Month: April 2025

Hertfordshire County Council elections – preview

Honestly, is there anything more boring?

Click here to go straight to the bit about Radlett, the Watling electoral division and Caroline Clapper, our councillor.

We’re struggling to think of anything. County Council elections have none of the obvious glamour of the national contest, the stakes are lower and – let’s face it – nobody knows what they do (quick, make a list of five things that your county council is responsible for! No Googling! See?).

But, this time around, there is expected to be some drama. Drama, of course, provided by yellow-corduroy man of the people Nigel Farage: principle bringer of chaos in British politics for almost twenty years. So we won’t just ignore this contest as we usually do (seriously, we’ve been previewing elections here for over ten years and we’ve never done a county council election).

So here’s a short overview of the contest, starting with the national picture and then zooming in to Hertfordshire and to the Watling division in which we live.

What are we voting for?

Elections are taking place in 14 county councils, eight unitary authorities and one metropolitan district (also the people of the Isles of Scilly are voting – but they have their own, very odd system). Nine councils currently busy with ‘unitarisation‘ programmes have been allowed to put their elections back a year. Here in Radlett (in the Watling electoral division – they’re not called ‘wards’ in county elections) we’re voting to send one county councillor to Hertford to represent us: nothing else. We’re not voting for borough or parish councillors (and there’s no unitary mayor in our area so that’s not relevant). More about all that below.

Reform rampant?

Of the 25 county and unitary councils holding elections, 16 have a Conservative majority and, of the six where there is no overall majority, three have Conservative leaders and three Liberal Democrats. Labour controls only one. Consequently, although the headlines on 2 May will probably be all about Reform’s surge, the actual electoral damage will be suffered almost exclusively by the Conservatives. Nigel Farage is still going around disingenuously predicting 200 seats for his party but the polling tells another story. This fancy MRP poll, conducted by Electoral Calculus for the Telegraph, suggests 697 seats for Reform, which is more than then expect for the Tories. Ouch.

The postponement of elections in nine areas may or may not have the side benefit of letting incumbent parties in those authorities off the hook with regard to the swing to Reform – but it’s quite possible they’ve just deferred the inevitable and that electorates will punish them when the elections do happen. The Electoral Calculus poll supports this idea and puts Reform comfortably ahead of the Tories in the councils where elections have been postponed. The government and the authorities who’ve opted for postponement claim only the most innocent, bureaucratic motives but, let’s face it, electors are pissed off that they’re not getting their chance to vote this year and are unlikely to have forgetten in a year’s time.

Looking further ahead – to the next general election – liberal, anti-polarisation think tank More In Common, using a similar MRP statistical method, suggests essentially a three-way tie between Labour, the Conservatives and Reform, with Reform narrowly winning. Dramatically, in their projection, in 285 Parliamentary seats the winner would secure less than a third of the vote – finally demolishing the protective wall provided for the main parties by the first-past-the-post system. Double ouch.

And here?

In Hertfordshire, after the last local elections in 2021, things looked like this:

Table showing results for 2021 county council elections in Hertfordshire. In summary: Conservative 46 councillors Lib Dem 23 councillors Labour 7 councillors Green 1 councillor Independent 1 councillor
Data from the BBC

In the four years since that vote the kind of drift that you see between elections has caused four councillors (one Conservative, two Liberal Democrats and one Labour) to drop their party affiliation and become independents. One Tory switched to Reform last month and will cheekily be standing for that party next week. Another complicating factor for the Tories here is that almost a third of their councillors are standing down this time around, including some cabinet members.

Obviously, a swing to Reform large enough to displace the Tories in Hertfordshire would be a real political earthquake but it’s worth noting that the Tories in the county currently have fewer seats than at any time since 2001 (there have been boundary changes since then but they’re not significant). Likewise Labour, which in 1993 actually took 30 council seats in Hertfordshire (three more than the Tories at that election) has been reduced in recent years to a pretty pathetic six councillors. With Liberal Democrats and Greens also expecting a surge at this election, both major parties are more vulnerable than they’ve ever been in Hertfordshire.

Watling along

We don’t know much about where our readers come from. Our web hosting company gives us some confusing data that suggests that about a third of you are in China (if you are one of our Chinese readers, please leave a comment. We’d honestly love to know what you’re doing here).

But, in the meantime, we’re going to assume you live and vote in the Watling electoral division in Hertfordshire. It’s a pretty big area, stretching all the way from the London border in Edgware to the edge of St Albans and taking in the whole of Radlett, Aldenham, Letchmore Heath, Elstree and a chunk of Borehamwood (we’re also excited in a childish way to note that Watling has its own airport).

Map based on OpenStreetMap data of the Watling electoral district in Hertfordshire, UK
Map from MySociety’s MapIt service

Each council electoral division returns one candidate elected by the first-past-the-post system. Since 2009 Watling has been electing Conservative Caroline Clapper. And we mean really electing. Her vote share at the last election in 2021 was 75%. She polled six times more votes than her nearest rival, from Labour. This is the kind of impregnable voteshare that Conservatives enjoy all over the home counties, of course but you’ll notice one important absence from this table of results from the 2021 election: Reform UK. Is Caroline Clapper losing any sleep to a Reform challenge now that they’re on the ballot here in Watling? No she’s not. But is her party, at the county and the national level? Yes they are.

Table showing results of 2021 county council elections in the Watling division of Hertfordshire. In summary: Caroline Clapper (Conservative) 3403 Alpha Bird Collins (Labour) 550 Paul Morse (Green Party) 309 Mandy Diana McNeil (Liberal Democrats) 257
2021 results from Hertfordshire County Council

Clapper is a popular and effective councillor. She’s visible and involved and anyone who’s ever had cause to ask her to help with a local issue will confirm that she works hard and takes her job seriously. She’s a cabinet member with an interest in education and chairs the council’s Education, Libraries & Lifelong Learning Cabinet Panel. She’s also a Hertsmere councillor and was a member of the cabinet there until Labour took over in 2023. She’s been a parish councillor in the past too. She lives in Bushey and is married to Michael, a mortgage broker and former vape entrepreneur. They have three children.

Then there’s the money

Councillors in Britain are not typically paid for the job but do claim ‘allowances’ and they can be pretty generous, in fact a senior councillor’s allowances will usually add up to something resembling an ordinary wage. There’s nothing secret about this, of course, but we’ve always thought it ought to be better known that a councillor can essentially make a living from representing you locally. Should they actually be paid a wage for this pretty onerous job? We think you could make a pretty good argument for professionalising local politics, turning it into a job. Is it likely to happen any time soon? No. So, in the meantime, councillors will continue to vote themselves generous allowances to make up for it.

Adding together Caroline Clapper’s allowances from Hertfordshire (£36,159 in 2024-25) and Hertsmere (£8022.28 – most recent published numbers are for the year 2023-24) brings her income to a pretty tidy total of £44,181.28, substantially more than the average wage in the UK and higher even than the average for relatively prosperous Hertfordshire. But Caroline Clapper is a busy woman and has other roles – she’s a non-executive director of Elstree Studios, for instance, where her Hertfordshire and Hertsmere colleague Morris Bright is chairman.

She’s an ambitious politician. She probably thinks she’s paid her local political dues. She won’t be stuck at the local level for much longer. She stood for Parliament in 2024, coming fourth against Labour’s winner Liam Byrne in Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North.

A total of 14 parties have put up candidates in Hertfordshire and there are five standing in the Watling division: Caroline Clapper for the Tories, Gus Channer for Reform, Stuart Howard for the LibDems, Satvinder Singh Juss for Labour and Cheryl Stungo for the Greens. Clapper is by far the most experienced politician on that list. Her Reform opponent is a college teacher and a former Royal Engineer who apparently got into trouble with his employer for taking a sick day and then showing up to a Reform media event with Nigel Farage. Oops. This is his first election – we assume he’ll be wiser next time.

Although we’re pretty sure she’s expecting to be put under some pressure from the Reform insurgency next week we’re certain that Caroline Clapper will still be county councillor for the Watling division on Friday.

  • What we do around here mainly is whinge about our Parliamentary representative Oliver Dowden. Bookmark this page for our coverage of your MP or follow this RSS feed.
  • We’ve also recently developed an interest in an enormous proposed development in Hertsmere – the DC01UK data centre that will, it is claimed, be Europe’s largest and will be built in South Mimms, if the developers and Hertsmere Borough Council have their way. Bookmark this page for our various deep dives into the project.
  • This post about the history of elections in Hertsmere is about as close to definitive as you’ll get – all the elections, all the results, all the candidates. We keep this freely-accessible spreadsheet of election results up-to-date too.

The Sir Oliver Dowden sketchy behaviour monitor, part two

In which we ask what happens to an MP’s priorities when three quarters of his income comes from his second (and third) jobs?

Bundles of five- and ten-pound notes wrapped in white paper bands
Show him the money!

UPDATE: 20 April 2025: Sir Oliver’s new favourite football team San Diego FC got absolutely clattered 3-0 at Charlotte, finishing with ten men after some VAR drama (in other news, they have VAR in the MLS). And it’s a very long flight home for the San Diego boys. Not quite as long as Sir Oliver’s back in March, though, obviously. Watch the match highlights.

As we’ve explained before, once an MP is out of government, they can do pretty much whatever they want to earn money. There’s a body, set up and funded by Parliament, called the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA), that tells ministers what they may and may not do on leaving office but it essentially boils down to “wait for a few months…”. ACOBA has no way of stopping a former minister or senior civil servant from taking up a new role but has been known to write a stern letter (see the cases of Sue Gray, who actually did what they told her to do, and Boris Johnson, who didn’t).

Sir Oliver Dowden has now left ministerial office twice – once while in government and once because of last year’s general election defeat. On each occasion he did the right thing, asked ACOBA for advice and was told to wait three months before taking up his new roles. You won’t be surprised to learn that, in both cases, he waited exactly three months before starting his new jobs.

Dowden is nothing if not loyal and it turns out that the work he’s taken up this time around is with the same employers as last time around (we wrote about them back then). He’s back with ‘global macro hedge fund’ Caxton Associates (intriguingly, the people who funded Liz Truss’s petulant insurgency) and with art broker Pierce Protocols (doing business under the name Heni Leviathan which seems sort of appropriate when you consider the modern Tory Party’s commitment to reducing the nation to a state of nature).

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

There’s more money involved this time, though. Dowden has spent almost his entire Parliamentary career getting by on his MP’s salary plus – once appointed in 2018 – the larger ministerial salary (there was about a month of outside work while he was briefly out of the cabinet in 2022) but now that he’s free to do so he’s dialing up the dough.

Again, it seems important to note that Dowden’s behaviour here is not exceptional: in the 2019 Parliament over 90% of income from second jobs went to Tory MPs – some of whom have been known to pull down nearly a million pounds per year from one second job or £2.5M in one Parliament or, in the case of the acknowledged master of the art of the second job, Boris Johnson, a million pounds from multiple jobs in one month. Sir Oliver’s income, so far, barely touches the sides.

His most recent declaration says that he’s now pulling down a total of £20,000 per month from the above sources (£10,000 from each). That’s 2.5x his MP’s salary and, added up, brings Dowden’s total declared income to £331,346 per year. At the top we wondered, in the sub-head, what happens to an MP’s priorities when this kind of money starts to flow into the bank account, making the sums coming from the day job look a bit silly. Well, of course, we don’t know. And we definitely don’t know what effect all this new money is going to have on Sir Oliver Dowden in particular. We do know that he’s been a professional and diligent representative for his Hertsmere electors for almost ten years – making speeches next to bins without complaint.

So, in a sense, what we’ve got now, with Sir Oliver out of office and finally pulling down the big money, is a kind of experiment: what happens when you give an elected representative a boost to his earnings equivalent to 2.5 times his basic salary and 6.5x the average wage in the UK? Is it possible that all that wedge will have no effect at all? Is it even slightly plausible that his priorities will not shift? That he won’t find himself thinking more favourably of his main employer and acting in their interests?

While in his ministerial role in the last Tory government Dowden was earning around £150,000 per year (and he’ll have received a severance payment of 16,876 on leaving that job last year). There must be a measure of relief for Sir Oliver in finally being able to join the high earners’ club. For his whole political career he’s been surrounded by the super-rich. The generation of Tory MPs he’s a member of is one of the wealthiest in history and he was usually in a tiny minority of non-millionaires in the cabinets in which he sat. The fact that, as a diligent bagman, he often wound up on Sunday morning TV defending the indefensible behaviour of his millionaire colleagues must have been especially galling.

San Diego FC 0-0 St Louis City

But let’s get to the most intriguing declaration in Sir Oliver’s latest update to the register. It’s not the most valuable – it’s a trip to a football match – but this football match wasn’t down at Meadow Park in sunny Borehamwood. It was at the Snapdragon Stadium in sunny San Diego, 5,500 miles further West, on 1 March. We assume Dowden travelled with his family. At least it’s difficult to imagine how he could have spent £9,217.79 on flights and £1,851.27 on accommodation on his own (plus £462.81 for transfers and £617.12 for match tickets and hospitality). This is another benefit of being out of government: you can stock up on freebies without the kind of examination that government ministers get when they go to the football.

Promotional graphic for San Diego vs St Louis football match

This particular football match was the inaugural home match of a club called San Diego FC. American football soccer is weird. We don’t pretend to understand all this but the club is an ‘extension team‘ that just won a place in the MLS (Major League Soccer) by demonstrating that it has the necessary financial backing. This backing – $500M of it – comes from the man who flew Sir Oliver out for the match, Sir Mohamed Mansour, a British-Egyptian billionaire who was a treasurer of the Conservative Party until his resignation last year. Mansour gave the party £5M in 2023 and was subsequently knighted by Rishi Sunak. He used to be known as ‘Mansour Chevrolet’ back in Egypt because his dad made the family’s fortune by representing Western brands in the region. Sir Mohamed was Egyptian transport minister between 2005 and 2009, but had to resign his post after taking responsibility for a disastrous train crash.

To be honest, none of this really explains why you’d want to fly a Tory Party backbencher 11,000 miles for a football match. We wondered if Dowden could have appointed Mansour to his treasurer role while he was Co-Chairman of the party but Dowden was no longer in that role when Mansour came in. Any ideas?

  • More about ACOBA and the register of members’ interests in this 2022 post and here’s a very good ACOBA explainer from the Institute for Government.
  • Sir Oliver is still on the front benches – he currently shadows the Deputy Prime Minister – but shadow ministerial roles don’t attract any of the customary limits on outside activity and only the leader of the opposition gets any kind of additional payment for the role. The ministerial code doesn’t apply to shadow ministers.
  • In principle, the current government opposes the whole idea of second jobs. Before the general election Keir Starmer enthusiatically supported legislation to limit MPs’ second jobs – his manifesto proposes “…an immediate ban on MPs from taking up paid advisory or consultancy roles,” which would obviously put the kybosh on Sir Oliver’s two main gigs. Things have gone a bit quiet since then, though, and we find this a bit puzzling: banning second jobs looks like a political slam-dunk for Labour. It would affect almost exclusively Conservative MPs; it would present a real practical problem for the big earners and a big political problem for the Tory front bench; and it’s been shown to be immensely popular with the electorate. Is there a tactical concern here that a wave of big Conservative resignations might produce some inconvenient by-election results and a few more ReformUK MPs on the opposition benches? Quite possibly.
  • Mohamed Mansour wrote about his ambitions for his new football club for a local San Diego paper in March. Next for San Diego is Charlotte FC away. We assume new fan Oliver Dowden will be watching on Apple TV+.
  • The administration of the Conservative Party is a complex matter and we’re not experts but it seems important to note that Mansour was never actually the capital-t Treasurer of the party (which explains why he’s not on this list), only ever a lower-case treasurer of the party. The Conservative Party acquires treasurers of this kind in a pretty spontaneous way and each will have a specific responsibility, depending on their wealth or their network. Mansour’s was to raise money to fight the 2024 general election. This presumably explains why he disappeared sharpish right after that historic defeat.
  • We read that Nadhim “Tax Error” Zahawi asked Mansour to fund a bid for the Telegraph last year but that he swerved that one. Very wise.
  • Back when he was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Dowden oversaw the Cabinet Office’s 22-person Propriety and Ethics team. Just saying.
  • We think it might be worth looking a bit more closely at the two businesses currently providing about 75% of Sir Oliver’s income between them – Caxton Associates and Pierce Protocols. Watch this space.
  • From the Politico politics blog, five MPs who really couldn’t muster even a single fuck about the advice of ACOBA.
  • Here’s part one of the Oliver Dowden Sketchy Behaviour Monitor which, to be honest, is even less interesting than part two. Bookmark Sir Oliver’s entry in the register of members’ interests and his page at They Work for You. Here’s all of our Oliver Dowden coverage on one page and if you use an RSS reader you can subscribe to this feed. We tweet this stuff and you’ll also find us in the Fediverse – search Mastodon for ‘Radlett Wire’.

DC01UK: data centre drama

It’s a few months since we learnt that Europe’s biggest data centre might be built here in Hertsmere – what could stop it from happening?

In part three of our DC01UK deep dive we’ll look at the various obstacles that must be overcome before it goes live on the Internet in 2030.

Five ducklings in a row on a white table, walking across the frame right to left.

It might fall at the first hurdle. The scheme has outline planning permission from Hertsmere Borough Council so the developers must get their ducks in a row and submit a final plan. If we’re honest, though, this doesn’t look like a major concern: the council has given the project its enthusiastic backing and the UK government has cleared the way by adding data centres to the list of developments that can be defined as nationally significant infrastructure projects, alongside energy, transport, water, waste water, and waste projects (Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has even mentioned DC01UK in a speech). Unless something else goes wrong, the project is probably guaranteed to happen. So what else could go wrong?

Hertsmere MP Oliver Dowden stands in a field with a group of Potters BAr residents who are objecting to the construction of a new data centre in the area

The neighbours might object. As with any big development – especially one planned for land that is 100% in the green belt – local people are upset about DC01UK and have begun a campaign. Sadly for the locals, though, this scheme is going to be very hard to stop. As we said in an earlier post, this is the kind of land Angela Rayner calls ‘grey belt’ and even the green belt lobby seems to have given up. Our MP has met with the local campaigners but it doesn’t sound like he was able to give them much hope: “I encourage residents to submit their own views on the matter directly to the council,” he says. The fact that the developers plan to leave half the land as green open space and have promised substantial enhancements to the local environment will not help the opposition’s cause.

Blue whale logo and logotype for Chinese AI firm Deepseek

The demand might not be there. The trigger for DC01UK – and hundreds of projects like it all over the world – was the massive surge in demand for data centre capacity that we wote about in our first post, almost entirely the product of the AI and machine learning revolution – apparently an unstoppable and unarguable fact of the modern world. But the launch, only two months ago, of a new large language model (LLM), from a Chinese firm called Deepseek, suggests the direction for AI might not be quite as ‘up and to the right’ as had been hoped by investors. Deepseek wasn’t supposed to be possible. American sanctions have stopped the sale of the latest versions of the specialist chips needed to train and run serious LLMs to Chinese firms. Deepseek was trained on chips from the top manufacturer NVIDIA but these chips had been deliberately downgraded so as to slow Chinese progress in AI. That a group of brilliant computer scientists was able to coax top-tier AI performance from second-tier hardware suggests that this might not be the brute-force business we thought it was to begin with.

The Deepseek engineers made such resourceful use of the hobbled chips’ capacity that they were able to get around the punitive sanctions regime and keep China in the AI game. And, more to the point, if one Chinese firm can make more efficient use of AI hardware then the American giants, then so can anyone. Suddenly the AI game doesn’t look so one-sided and the soaring demand for newer and faster hardware doesn’t look so nailed-on. If more really can be done with less, then maybe the world doesn’t need the vast additional computing and data centre capacity that’s now being built. So do we think that the spreadsheets that justified DC01UK’s grand plans have been dragged to the trash? No, we don’t. The underlying growth in demand for the kind of cloud services that run in data centres like this one is unabated – and most of it has no need of LLMs – but has the gloss come off the AI data centre business? Just a bit. We’d like to have been a fly on the wall in a post-Deepseek DC01UK planning meeting that’s for sure.

A vivid, graphical splash of water moving left to right through the air

It’s the water stupid. In our previous post we wrote about the extraordinary demands that a data centre on this scale makes of resources like electricity (to power the servers) and water (for cooling). The power is, apparently, already sorted. The water, though, may not be so straightforward. Our region, the East of England, is already classified as ‘severely water stressed‘ and environmental groups calculate possible daily shortages of up to 800,000 litres by 2050. We’ve calculated that DC01UK alone will need 250 million litres per year (660,000 litres per day) to keep its servers cool. Where will this vast quantity of water come from? In fairness to the developers they may be considering an approach to DC01UK that doesn’t need any water at all – at least not after the initial top-up. It’s possible to build a server farm with a ‘closed’ cooling system that recycles the cooling water used – condensing it after it’s evaporated and pumping it back through the system (Microsoft is testing this approach). It’s not easy, though, and you need to engineer your data centre from the ground up to take advantage of this approach, pumping water right through the computers to cool the chips directly. There are even more advanced solutions – like the one from Google’s parent company Alphabet that will site a direct air capture facility next door to your data centre, producing CO2 to be stored forever underground and clean water that can be used to cool the servers. Magic. But very expensive. And a relatively small firm like DC01UK probably doesn’t want to be adding cost to a low-margin business like a data centre if they don’t have to. Where will the new data centre get its water? And, as shortages bite, will DC01UK just dry up all together?

Black dog running across a meadow full of flowers

The money. Obviously. The companies behind DC01UK are not the final operators and won’t be funding the project. Can they guarantee the billions of pounds necessary to get a fitted-out, ready-to-launch DC01UK to market in 2030? Of course not. So this comes down to who is actually providing the money and to the absolute forest of unknowns – global recession, soaring borrowing costs in the UK, a tech crash that crushes demand – that might bring the thing to a grinding halt and leave that nice dog-walking field in South Mimms just as it is now.

US President Donald Trump walks toward the camera holding up his hand in front of him perhaps in greeting. Alongside him many flags including a stars and stripes

Then there’s Donald Trump. This one’s tricky. Will a new worldwide trade framework be a good thing or a bad thing for a UK data centre? We don’t think anyone knows right now and there are many contradictory factors. We think, though, that this global re-arrangement could actually be a good thing for DC01UK – and for firms like it outside the USA. Services – like those provided by DC01UK to big corporations – are not covered by the new American tariffs. That has to be a good thing in itself: the biggest national customer for data centre services is the United States by about a mile and worldwide data centres will be able to continue selling their capacity to American firms on the current terms. Since the physical location of a data centre is important – you want your servers to be close to your customers to reduce latency – local facilities like DC01UK will continue to be important.

The hardware that goes into data centres is, as you’d expect, mostly made in the far East. NVIDIA’s AI chips, for instance, are made in Taiwan – and US tariffs have been applied there. It is possible that the hike in price for these products in the USA could be beneficial to firms in the rest of the world – if there’s a sudden oversupply of hardware made in China, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan a glut of unsold kit could cause prices to drop here. Fitting out DC01UK could turn out be cheaper than planned. This fear of ‘dumping’ by lower-cost countries is putting the fear of God into UK manufacturers but since no computer hardware is made in Britain, this cannot be a concern. