our heads we’d have gone back to the tribute acts and dropped Sir Oliver all together.

And we find this instructive, of course. We’ve learnt that ordinary electors are definitely much more interested in constituency matters than they are in the goings-on in Parliament. This is universal, of course. For most people the fact that their MP is a Machiavellian schemer in SW1 is utterly irrelevant – boring, in fact. It’s much more important that this MP is visibly working to stop the hideous green belt development that’s going to block out the light or ready to stand up for a constituent against the council. That kind of thing.

Things pick up around here at election time. People seem to like our detailed posts about the candidates and the campaigns and the election results posts are always popular – and this is the stuff that keeps producing traffic long after the election. We assume these posts become a kind of reference – and they continue to show up in Google search results so they must be of some value. This is why we try to make sure our posts are:

  • Packed with useful information – the more the better. This will make for long (sometimes slightly boring?) posts, but this is important work so that’s cool.
  • Absolutely objective and scrupulously accurate. We have our opinions but they don’t influence the facts. We never share unverified stories or gossip. Our spreadsheet of historic election results, for instance, is the only place you’ll find the whole history of Hertsmere elections in one place.
  • All about the politics. We’re not interested in the private lives of the politicians we talk about, only their public conduct and their official roles.
  • Comprehensively sourced – with links to every resource we make use of. And we’ll link to sources of every complexion – from the Telegraph to the Morning Star, via the Guardian, the Office of National Statistics and – of course – Wikipedia.
  • Up-to-date. We’ll go back to older posts and add new information. Our voting in Hertsmere post has been updated multiple times since first published and currently provides the most comprehensive guide to the history and politics of the constituency you’ll find anywhere.
  • Sarcastic. Always sarcastic. Sorry.

The fact that the local press has largely stopped covering Parliamentary and constituency politics between elections is another reason we want to carry on covering the activites of our MP. There ought to be somewhere that puts on record, all in one place and with a critical eye, the business of a single constituency MP. They’re important people, our representatives – and have been for hundreds of years – since long before ordinary people were able to vote for them. We shouldn’t let them operate unobserved.

So, Sir Oliver’s list of sketchy behaviour is not a long one. And what’s on it is, let’s face it, not the most damning. Hardly a morning’s work for a Boris Johnson or a Nadhim Zahawi. But we’ve been keeping track of it, so here’s a list, with links to our original coverage.

BehaviourWhen?Details
Sums totaling £82,741.09 for his office2017-2022Dowden election date betting scandal interview situation
£8,398 from a hedge fund2022Has Oliver Dowden finally joined the club?
£5,000 from an art services company2022ibid
Fairly minor infamies
  • What you’ll notice about the dates associated with the last two items on this list is that took place while Sir Oliver was out of office and on the back benches. The rules are less onerous when you’re not a minister. They don’t apply to shadow ministers either so expect a bit of a boost to Sir Oliver’s income from these outside sources now that he’s in opposition.
  • You should also bookmark Sir Oliver’s entry in the register of members’ interests on the House of Commons web site. You’ll notice a fair number of gifts, mostly seats at the opera and at sporting events. No trainers, though.
  • You’ll also notice that the members’ interests data is presented in an essentially un-searchable form with no analysis or comparison functions at all. Most government and Parliamentary data is presented in a very accessible format these days, as an aspect of the commitment to open data and transparency. We can’t think why the MPs would want information about their gifts and outside jobs to be quite so awkward and inaccessible. The brilliant people at MySociety have recenly begun to publish the members’ interests data in various useful formats, though. There’s a spreadsheet you can download.

Dowden election date betting scandal interview situation

We really should have put some money on this.

Generic bookmaker's betting slip with the words '£20, gen election, 4 July' written in a pencil script typeface in the blank area.

As we said in our last post, the keeping-an-eye-on-Sir-Oliver-Dowden business has really fallen off a cliff since the election. We’re not complaining. It was bound to happen. And, to be honest, we weren’t expecting him to do anything worth keeping an eye on until after the new Conservative leader is announced in November. Our “Oliver Dowden” Google alert has been so boring of late we were considering cancelling it. But then…

What we definitely weren’t expecting was for Sir Oliver to be caught up in the alleged election gambling scandal. The whole thing looked so not his style. Seriously, can you imagine Sir Oliver “what me, guv?” Dowden gripping his tiny pencil and pushing a betting slip across the counter at Coral’s? “20 quid on 4 July, please.” But here it is, according to Sky he’s been interviewed by the Gambling Commission as part of their investigation into bets placed by Tory insiders on the date of the general election.

A composite image of Conservative MP Oliver Dowden, wearing a surgical mask and floating against a virtual reality background - source unknown
Sir Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality

We should be clear, the Sky report goes on to say: “a source close to Sir Oliver said the former senior cabinet minister is not and was never under investigation himself,” so, presumably, he was being grilled about whether he saw any other senior Tories coming out of a bookmaker’s clutching a betting slip with their collar turned up in the days running up to 22 May.

Here’s hoping for more mildly disreputable stuff from Sir Oliver. Up until now the absolute shadiest behaviour we’ve been able to find from our squeaky clean MP is making use of a notorious legal loophole to accept £82,741.09 for his office from an ‘unincorporated association’ that apparently has no address, no members, no directors, no web site and has never published any accounts – called the South Hertfordshire Business Club, between 2017 and 2022.

  • We suspect this to be Sir Oliver’s first appearance in the gaming trade press too, so that’s a bonus, publicity-wise.
  • And what’s this about ‘a source close to Sir Oliver’? Once you’re out of government your team of flunkies and loyal spokespeople evaporates in an instant. When Sky reporter Jon Craig says ‘a source close to Sir Oliver’ he means ‘Sir Oliver’.
  • The Tory rump in Parliament must be almost hysterical with glee at the revelations from the government benches about Taylor Swift tickets, Hugo Boss trainers, the loan of a house to do homework in and so on. But it’s worth remembering that even the squeakiest of MPs will sometimes find themselves accepting a large payment from a hedge fund. Sir Oliver was one of ten Tory MPs who took paid jobs with party donors during 2022, including, for some reason, a very well-paid engagement (£700 per hour!) with Caxton Associates, the hedge fund that bankrolled Liz Truss’s bold experiment with reality.
  • As a (very) small business operating in the South Hertfordshire area we would be interested in availing ourselves of the services of the South Hertfordshire Business Club but we haven’t been able to locate a membership form. If you know more about the club, who runs it and how we might join, do leave a comment.

Slim pickings

Look, we know we should have expected this, but we’re experiencing a bit of a post-election comedown.

King Charles III wearing ermine and huge crown making his speech at the state opening of Parliament in July 2024

There’s plenty of action in Parliament, of course, and it’s kind of mind-blowing to hear the man in the big hat reading out a list of broadly social-democratic laws, even if some of them are a bit arbitrary and possibly even cynical.

But in our favourite bit of politics: the parliamentary and government career of our MP, Sir Oliver Dowden, things have gone very quiet indeed. Let’s have a little look.

Runners and riders and fallers at the first fence

Last week we reported that Dowden was supporting Victoria Atkins for Conservative Party leader but he’s actually not said a word about that since Christmas so we suspect he’ll have moved his alliegance by now. He’s an important figure in the party, though, just behind the big beasts, and he always goes early with his endorsement (see this earlier post for more about Dowden’s habit of picking winners) so his opinion matters. Who do you think he’ll support when the time comes?

You can still get 25-1 on Atkins and a ridiculous range of odds on Dowden himself. 12 bookmakers are currently offering a median of 83-1 on the former Deputy Prime Minister and outlier Betfair will currently give you 342-1, which we reckon is crying out for a fiver if you’ve got one lying around.

Bagman forever

A composite image of Conservative MP Oliver Dowden, wearing a surgical mask and floating against a virtual reality background
Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality

Oliver Dowden, as we’ve been saying on here for years, has been moving around the fringes of power for his whole political career. We’re not qualified to tell you why he’s not found his way to the top tier yet, although we have our theories. This historic Tory drubbing must represent his best opportunity yet, though. The field is much smaller (there are only 121 of them to choose from now after all), his nine years in parliament and six years in government must now put him somewhere in the top half of the table in term of experience – and many of the genuine big beasts have retired or been ejected.

For most of his less battle-hardened colleagues there’ll be a reluctance to go for the big job while everything’s so sad and broken. Suella Braverman, one of the more credible candidates, has already imploded – and will probably be a Reform MP by the time the conferences come around. The desperate antics on the opposition front bench last week – with two of the leadership frontrunners, er, losing their shit during a very boring ministerial statement – doesn’t bode well. This is going to get nasty. We can understand the attraction of a long caretaker period, even if only to allow everyone to calm down and for the new medication to kick in.

Leadership candidates Badenoch (13-8) and Atkins (25-1) in action

So a Dowden leadership bid is unlikely. He’s a realist. He knows he’s not charismatic enough, that his network is too thin, that his awkwardness and his reedy estuary voice won’t carry him through a gruelling period in opposition. It’s a very relateable dilemma, shared by so many of us – in our work and in our private lives. But Dowden’s great strength is that he knows his limits and is happy to stick to the second tier, managing situations, solving problems and providing back-rubs for the big beasts.

Our MP has been pretty quiet since he won in Hertsmere (against a 20% swing to Labour). On social media he’s made one appearance, looking a bit untidy, standing by a chainlink fence. Must have been a tough few weeks.

What’s he talking about over there by that fence? The green belt obvs. While he was in the government his room for manoeuvre was limited – he had to be seen to defend the interests of his constituents while sticking to the government’s line on planning reform and development. His solution then – on the Radlett aerodrome development, for instance – was to intervene only when he could identify someone else – like the county council – as the villain. But he’s off the chain now so we can presumably expect him to be much more robust in defence of farmland like the fields on Barnet Lane behind that fence. He might want to iron his shirt.

The general election in Hertsmere

Voters are often called upon to solve problems for the political class

Group photo of every Labour MP elected to Parliament in the 2024 general election
What a Labour landslide actually looks like

Especially in Britain, where governments can call elections whenever they fancy it within a five-year term (Fixed Term Parliament Act RIP), we’ll usually be asked to go to the polls when a government is in crisis or has an urgent problem to deal with. In 2017 we were called upon to help Theresa May break her Brexit impasse by giving her a big enough Parliamentary majority to push through a deal (nice work, Theresa). In 2019 we were asked to resolve Boris Johnson’s even more intractable Brexit dilemma (guess he did get Brexit done). But what problem was Rishi Sunak asking us to solve for him by calling an election six months before he had to, in the teeth of the lowest popularity ratings and the worst polling for decades?

We’ve updated our free spreadsheet of results from every general election in Hertsmere all the way back to the first one, in 1983.

It looks like Sunak was desperately hoping that the electorate would rescue him from the Reform insurgency, that Richard Tice wouldn’t have time to organise a national campaign, that Nigel Farage wouldn’t dream of giving up the glamour and the gilded corridors of Trump Tower and that, when forced to choose, unhappy Conservative voters would snap back to the Mother Party and send Reform packing. No such luck.

So who won?

Well, to state the obvious, here in Hertsmere the Conservative Party won, with a majority of 7,992 votes – not bad considering the national picture but almost two-thirds smaller than in 2019, when Oliver Dowden won by 21,313 (it’s the smallest majority he’s won in four general elections). This much-reduced majority compares pretty well with the other seats where Tories held on too. In fact Hertsmere is now the tenth safest Conservative seat in the UK – up from 43rd before the election (even allowing for the fact that there are now so few of them this is still a big improvement).

Polling isn’t recorded at the council-ward level so we can’t tell how different parts of the constituency voted. We’re going to go out on a limb, though, and guess that the issues that motivated prosperous parts of the constituency like ours were VAT on private school fees, capital gains tax and the risk of an update to the 1991 valuations used to calculate council tax. The investment managers among us might also have been worried about Labour’s plans for carried interest.

The average Tory majority at this election was 4,086, which is a number that must put the fear of God into the strategists at CCHQ. The median was 3,572 and the largest in the country was – guess where – Rishi Sunak’s Richmond and Northallerton, where the majority was 12,185.

Lay your bets

Let’s get the succession out of the way. Who will take over the dry husk of the Conservative Party? Who will be its William Hague? Its Michael Howard? The person to rebuild it after the earthquake? We’d assumed the jockeying for leadership of the soundly defeated Conservative Party – reduced to the smallest number of MPs in its history – was well under way before Thursday’s epic collapse but we were a bit surprised to learn that Oliver Dowden might well be supporting outsider Victoria Atkins for leader when the contest comes.

The fear for mainstream political parties in chaotic periods like this is that an ordinary electoral set-back might turn out to be a realignment, a permanent break – like the Tory catastrophe after the Great Reform Act or when the Liberals disappeared as a party of government in the twenties. Is it possible this is what just happened to the Conservative Party?

The Telegraph got excited about this two days before the election but on actually reading the source of their scoop – an article in The Independent – it seems that Dowden was really just buttering up a guest at a Xmas drinks party back in December. Atkins herself, on hearing Dowden say “…there’s only two people from my generation that I could see leading the Conservative Party: Rishi Sunak or Vicky Atkins…” is recorded as saying only ‘wow’.

We wouldn’t mention this bit of Tory Party gossip here if it weren’t for the fact that Dowden has a record of picking winners. If you’d like to make this a little more interesting you’ll currently get between 10-1 and 25-1 on Victoria Atkins for leader (with favourite Kemi Badenoch on 2-1 or even 6-4). We urge caution while things are so fluid, of course, but we’re wondering about a couple of quid on a wildly implausible come-back for Nadhim “Unsecured Loan” Zahawi at 66-1 (Dowden himself is presently at around 50-1 – although we’re about 90% sure that it’s once-a-bagman-always-a-bagman for our MP and that he wouldn’t dream of standing. Prove us wrong, Sir Oliver!).

Composite of official photos of Conservative MPs Rishi Sunak, Robert Jenrick and Oliver Dowden, all smiling broadly in dark blue suits
The gang of three – all, remarkably, still in their seats

And when we say ‘picking winners’, we mean really picking them. Dowden was part of the ‘gang of three’ thrusting young MPs, along with Robert Jenrick and a junior Minister called Rishi Sunak who were first to endorse Boris Johson for leader in June 2019 (look at their happy little faces! Seems so long ago). Anyway, you know how that went.

But canny Dowden was also ‘first to wield the knife‘ when Johnson’s time had come in July 2022 and the letters of resignation started to pour in (do you remember there were so many of them we made a spreadsheet to keep track of them?). We wrote about this back then.

Official three-quarter length portrait of Oliver Dowden MP, smiling broadly. Text overlaid reads: 'Rishi is the best person to lead our country and unquestionably the best person to beat Labour. That's wht I'm backing him to be our next Prime Minister.' Ready for Rishi

Dowden was then among the very first to join #TeamRishi, although it was an idea whose time hadn’t quite come because we had to get through that weird Liz Truss bit before Sunak could assume power as some sort of saviour. “Unquestionably the best person to beat Labour…” you say?

(although there was a bit of a scare in the small hours, Dowden’s favourite for Tory Party leader Victoria Atkins was re-elected, so it’s still on…).

The two biggest parties – one of them two hundred years old (well over 300 if you count from the origin of the Tories) and the most successful political party in modern world history; and one of them well over a hundred years old and the most durable party of the working class anywhere in the world – are both

The voting

Labour. Of course, as we should have expected, the result here in Hertsmere was another win for incumbent Oliver Dowden. The swing against him was huge – over 20% – and the swing to Labour pretty good too but nowhere near enough. Josh Tapper’s share of the vote, 28%, is the fourth highest ever polled for Labour in Hertsmere, also the fourth largest number of votes, 13,459. But to win he’d have to have done better than Beth Kelly in 1997, whose 19,230 votes and 38.2% brought her to within 3,000 votes of a win. Even if Reform had not existed and every one of Darren Selkus’s 6,584 votes had gone to Tapper, we’d still have a Tory MP today.

