The Liberal Democrats
Part one of this guide to the general election in Hertsmere, about the fringe parties, is here.
Okay, now it’s getting interesting. The next general election is still an unknown number of months away. It can’t be later than 28 January 2025, though, and the Prime Minister says he assumes it’ll be in the second half of this year. For some reason he’s explicitly ruled out 2 May 2024. Here in the Hertsmere constituency candidates are coming out of the woodwork (although only two have got as far as submitting their papers). We understand that Oliver Dowden, our MP, will stand again. Or at least that his constituency party has re-selected him – but there’s nothing official yet.
Last year we published the first in a series of general election guides, introducing the fringe parties (taking in all the wannabes and also-rans and going all the way back to the independent Communists and the Natural Law Party). Darren Selkus, army veteran and CEO of an East London wood veneer company, who made it into the national press when he stood for the party’s earlier incarnation, the Brexit Party, in Essex in 2019, had already announced (on Twitter/X obvs) that he’s standing for the Reform Party (not so fringe these days) and he’s actually submitted his papers.
The Liberals chose their candidate last year and she is now also officially on the ballot. Two candidates have come forward for selection by Labour – one who used to be in the army and one who used to be on Gogglebox. Labour Party members in Hertsmere will be choosing their candidate at a meeting on 19 March (more about Labour in the next part of this four-part guide).
In other news
In May 2023 we learnt that Georgia Elliott-Smith, a sustainability consultant, was going to stand in Hertsmere for Gina Miller’s True & Fair Party, founded in 2021. Miller was going to be coming to Hertsmere to launch a campaign in June. We’re pretty sure this didn’t happen. Elliott-Smith’s candidacy was never formalised and she’s not listed on the True & Fair Party’s web site. Her LinkedIn makes no mention of True & Fair. Oh dear.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time but, in the space of a few years, the whole Miller project has gone from slightly ridiculous but quite influential to slightly ridiculous and, well, irrelevant. Gina Miller has said that there’ll be nine True & Fair candidates in the general election and the party is obviously still active but we’re going to go out on a limb and say the list of five candidates on the party’s web site might shrink a bit further as the election approaches.
Nothing from the Greens yet. They’ve put up candidates at the last two general elections and, before that, in 2010. One might argue that standing in Hertsmere would be a pointless exercise for a party so unlikely to win but they’ve announced they’ll be standing in every seat in England and Wales in the general election – a critical rite of passage for a party with national ambitions.
So, in this post, we’ll cover the Liberal Democrats. Next it’ll be Labour (the selection battle will be out of the way by then) and then, finally, we’ll consider the candidacy of the incumbent, Oliver Dowden, and the history of the Tories in Hertsmere (the blue line along the top of the graph).
A tale of woe
The Liberals in Hertsmere could have been contenders. In the first two elections of the constituency’s history – before they’d absorbed the SDP and were still just Liberals – the party was the second-largest in Hertsmere. It can’t be coincidental that the party’s decline here began at the following election – 1992. Liberal Democrat vote share here fell from the mid-twenties into the teens for the period until 2015 and then, precipitously, again, to between five and six percent in 2015 and 2017. Sophie Bowler, who stood in 2015, managed to secure the party’s lowest vote ever in the constituency and fourth place behind UKIP, although this might have had something to do with the fact that she was just too busy to do any campaigning. The party’s national collapse in this period, which came after the catastrophic coalition period, was the largest recorded since 1931 (and that was the Liberals too). In 2019 the party recovered somewhat and candidate Stephen Barrett, business manager in a local school, recorded a 12.6% share.
Hertsmere Liberal candidates over the years:
Stephen Barrett (2019) – secondary school business manager.
Joe Jordan (2017) – software engineer.
Sophie Bowler (2015) – compliance officer at a financial firm
Anthony Rowlands (2010)
Jonathan Davies (2005)
Paul Thompson (2001)
Ann Gray (1997)
Laurence Brass (1987) – now a Hertfordshire County Councillor.
Zerbanoo Gifford (1983 and 1992) – human rights campaigner.
We’re pretty sure that only one of these candidates has their own Wikipedia entry and that’s Zerbanoo Gifford, a veteran human rights campaigner.
Return to influence?
So, in the history of the Hertsmere Parliamentary constituency, the Liberal Democrats have gone from contender to influential third party to basically irrelevant and – they must be hoping – back to some measure of influence. The only way is up. Of 13 Parliamentary by-election gains since 2019, four have been for the Lib-Dems (against seven for Labour, one for the Tories and one for George Galloway’s Workers Party). This pattern is likely to repeat in the next GE. The Electoral Calculus average of opinion polls suggests the Lib-Dems could win 40 or more seats nationally – five or six times the party’s 2019 low of eight seats, although their projection for Hertsmere is not quite so positive for the party and puts Reform substantially ahead of the Liberals.
So one of the LibDems’ new seats won’t be Hertsmere, but a good share of the vote here would put them back in a position to influence the outcome. The Liberal candidate thinks she’s the natural recipient of tactical votes. With Reform also surging there’s even a small chance that the Conservative vote will be squeezed enough to give Labour a go here. But when we say a small chance we mean a very, very small chance. We’ve only seen one – very extreme – projection of a Tory collapse that gives Labour Hertsmere (remember, even in the 1997 Labour landslide Hertsmere stayed firmly Tory – you can see how close they came in the graph above). Electoral Calculus gives the Tories a 71% chance of a win in Hertsmere, even with the party at 18% in the polls.
The candidate
Emma Matanle was chosen as candidate for Hertsmere in March of last year. She’s very much a contemporary Liberal politician. Back when the Liberals were the party of free trade, individual liberty and progress, Liberal Parliamentary candidates used to be businessmen or sometimes University lecturers, Methodist firebrands, even the occasional working class radical. The party of freethinkers still attracts the odd outsider and eccentric (also the occasional certifiable loon) – and we love them for it – but it’s essentially now a bog-standard, and honestly rather charmless, party of the technocratic political centre, a category that’s been under a lot of pressure thanks to the populist turn worldwide but which survives in Britain thanks, mainly, to first-past-the-post voting.
Matanle’s LinkedIn (it’s a requirement for a contemporary politician to have an up-to-date LinkedIn profile) says that she’s currently writing briefings for the Local Government Information Unit, a membership body that does research for local authorities in the UK and elsewhere. We’re not 100% sure what writing briefings involves but it sounds like excellent preparation for 21st Century politics.
Conservative MPs are still, typically, entrepreneurs, lawyers, stock brokers, bankers and landowners (also hedge fund managers, of course). Further to the left they mostly now come from NGOs, charities, consultancies and think-tanks. In Labour it still occasionally happens that a working-class candidate makes it all the way to the Commons but in the Liberal Democrats this never happens. The party is essentially an entirely middle-class and professional entity.
That’s not to say that they won’t occasionally win in working-class seats – they’ll do so in the South West of England – but the membership is now all middle class and the elected politicians are from what is often now called the Professional Managerial Class – the credentialled elite who basically run all of our institutions. For a mainstream political party this is not necessarily a bad thing. The middle class might be skint but it’s still a large and influential group. A party that only appeals to this group – to the interests of school teachers, middle managers and small business-owners – can and will win elections, especially in the more prosperous South of England, although probably not in Hertsmere.
Our Liberal Parliamentary candidate, Emma Matanle, is from this new heartland. She’s spent time at the UN and at Chatham House (a hawkish international relations think-tank). She’s a qualified lawyer and a councillor in St Albans, volunteers for the Scouts and stood for Parliament once before, in South West Bedfordshire in 2019, polling a very respectable 10.2% of the vote, reflecting the same post-coalition recovery in the Liberal Democrat vote seen nationally in that general election.
- We’ve recently updated our history of general elections in Hertsmere and there’s a spreadsheet with all the polling data.
- There’s a list of declared candidates for the next general election on Wikipedia. And here are the instructions for nominating yourself if you feel like standing – you’ll need £500, an agent and some sponsors.
- At the next general election, our constituency will actually be a bit smaller than it currently is. Boundary changes have moved one Bushey ward out of the constituency and one Hatfield ward in. The overall effect will be to reduce the population of Hertsmere by about 7%. The Electoral Calculus projections in this post take into account the changes.
- Where MPs go after they’ve left Parliament is obviously as important as where they come from. We wrote about Oliver Dowden and the revolving door a while ago.
- Is it just us or is the ampersand in the middle of True & Fair really irritating?