General election results for Hertsmere in July 2024 - a screenshot from the BBC web site

This must have been an absolute rollercoaster for Josh Tapper. When selected by his local party back in March he’d presumably have had very limited expectations, in Britain’s 43rd safest Tory seat, but as Rishi’s catastrophic campaign ground on and the polls (so many polls!) began to pile up, he must have allowed himself to think the unthinkable once or twice. We noted some polls here that put Tapper over the line but they were very much outliers. It must be heartbreaking for him to watch the many new, young Labour MPs turning up at Parliament over the last few days. Better luck next time, Josh!

Of course, one of the more remarkable things about this Labour landslide is that it is the product of one of the lowest vote shares in recent political history – 34%. Commentators are calling this result ‘wide but shallow‘ or ‘distorted‘. Fraser Nelson in the Spectator calls it a Potemkin landslide, which is clever. Activists, of course, will say things like ‘that’s how politics works’, or ‘a win is a win’ but will be privately conscious of the fact that Starmer won three million votes fewer than Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and, startlingly, over half a million fewer than the same bloke in the catastrophic 2019 election. Labour must govern – and quickly make a real impression on the lives of Britons – in the knowledge that Keir Starmer is less popular in electoral terms than the hated predecessor he has expended so much energy to delete from the national memory.

The counter-argument is that where the Labour win is wide but shallow – a ‘sandcastle landslide‘ that could be swept away when the tide comes back in – the Tory position now is narrow and shallow. It has to be a fear for the remains of the Tory leadership that a Parliamentary party with 122 MPs and an average majority of about 4,000 looks very fragile indeed and essentially only one more defeat from total irrelevance – especially when its next leader might well be from an extreme wing of the party and ready to essentially abandon the party’s historic base.

The Liberals. In Hertsmere, Labour remains the only viable opposition. The Liberals fell apart here – again – and there was a 3.2% swing against Emma Matanle. The ruthlessly effective Lib Dem campaign – which has produced 71 seats nationally – focused on harnessing the ‘efficiency’ of the electoral process by investing everything in winnable seats. It was always going to leave Matanle on the outside. In the 1980s the party – before the SDP merger – was the second-largest in the constituency. Matanle’s vote was less than a third of the party’s best performance here in 1983. It will be a long road back.

Table showing all the Liberal and Lib Dem results in the Hertsmere constituency between 1983 and 2024
This list of Liberal and Lib Dem candidates, incidentally, includes Zerbanoo Gifford, the only Zoroastrian (we think) ever to have stood for election in Hertsmere; Laurence Brass, founder of an important Jewish-Palestinian peace settlement who is still serving as a Hertfordshire county councillor almost forty years on and Sophie Bowler, the Lib Dem candidate who won some press coverage in 2015 for being ‘too busy to do any campaigning‘ and consequently won the smallest number of votes for her party in the history of the constituency.

Reform’s performance in Hertsmere was, in national terms, not remarkable. An outer-London green-belt settlement was never going to be a good prospect for the party so their investment here was probably small. Darren Selkus was essentially on his own (at least he was actually visible) and the fact that he was able to bring in 6,584 votes – more even than UKIP at their 2015 high-point (and, remarkably, more than UKIP’s entire national vote at this election) – probably bodes well if he wants to stand again (he stood for the Brexit Party in Epping Forest in 2019 too). His vote here was the largest for a populist party in the history of the constituency (easily enough to get his deposit back). The party took lumps out of the Tory vote this time round but all the parties are conscious that Reform UK will be the primary source of chaos in UK politics for some time yet – and the party really won’t want to stop at humiliating the Tories. Like UKIP before it, the party’s presence in the political landscape is going to focus minds and all parties will be thinking hard about how to make sure Reform can’t come for them in subsequent elections. Labour’s concern will be that Reform came second in 98 UK seats and in 89 of them Labour was the winner.

Huge Union flag draped across a hedge outside a house in the Hertsmere constituency. A sign in the middle of the flag reads: 'SOS Vote Reform. Vote Selkus. He can help us'
From Darren Selkus’s Twitter account

During the campaign Selkus promised to give the whole of his MP’s salary to charity, which suggests that his business – which sells wood veneers – is probably doing well. He’ll be able to give it 100% of his focus again now.

The Greens must be wondering what they have to do to have an impact in British politics. If any party should be disrupting UK politics from the margins then surely it ought to be the party of the climate crisis and of protecting the environment? But no, once again, the disruptive force – here as across Europe – is a reactionary populist party. A party, in fact, that explicitly opposes Net Zero and advances a kind of ‘la-la-la-not-listening’ approach to global warming. Reform UK Chairman Richard Tice explains that, because the UK’s economy is relatively small, cutting emissions here would “make zero difference to climate change”, so we should focus on adaptation (taller sea walls, flood-resistant crops, factor-50 and so on) rather than participating in the worldwide energy transition.

The Green Party put up a candidate in every seat in England and Wales this time and now has four MPs, one fewer than Reform – a big breakthrough. In Hertsmere, John Humphries, a veteran campaigner who stood here in 2019, continued the party’s steady growth in share. Where the party took seats this time they came from the major parties but it will be a long time before the Greens represent a threat to the Tories here.

One of the party’s challenges is that, once elected, Green MPs will be subject to the same local political pressures as everyone else. It’s already started: this Telegraph story is from two days after the election:

Would a Hertsmere Green MP be brave enough to support the construction of a thousand PassivHaus homes on the green belt? Or a big solar farm on agricultural land in the constituency?

The Independents. The other group that’s really boomed in the 2024 general election is the broad church of candidates with no party affiliation. We counted 487 candidates in the general election with the word ‘independent’ in their party name, the largest number ever in a UK election – most constituencies in Britain had five or six candidates, which is more than usual. Six Independents were elected to Parliament this time. One of them was Jeremy Corbyn, of course. Four of them were so-called ‘Gaza candidates’, standing against Labour in seats that have larger Muslim populations (and one is an independent Unionist in Northern Ireland). The press have been quick to suggest that these one-issue candidates are the thin end of an Islamist wedge or ‘a failure of integration’ but a quick look at their biographies suggests otherwise: one Lib Dem barrister, one solicitor, one IT consultant (and school governor) and the chair of a Muslim advocacy group. We’d suggest that standing for Parliament is about the best evidence of integration you’ll find.

Hertsmere’s Independent is Ray Bolster. Bolster kept us guessing by remaining entirely invisible for the first five weeks of the campaign – no web site, no social media, no leaflets. But in the few days before the poll he put his head above the parapet and put out a leaflet. We learnt that Bolster is a local man, an RAF veteran and a life-long peacenik. His 536 votes doesn’t look at all bad when you consider how elusive he was during the campaign.

A quote from Ray Bolster's election leaflet from the Hertsmere general election in July 2024 - "I am in my eighties and recently widowed. This is my final call. Join me as I stand for politics from the heart. Join me to fight for a better Britain… and a fairer world.
No concerns about age here

The only other Independent in the history of Hertsmere was Ronald Parkinson, who stood as an Independent Communist in 1983 and polled a remarkable 1,116 votes (although the fact that he had the same surname as the winning Tory may have contributed to this total).

Table showing results in 1983 general election in the Hertsmere constituency.
  • Detailed results for Hertsmere from the BBC (with nice charts) or from Wikipedia (with a simpler table of results).
  • We’ve updated our spreadsheet of results from every general election in Hertsmere all the way back to the first one, in 1983 (you’ll also find council and PCC results).
  • Since Oliver Dowden remains our MP we can continue keeping an eye on him. Follow the #DowdenLog tag here.

Farage’s contract

It’s chaos at Reform HQ but that’s how they like it…

Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich presents his Contract with America in in front of a huge map of the USA.
A man with a contract

For an insurgency polling in double digits and threatening to disassemble the most successful political party in history, Reform UK is a pretty shabby outfit. Neither a high-gloss, updated 20th Century dinosaur like Le Pen’s National Rally, nor a dark, ideological machine like Alternative for Germany, nor even a big-money hostile take-over of an establishment party like Trump’s operation. But maybe we shouldn’t expect a slick operation here, maybe it’s not very British to expect a challenger from the far right to be anything other than scrappy and a bit lairy.

The man in the photo with all the American flags is Newt Gingrich – not a British politician, of course, but pugnacious Speaker of the US House of Representatives during the 1994 Congressional mid-terms, a veteran conservative political operator who wrote the Republican party’s programme for that election, an enormously influential document that many credit as the beginning of the populist turn, the epic shift in American politics that ultimately produced you know who.

Darren Selkus, army veteran and business owner, is Hertsmere’s Gingrich. Read about him on the Reform web site.

Gingrich’s document was no mere manifesto, no mere platform. It was a contract. A Contract with America. The idea was that instead of promoting a dry programme of dry legislation to be fought out vote by arduous vote through the congressional system once in power, the party would lay out an ambitious reworking of the system itself. Gingrich was a political visionary who saw an opportunity to put the Republican party back at the heart of things. In this he wasn’t so much a proto-Trump as Trump’s inverse – he wanted to shift the power in American politics back from the presidency to a radicalised congress.

His contract was more than the usual shopping list of policies carefully weighted for viability; it was a series of linked measures that would, together, overturn decades of post-war liberal orthodoxy – economic, social, diplomatic, everything. It begins with eight pledges – reforms to the congressional system aimed at cementing a conservative model of governance indefinitely. It’s a fascinating document, not least because it self-consciously marked the end of folksy, optimistic, forward-looking Reagan conservatism and the beginning of the darker variety the whole world is now familiar with – George W Bush’s messianic militarism, Trump’s ‘American carnage‘.

Britain’s Gingrich?

Gingrich was working as an insurgent inside one of the two governing parties, of course. He’d been an operator since the 1960s. Trump began as an outsider but entered the Republican party and hollowed it out brutally. It’s his party now. Farage has not yet achieved a position inside the Tory Party but he’s been influencing the shape and direction of the party pretty directly for twenty years now. He’s a kind of parasitic shadow leader, directing the mighty, 300 year-old Conservative Party, pint in hand, from the saloon bar. It’s only a few years since Farage looked like he was finished. Boris Johnson had cannily replaced him as populist folk hero, Brexit was finally done and the man himself seemed to be more interested in the goldmine on the other side of the Atlantic. But his influence endures. And we suspect he’s not finished with the Tory party yet, whether he’s elected in Clacton or not.

The Gingrich contract must have come to mind for many on Monday when Nigel Farage launched Reform’s ‘Contract With You‘. This contract isn’t quite as ambitious – and it’s likely to be a lot less influential (we suspect it was written in a bit of a hurry – count the typos).

Reform’s document steers clear of grand claims. It’s essentially a pretty focused list of policies designed as a response to a probable Labour government. Farage is positioning his party as the effective opposition in the coming Parliament. His assumption is that the Tories, no matter how many seats they finally win, will be so diminished, so intellectually exhausted that they’ll have little to offer while the party is laboriously rebuilt. That Reform, even from a base of a handful of seats, will dominate on the critical issues. And they might be right (they’ll need to win a few seats, though).

Beginning on the very first page we’re into a sequence of commitments that are carefully weighted to offer a challenge to the likely governing party without being in any way deliverable. Finding £50 Billion of savings in the civil service, a sum equal to the whole defence budget, seems implausible to say the least, for instance. Taking back £35 Billion per year from the commercial banks without causing mini-budget levels of market chaos likewise.

Pledges pledges pledges

You will find the obligatory numbered pledges at the beginning, though – obviously an indispensable element of any contemporary manifesto. These numbered pledges, for some reason, all begin with a kind of John Lennon flourish: 1) Imagine Smart Immigration, Not Mass Immigration; 2) Imagine No More Small Boats in the Channel; 3) Imagine No NHS Waiting Lists; 4) Imagine Good Wages for a Hard Day’s Work; 5) Imagine Affordable, Stable Energy Bills.

In this rather boring package, the only place where the language soars a little is in the final policy section, headed ‘Reform is needed to defend and promote British culture, identity and values’ (intriguing use of the passive voice there). This is where we find the more inflammatory bits – the obligatory mention of sharia law (not a single mention in the whole document of Farage’s favourite ‘Judeo-Christian values‘ though), anti-woke legislation, de-banking, dumping equalities legislation and so on. But it’s striking how unambitious this all is. Farage and Reform here are not reaching for a consitutional remaking of Great Britain or for the destruction of the liberal institutions of the post-war settlement. In fact all we get are some rather managerial proposals about running the NHS more efficiently and a predictable kicking for the old enemy – the BBC.

SAVINGS PLEDGES Policy Area Annualised Savings Over 5 Year Electoral Term Amount in £ billions Immigration Savings £5 Employer Immigration Tax £4 Energy Savings - tax subsidies & scrap Net Zero £30 Benefit Saving - 1 million plus back to work £15 Transport & Utilities Savings £5 Slash wasteful Government spending Save £5 in 100 incl govt depts. quangos, commissions £50 Stop bank interest on QE reserves £35 Cut foreign aid by 50% £6 Sub-Total Potential Savings = £150 billion pa = Almost £3,000 per Adul
Comedy cost savings

In the financial section Reform turns out to be as obsessed with the zero-sum tax-and-spend calculations as the major parties. And this is interesting, not least because it’s not very revolutionary. Only a very cautious insurrectionary party would be so interested in retaining tight control over expenditure after the revolution. Of course it’s possible that this very cautious package is meant to answer fears about Farage as a potential Mussolini, seeking election so that he can cancel elections and rule forever, but we’re ready to bet that this is it. We’ve reached the limit of Reform’s intellectual and ideological ambition.

The table of savings at the end reads like the kind of Dragon’s Den forecast that would make Deborah Meaden weep – various conveniently round numbers totted up in a table so that party spokesmen can claim it’s ‘fully-costed’. Evaluating this lot would cause the entire staff of the OBR to faint in unison.

So why a contract?

Back in the nineties, the Contract With America wasn’t quite the ideological bulldozer Gingrich hoped it would be – it was essentially cut to ribbons in congress – by hostile conservatives from within his own party as well as by Clinton’s Democrats – reduced to a pretty thin set of compromised measures, most of which failed to pass. Gingrich went from sole proprietor of a congressional earthquake to “who?” in a few years. But his aggression, his unwavering rejection of the bi-partisan conventions of congress and his disrespect for his party’s elders have all influenced American politics to the present day.

Nigel Farage raises a glass of wine in a BBC green room in May 2017. He's gurning characteristically.
Another man with a contract

So, back to the UK general election of 2024. Why would a party leader want to attach this ‘contract’ idea to his policy programme?

It stands out from the crowd. The contract language quite cleverly opens up some distance from the other parties’ documents. It’s the only set of promises in play that’s not a manifesto, not a dreary document like all the other dreary documents. At his launch, Farage said: “today is not a manifesto launch. If I say to you ‘manifesto’, your immediate word-association is ‘lie’…”

Contracts are for consumers. The idea of a contract is actually a pretty good expression of our relationship with contemporary politics. Electors in the third decade of the 21st Century are not expected to engage with politics – as activists or organised workers or even as enthusiastic private citizens. We’re expected only to consume politics, to rate its quality via occasional elections and sometimes to switch brands, in the same way we switch gas providers or mobile phones. Meanwhile, political movements are over, replaced by narrowly-focused campaign groups. Incidentally, this explains why we feel so disempowered and disconnected from politics, why so many people say “they’re all the same…” – the politicians like it that way.

Businesses love contracts. Reform UK is a business. It’s the image they’re looking for. Tice and Farage and Habib have enthusiastically embraced the ‘start-up’ idea. Journos and critics noticed ages ago that Reform UK is not a conventionally incorporated political party. Columnists and social media geniuses thought the revelation that the party is just an ordinary limited company would be an absolutely killer gotcha. “Look, it’s not a political party, it’s a scam!” Of course it made no difference at all. Nobody cares. Limited companies are famously easy to set up in Britain. It costs £50 and takes less than 24 hours. The fact that the simplest and most robust organisational form for this new force in British politics was actually an off-the-shelf company really does suit the project. A disruptive, entrepreneurial enterprise like Reform probably ought to be a business and not a fusty old not-for-profit.

Chaos suits Reform

Reform UK wasn’t ready for the election when Sunak announced it but that’s fine – it’s a start-up – the rag-tag Reform team mobilised resources with the ‘fuck you’ energy of a tech entrepeneur. ‘Move fast and break things’ could almost be their slogan. Hiring and then quickly firing candidates as they’re exposed as racists and lunatics is all part of the energy of an insurgent party. When opponents get excited about the chaos inside the Reform operation they’re profoundly missing the point. That’s how they like it – and, let’s face it, voters seem to like it too.

What’s in this contract?

Next time we’ll look at the content of Reform UK Ltd’s ‘Contract With You‘ and possibly at the policies of their unlikely collaborators, the SDP…

Be prepared

Fear is back

The entrance to the world war two 'Report and Control Centre' in Radlett in the UK. A concrete-built structure with a large, arched, gated entrance, at the end of a short path covered with leaves and overgrown. An explanatory sign in the foreground reads: 'Radlett & District Museum HISTORIC BUILDINGS Radlett Control & Reporting Centre This Wartime Nissen hut was built in 1939 by local builder Wings, as a key point of contact for civil defence. It cost £425 to construct and has two rooms plus a toilet. Today, the structure is in good shape and in the care of Aldenham Parish Council. It has been used for storage, the restoration of a vintage motorbike and the breeding of maggots for fishing. radlettmuseum.com'

Why does Rishi Sunak want us to prepare for war? Why does Oliver Dowden want us to fill the cupboard under the stairs with tins of beans and bottled water? And what’s any of this got to do with a concrete shed in the middle of Radlett?

If you walk up Gills Hill towards the park you’ll pass a lovely bit of green called Scrubbitts Wood and if you look over the gate at the North East corner you’ll see a concrete structure that looks like an old garage or possibly an air-raid shelter. Everybody used to call it ‘the air-raid shelter’, in fact, but recently a handy sign has gone up by the gate explaining that it’s actually a World War Two ‘Report and Control Centre’.

Round enamelled sign, red with white text, reads: 'Radlett & District Museum HISTORIC BUILDINGS Radlett Control & Reporting Centre This Wartime Nissen hut was built in 1939 by local builder Wings, as a key point of contact for civil defence. It cost £425 to construct and has two rooms plus a toilet. Today, the structure is in good shape and in the care of Aldenham Parish Council. It has been used for storage, the restoration of a vintage motorbike and the breeding of maggots for fishing. radlettmuseum.com'

It’s a communications node in the wartime civil defence system. There was probably a telephone line, quite possibly female volunteer despatch riders. It’s not easy to understand why you’d put such an important bit of infrastructure in Radlett but there it is, defying the passage of time, right in the middle of the village.

Structures like this were put up all over Britain during the war, and were part of a huge – and hugely-effective – collective effort to protect Britain during what was unarguably the country’s greatest crisis for over a hundred years. Civil defence during the war was a bureacratic-voluntary hybrid, of the kind Britain is famed for. It’s how we roll, how the whole Empire was run.

The cold war

Famous still from 1984 film 'Threads' about the aftermath of a nuclear war in Britain. A man in a traffic warden's uniform has a bloody bandage with crude eye-holes covering almost his whole face. A rifle at his shoulder, dazed expression on his face.

After the war, of course, began another war. And a modernised, atomic-age version of the wartime civil defence structure came into being. One of its functions was to put the fear of God into us about nuclear armageddon. If you grew up in this period you’ll remember the public information films at the cinema and terrifying fictional visions like Threads and When the Wind Blows. Some of us are still haunted by the Protect and Survive booklets you could pick up in doctor’s surgeries and libraries right up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The end of history

President of the USA Ronald Reagan against a blue curtained background making a speech behind two press microphones
Amiable B-movie schlub saves world

But then amiable B-movie schlub Ronald Reagan implausibly won the cold war. The communist gerontocracy basically died. The long Soviet experiment collapsed. Things changed, of course, and there was that odd decade during which everybody felt they could breathe again. The booklets were pulped, they scrapped the sirens and Tony Blair’s New Labour won the biggest electoral landslide in modern British history. American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously wrote a book called ‘The End of History and the Last Man‘, published in 1992, in which he proposed that the end of the cold war and the benign economic climate signalled a definitive end to the chaos and conflict of the twentieth century. Liberal democracy had won the battle of the ideologies and would become the unquestioned norm everywhere and forever. Oops. This dreamy mood lasted about ten minutes and was finally finished off by 9/11.

War without end

A large crowd of American soldiers in full uniform with helmets and weapons against a dusty background
Americans

And we entered the era of the War on Terror (capital ‘W’, capital ‘T’). The Americans recruited a ‘coalition of the willing‘ (you might not remember this but you were definitely in it) and moved onto a war footing, invading Afghanistan and then Iraq. One of those wars became the longest in American history. Deaths in all of the post-9/11 wars, the wars we can classify as connected with the War on Terror, now amount to several million (including hundreds of British servicemen and women and thousands of Americans).

The USA is, in fact, legally and politically, still at war. A law passed in 2001, giving the President essentially unconstrained power to make war against enemies, real and perceived, is still in force, discussed periodically in the US Congress ever since but never repealed. Of course, here in Britain we just do as we’re told, so we’re effectively still at war too. The absence of a written constitution makes it much easier for UK governments to tag along with the Americans (as Tony Blair said to George Bush “I will be with you, whatever…”).

A century of emergencies

The happy optimists of the last decade of the last century could hardly have anticipated the drama of the first quarter of this one. A sequence of regional and world financial crises (including the biggest one since the great depression), dozens of popular uprisings brutally put down across the world, a hundred-year pandemic, a major European war, the populist turn; all overlaid on the building turmoil of the climate crisis. None of this was in the plan.

And the response of the major powers – including here in Britain – has been, in almost every case, to dial up the anxiety, to legislate, to militarise and to take a variety of increasingly authoritarian actions. Social and economic elites – even liberal and left-wing elites – almost everywhere turned to repression and away from democracy or other forms of popular deliberation.

In an emergency, all bets are off. A government may require us to stay indoors, allow us to protest but without being a nuisance or impose long prison sentences for non-violent action. Ancient rights are suspended and recently-acquired rights are reclassified and unwound. And we can expect more of this as the multi-dimensional crisis intensifies.

But hold on, what’s this got to do with tins of beans?

Well, Oliver Dowden, in his role as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, is in charge of resilience (in addition to a long list of other tasks, including ‘civil contingencies’, the COBRA committee and that portrait of the King…). Resilience in this case doesn’t mean bouncing back when your boss gives you a bollocking. It’s more about preparing for climate change, terrorism and war. Dowden’s brief includes flooding, heatwaves, cybercrime, sabotage by state actors and, for some reason, he’s chosen this moment to amp it all up, to dial up the anxiety and ask us to start hoarding pasta and toilet paper again.

Screenshot from UK government Prepare web site, black text against orange background reads: 'Get prepared for emergencies'

Hardly anyone noticed this but in the morning on the day of Rishi Sunak’s surprise election announcement (do you remember it? It was raining) Oliver Dowden announced something else – he announced an inexplicable new web site and a campaign to persuade us all to prepare for disaster. The web site is called ‘Get Prepared for Emergencies’ and it’s a slightly uncanny throw-back to those cold war public information booklets. There are many exclamation marks and a guide to preparing for the worst. You’ll learn how many bottles of water you should buy (three litres per person, per day, FYI), how to prepare your house for a flood and what to keep in the boot in case you need to leave home in a hurry. There’s a checklist to download.

Geopolitical dread

And this all came about a fortnight after the Prime Minister’s oddly dystopian speech warning us about, well, everything. He spoke, at his lectern, of the threat from “…gender activists hijacking children’s sex education…”, “Iranian proxies firing on British ships in the Red Sea…”, “countries like Russia weaponising immigration for their own ends…”, “criminal gangs finding new routes across European borders.” Read the speech, it’s all there: artificial intelligence, trans ideology, small boats, cancel culture, Putin’s ambitions and… nuclear anihilation.” Sunak’s painting a picture here and it’s not a happy one. It doesn’t actually mention alien invasion but we suspect it’s on a checklist somewhere.

Alien invasion movie still - spaceships hover over planet's surface, dark and frightening background

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Conservatives have decided their last chance against the inevitability of defeat in July is to weaponise dread, to trigger the entire voting-age population, to reduce us to a kind of quivering electoral jelly, waiting for the catastrophe and hoping against hope that Rishi can rescue us. The logic is that this dread will cause us to cling to the Tories when it comes to placing an X in the box, that we cannot imagine a better way out of this miserable, grinding, 14-year nightmare than to vote for the people who made it.

There’s a kind of contemporary horror movie-vibe to all this. These hollow men in suits, standing at lecterns, informing us in bloodless terms that our freedoms are to be suspended and that our larders and cellars must be filled in case of catastrophe. It’s grim.

Signing the pledge

Meanwhile, Labour, of course, in closely shadowing the Conservative policy offer, must carefully match the beligerance and dread Rishi’s bringing. Yesterday Keir Starmer made it clear that he’s not just going to retain Britain’s nuclear deterrent but double down (in fact the party’s calling it a ‘nuclear triple-lock’, which is catchy). Starmer’s promise is not new. In fact it’s consistent with the stance of all UK governments since 1962. In that year Harold Macmillan and JFK signed the Nassau Agreement, permanently cementing Britain’s dependence on the US military-industrial machine. To vary this relationship would be costly and almost certainly diplomatically impossible. Every Prime Minister since then has acknowledged the geopolitical realities of the North Atlantic compact and signed on.

HMS Vigilant, the third of the Royal Navy's Vanguard Class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines. Dramtically backlit against a cloudy sky

Under this and most of the subsequent agreements the British nuclear deterrent is essentially a North European branch operation of the vast American one. You don’t need to be a peacenik to feel uncomfortable with this relationship, with the fact that important parts of the UK nuclear weapons system literally belong to the United States government, that Britain’s 58 warheads are considered part of a larger US-controlled pool of weapons, that targeting, maintenance and other aspects of deployment are decided by American generals and that although it might be technically possible for a British submarine captain to launch a Trident missile independently, it would be unthinkable in practical terms and could actually be stopped by a US government with a mind to do so. According to one academic, the UK’s nuclear arsenal doesn’t meet ‘the 1940 requirement‘, meaning it could not be used in a situation when the country stood alone as it did at the beginning of the second world war.

No UK government has ever had the courage to challenge this and the economics of operating an advanced nuclear weapons system – with cold-war levels of preparedness – independently of the USA is so scary that this is very unlikely to change. It’s almost certain that even if a unilateralist government were to come to power (as it nearly did in 2017, remember) it would quickly acknowledge the realities and renew the deal. This unequal relationship is a deeply entrenched aspect of the Atlantic hierarchy. It’s essentially impossible to imagine altering it, let alone abandoning it.

Fear wins again

An official photograph of Oliver Dowden MP with a British Army captain's hat crudely photoshopped onto his head
Captain Dowden is ready for action

Oliver Dowden’s stock of tinned food, Sunak’s dead-eyed scare tactics and the UK’s unvarying committment to the nuclear status quo are all aspects of the same, rigid security orthodoxy and the same increasingly hysterical emergency politics that govern our lives in the developed economies. Fear is a political currency – and when politicians deliberately and cynically mobilise our anxieties it’s a sign of their fragility. It’s undemocratic and regressive and we’re probably stuck with it.

Voting in Hertsmere on 4 July

Everything you need to know

Oliver Dowden acceptance speech 2017
Oliver Dowden addresses the crowd after his 2017 victory in Hertsmere.

Who are the Hertsmere candidates?

CandidateParty
Ray BolsterVeteran peace campaignerInd
Oliver DowdenIncumbent and Deputy PMCon
John HumphriesShenley management consultantGreen
Emma MatanleBriefing writer and councillorLib Dem
Darren SelkusArmy veteran and business ownerReform
Josh TapperCivil servant and GoggleboxerLabour
General Election 2024, the candidates in Hertsmere, in alphabetical order
Conservative MP, Deputy Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Oliver Dowden in long shot turns to his left and smiles at the camera in Downing Street
The incumbent
Grid of four photos of candidates in the Hertsmere Parliamentary constituency for the 2024 UK general election - clockwise from top left: Josh Tapper Labour, John Humphries Green, Darren Selkust Reform, Emma Matanle Liberal Democrat - their surnames are overlaid
The pretenders

There’s some detail about all of these candidates in the party guides we’ve already published – click the links in the table.

We updated this post on 7 June 2024 to reflect the final nominations for Hertsmere. There’s a complete list of candidates in all constituencies on the BBC web site. There’s a further update, made on 1 July, adding some information about Green dandidate John Humphries and Independent Ray Bolster.

The time has come. The election has been called and is in the diary for Thursday 4 July. You presently have no MP. Nobody does. There are now only candidates. Oliver Dowden, although he is still Deputy Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, has carefully changed his social media bios to reflect this.

By election day, some of the 4,515 individuals – the largest number of candidates ever for a UK general election – who managed to get their papers in by the deadline will have wthdrawn and some will have lost the support of their parties but none can now be removed from ballot papers, so some electors will have to be careful not to vote for someone who has stood down. We also notice that YouTuber Niko Omilana, who has registered for election in multiple constituencies, contrary to the rules, is still on the list – eleven times.

The deadline for submitting a nomination passed on 7 June. Georgia Elliott-Smith from Gina Miller’s True & Fair Party, said she was going to stand here in Hertsmere but then disappeared and has not submitted her papers (looks like only four candidates ultimately got their forms in for True and Fair). Independent Ray Bolster, a mysterious late entry, has caught us by surprise. We know nothing about Ray and hope to learn more soon. Obviously we’re disappointed there’ll be no surprise come-back for the levitating Natural Law Party.

Close-up head-and-shoulders portrait of Hertsmere Parliamentary candidate Ray Bolster. He's an elderly man in an outside location, smiling, wearing a purple jumper.
Ray Bolster, independent candidate for Hertsmere

Update for 31 June 2024. We now know something about all six of the candidates standing in Hertsmere (the largest number of candidates in Hertsmere since 2010). Mystery independent Ray Bolster is a mystery no more. According to the Welwyn & Hatfield Times Bolster is an RAF Medical Corps veteran and a long-time anti-racism campaigner who fought against anti-semitism in London’s East End in the 1960s and was a founder of the Watford Anti-Racist committee in the 1970s. He’s picked this unlikely location to campaign for the Gaza vote, calling for an immediate ceasefire. We suspect Bolster may attract a few votes from voters who don’t feel represented by any of the larger parties on this issue but his complete absence from the first month of the campaign doesn’t bode well for his vote share. We’re pretty sure he doesn’t have a web site, a social media presence or any printed material. Hardly anyone entering a polling booth will know who he is. Good luck, Ray!

And the Greens. From recent press, we also now know more about our Green candidate, John Humphries. The party made a commitment to stand in every constituency in England and Wales at this election – a critical step for any national party with ambitions to government – and the Greens have stood in Hertsmere before, in 2010, 2017 and 2019. Humphries was the candidate in 2019. On the face of it the party of the environment ought to do well in a constituency that’s literally in the London green belt.

In some parts of the UK there’s been an effective but sometimes awkward alliance formed between Greens of the ecological variety and people more motivated by conservation and opposition to development. There’s a tension within the party between the historically more narrowly-focused environmentalists and the progressives with an interest in social issues and redistribution. It’s hard to imagine suburban green belt-warriors feeling much of a connection with the trans activists and de-growthers in the national party. The manifestos don’t tell us much about the green belt. Reform UK and the Liberals don’t mention it at all. Labour, Conservatives and Greens have essentially identical positions on protecting the green belt. No party dare go near the idea of dismantling the whole ridiculous apparatus and replacing it, for instance, with a rational set of protections for nature and green space while permitting a desperately needed house building.

PartyFrom the manifestoMentions
Conservative“Retaining our cast-iron commitment to protect the Green Belt from uncontrolled development…”2
Green“Elected Greens would seek to strengthen and prevent any rollback of existing protections of the Green Belt”2
Independent
Labour“Labour is committed to preserving
the green belt which has served
England’s towns and cities well
over many decades.”		1
Liberal Democrat“Everyone should be able to enjoy open green spaces, clean blue rivers and the beauty of Britain’s coast.”0
Reform UK“Legislate to ban ULEZ Clean Air Zones and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. Scrapping Net Zero.”0
Mentions of the term ‘green belt’ in the 2024 party manifestos

The parties and the history. As a loyal reader of Radlett Wire you’ll be aware of our four-part guide to all the parties standing in Hertsmere: part one, the fringe parties (including Reform and the Greens); part two, the Lib Dems; part three. Labour; part four, the Conservatives. You’ll also have read our definitive history of the Hertsmere constituency, which goes back all the way to our very first MP, in 1983, disgraced Thatcher ally Cecil Parkinson.

Your new constituency. Like many constituencies in Britain, Hertsmere is a different shape for this election. In fact, it’s smaller, both geographically and in population terms. The purpose of the boundary changes was principally to bring the ‘electoral quota‘ – the number of voters living in each constituency – to between 69,724 and 77,062 voters. Population change over the decades had caused some, mostly urban, constituencies to get much bigger than that and some, mostly rural, constituencies much smaller. The changes are thought to have strengthened the Conservative Party’s electoral advantage in Britain, but not by much – and certainly not by the enormous amount that was first feared. Although it was originally proposed that the number of UK constituencies be reduced from 650 to 600, the overall number hasn’t changed in this update.

Map showing the changes to the boundaries of the Hertsmere Parliamentary constituency for the 2024 general election in the UK
Boundary changes

The effect in Hertsmere is not drastic – one Bushey ward has moved out of the constituency and one Hatfield ward in. The overall effect will be to reduce the voting-age population of the Parliamentary constituency by about 7%. Pollsters and news outlets have had the considerable headache of reflecting the new populations in their data. For instance, the Electoral Calculus projection we’ve been sharing here regularly is for the new constituency boundaries.

Voting in Radlett, whatever the election, is run by Hertsmere Council. They run the count and provide the polling places. The returning officer works for the council (when Sunderland and Newcastle race to get their results out first it’s a battle between two councils). Hertsmere will publish a list of polling places closer to the date of the election but it’s safe to assume the Radlett ones will be at Phillimore Hall, the Radlett Centre and the United Synagogue as usual.

Registering to vote. You’ve got until midnight on 18 June to get your name on the register. Once you’re registered you can apply for a postal vote but you’ll have to do it by the end of the following day, 19 June. If you think you won’t be able to get to the polling station on the day you can send someone to vote for you – a proxy vote. You’ve got until 5pm on 26 June to apply (and, if everything goes pear-shaped, you can set up an emergency proxy at any time up till 5pm on polling day).

Fun fact. You’ve still got time to stand for election yourself. You’ll need ten people to nominate you and £500, though.

Voter ID is now required for all UK elections. The Conservative government thought this would give them an electoral advantage, since young voters and poorer urban populations are less likely to have good ID, but Jacob Rees-Mogg thinks it’s backfired. Here’s a list of permitted forms of ID. Check it carefully because you may find you don’t have the right kind. It helps to be old. For instance, senior railcards and 60+ Oyster cards are okay but not young persons’ railcards or student ID. You don’t need to take the polling card you’ll be sent in the post. If you’ve got no valid ID you’ve got until 5pm on 26 June to apply for a voter authority certificate (you don’t need ID to get one, which seems like a bit of a loophole, but you will need to know your National Insurance number).

Hertsmere General Election preview, part four

The Conservative Party

Two men carry a lectern out into Downing Street for a speech by the Prime Minister
Lot of lectern action lately

This is it. The big one. The last of our four guides to the parties standing in Hertsmere at the next general election, whenever that is. We’ve done the fringe parties, the Liberals and Labour so now it’s time to tackle the incumbents, the 800-pound gorillas of Hertsmere politics, the Conservative Party, winners in Hertsmere since the constituency was created, for the 1983 general election – the ‘Falklands election’. The Tories have never even come close to losing here, not even in 1997, when Labour won the largest number of Parliamentary seats in history and squeezed the margin in Hertsmere to six percent.

Four Conservative politicians behind a desk at a press conference, microphones in front of them. Left to right: Margaret Thatcher, Cecil Parkinson, Francis Pym and Michael Heseltine
Cecil Parkinson (next to Thatcher), once MP for Herstmere and – in a competive field – probably the biggest heel in Conservative Party history

The history of the Tories in Hertsmere is essentially the history of the contituency so you’ll want to read our electoral history of Hertsmere, which covers the whole period since 1983 and its three MPs – including the ignominious departure of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite Cecil Parkinson in 1983 and of his successor James Clappison, dumped by the party for fast-track SPAD Oliver Dowden in 2015.

You might think that Hertsmere is one of those home counties contituencies that’s been approximately Tory since the battle of Hastings, or the end of the ice age. And you wouldn’t be wrong. A single county-wide constituency was first created over seven hundred years ago, in 1294, and it persisted until 1885. The Hertfordshire constituency returned – for most of that period – three MPs (the principal towns in the county also returned their own MPs). Before the franchise was expanded in the late 19th Century the electorate was tiny – In 1868, about 9,000 men in Hertfordshire (landowners and later the ‘ten-pound men‘) could vote. The first time they got a chance to vote for a candidate identified as a Tory was in 1727. He was a Jacobite noble called Charles Caesar, who was also Treasurer of the Navy. Between then and the seat’s final abolition in 1885 Tories dominated, with the occasional blip of Whig control. Between then and 1983 Radlett has bounced around between the constituencies of Watford, South West Hertfordshire and South Hertfordshire.

The odds

In a sea of disastrous polling data from the Sunak period, we’ve seen only one projection that suggests the Tories could lose in Hertsmere – and it’s a doozy. It’s the February 2023 MRP poll from the highly-reliable polling company Electoral Calculus. It gives Labour 509 seats and the Conservative Party 45. In this scenario the Tories aren’t even the official opposition. LOL.

February 2023 MRP poll from Electoral Calculus, showing the following data in a table: Party Number of Seats at GE 2019 Predicted Number of Seats Predicted Change CON 365 45 ?320 LAB 203 509 306 SNP 48 50 2 LIB 11 23 12 Plaid 4 4 0 Green 1 1 0 Reform 0 0 0 Total 632 632 0
Ouch

We know that even the slightly less extreme polling that’s been done since then has been causing panic bordering on hysteria in corridors and bars and meeting rooms in the SW1 area. Such an enormous swing is obviously unlikely and the most recent MRP polling gives Dowden a 1997-sized lead here in Hertsmere. That would bring Labour’s candidate Josh Tapper to within 3,000 votes of Oliver Dowden. We’ve noted before that Tapper must be praying the Gogglebox factor can get him a bit closer.

Chart showing vote share for the Hertsmere Parliamentary constituency for the main parties in the period from 1983 to 2019
Vote shares in Hertsmere since 1983, showing swings to Labour in 1997 and 2017

Crown, church and land

They don’t call the Conservative Party the most successful political party in the world for nothing. This 300 year-old institution, which began life in the ferment after the English Civil War, is so wired into the constitution of middle England – especially rural and landowning England – that it seems almost to be part of the landscape.

The party’s various re-inventions, especially in the period since the industrial revolution, have seen it identified with business (which had previously been the domain of the Whigs), with the urban middle class and, much more recently, with working class voters, for whom the Tories came to stand for ambition, home ownership and the prospect of a better life for their children.

The fact that this last electoral coalition – the one assembled by Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s that has seen the party running the country for 32 of the last 45 years – seems finally to be collapsing, in the wake of 15 years of flat wages, growing inequality and diminishing expectations – would, for any ordinary party, presumably mean the end. For the Tories it almost certainly means another re-invention – the Conservative Party is evidently indestructible and will still be with us on the other side of whatever apocalypse awaits us. Like cockroaches and the plague.

Our present Prime Minister – according to a polling firm one of the least popular party leaders in history – has made several increasingly desperate attempts at his own re-invention in the last year or two and, in his most recent effort, is trying to position his party as the ‘national security party’ or the party of geopolitical dread. It’s too early to say whether this relaunch will stick, of course, although the bookies aren’t convinced. At Radlett Wire we have a simple rule of thumb: when the Prime Minister puts a lectern outside Number 10 and makes a speech about nuclear annihilation it’s probably not his country’s security he’s worried about but his own.

The candidate

A composite image of Conservative MP Oliver Dowden, wearing a surgical mask and floating against a virtual reality background
Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality

We remain, as we have essentially since his election in 2015, deeply impressed by Oliver Dowden. He’s an intriguing figure. Not charismatic, not possessed of any apparent vision or of a distinctive political identity, nor even of deep roots in the Tory party. He is, in his party’s terms, an outsider, but his tenacity and his political instincts have kept him in or near the action since his first election – through one of the most turbulent periods in his party’s (and the Parliament’s) history. He’s a pragmatist – entering politics via David Cameron’s upbeat, socially-liberal, modernising regime, when CCHQ was like the marketing department of a Plc – and he had no difficulty subsquently lodging himself in the government of each successor Prime Minister. Only Liz Truss could find no use for him.

As we said in an earlier post here, when the s**t hits the fan he’s always ready:

For a second-tier politician, Dowden’s always been pretty close to the action (once a Number 10 staffer, always a Number 10 staffer). He was first to endorse Johnson to replace Theresa May but also first to resign as Johnson’s final crisis began. Joining #TeamRishi was another low-key masterstroke for our operator, although his return to the front bench was delayed by that weird 49-day Liz Truss thing, during which Dowden was very much on the outside…

From How does Hertsmere vote? Radlett Wire, updated 19 January 2024
An official photograph of Oliver Dowden MP with a British Army captain's hat crudely photoshopped onto his head
Captain Dowden of the Winter of Discontent Taskforce

We’ve sometimes called Dowden a bagman here. We don’t mean this disdainfully. The bagman is vital to a successful political party. Some politicians are far too grand for this kind of thing but Dowden is always quite happy, as the moment requires, to get his hands dirty, to dispose of a body, to endorse even the silliest talking points – privet hedges, woke roadsigns, hoarding stolen artefacts – scolding Netflix and calling for Gary Lineker‘s dismissal on the regular. He’ll step up in defense of the indefensible on the Sunday morning programmes without complaint and he’ll take on the emptiest, gestural nonsense with gusto. For a while during the wave of industrial unrest of 2022 and 2023 he was put in charge of Rishi Sunak’s ‘Winter of Discontent taskforce’. We amused ourselves here trying to find any further trace of activity from the taskforce. None materialised. It was never more than an announcement – the kind of entirely hollow politics you need a strong stomach to pursue with enthusiasm. Dowden has a strong stomach.

Classic teflon

Oliver Dowden is as close to clean hands as you’ll get in the contemporary Conservative party, so-far unblemished by scandal. And even when he really ought to have got into trouble he’s somehow squeaked through, untouched. It was Dowden who appointed Boris Johnson’s friend and loan-arranger to be Chair of the BBC. Dowden who was in charge of propriety and ethics when the party was accused of covering up a rape. He’s never been close to the big money but he was one of ten Tory MPs who took paid jobs with party donors during 2022 and for some reason accepted a payment from the hedge fund that bankrolled Liz Truss’s experiment with credibility too.

Local hero

Dowden comes from up the road and went to a school a lot of Hertsmere kids attend. He knows the area and has been a diligent constituency representative. In our experience, he (almost always) answers letters from constituents (your mileage may vary). He’s never, as far as we know, phoned an elderly constituent in the middle of the night asking for money to give to ‘bad people’ and we’re pretty sure he doesn’t own a property portfolio. He’s always ready to make a speech about a car park next to a bin. For all this, as his constituents, we should be grateful.

There will be constituents who question his absolute committment to local concerns, though. The rail freight terminal on the old Radlett aerodrome land is one of those giant projects that will always present a problem for a government minister. He very much wants to be identified with the electors who are going to have an enormous warehouse blocking out their view or a busy new access road keeping them awake.

An aerial visualisation of the Radlett rail freight terminal planned for the old aerodrome land

It’s a delicate business, though. Dowden has felt able to participate in the dispute but has reserved his full-throated criticism for the actions of the local authority, Hertfordshire County Council in this case, who say they were obliged to sell the land for the development. It’s always much easier for an MP to criticise the council than to criticise his own government or a major business that may well be a party donor.

We feel for Dowden on this. He doesn’t want to be seen too vocally opposing a development that will bring work to the area at a time when everyone’s fulminating about the sclerotic planning system. The sheer scale of the development and its likely impact on the households affected makes it hard to ignore for a local MP, though.

He’s ready

Screenshot of a tweet from Oliver Dowden MP. Two photos of Dowden with local Conservative Party members. Text reads: Delighted to have been readopted as the Conservative candidate for Hertsmere this evening!

Dowden has been reselected by his local party (they do this sort of thing informally in the Conservative Party) but, as far as we know, he hasn’t actually lodged his nomination papers with the local authority so there’s still a slim chance he’ll run for the hills. We doubt it, though.

As a government minister he’ll evidently be able to draw on significant resources from his party during his campaign but Hertsmere is such a safe seat that it’s unlikely we’ll see many of the top brass here during the campaign. If he’s lucky he’ll be able to call on his friends at South Hertfordshire Business Club again, though. This is a club with no web site, no staff, no premises, no accounts and, apparently, no members (looks like it might share an address with the St Albans Conservative Association, though). According to the Electoral Commission the club gave £82,741.09 to Dowden’s office between 2017 and 2022, making use of a loophole that allows ‘unincorporated associations’ to give up to £25,000 per year to a political party or campaign without saying where the money comes from. Dowden’s not the only MP using this method of accessing anonymous money. There are a number of these secretive organisations, with names like The Portcullis Club and the Magna Carta Club (that one’s given £150,000 to Michael Gove since 2009). Interestingly, they seem to exist only to give money to Conservative politicians and campaigns. Details of the Dowden donations in this spreadsheet.

  • Dowden suffers from a very contemporary political problem. He’s from a nominally working-class background but he speaks and acts quite posh. The same problem afflicts Keir Starmer. But the iron rule is that neither will ever, no matter how much they protest, be accepted as working class. They both really ought to give up trying.
  • Oliver Dowden has had a few goes at the despatch box depping for the boss lately. We can’t say we’ve ever managed to get through a whole session. It’s too much. Watching him labour awkwardly through his scripted jokes is far too painful, like the nasty bit in a nature documentary about seals and killer whales.
  • It turns out that the dreadful Cecil Parkinson affair has not yet, over forty years on, been forgotten. A new documentary is in the works.
  • Here’s our big spreadsheet with all the Hertsmere election results going back to 1983 – the only place you’ll find all this information in one place (and we recently added Hertfordshire PCC results going back to 2012 for extra excitement).
  • We group together all our Oliver Dowden posts with the #DowdenLog tag and you can subscribe to these posts in an RSS reader if that’s your thing.
  • You can keep up with what Oliver Dowden does in Parliament at TheyWorkForYou and you can set up an email alert there too, should you be sad enough.
  • We’re on Twitter/X and Facebook and you can follow this blog in the fediverse. Search for @blog@radlettwire.co.uk in your fediverse client (e.g. Mastodon)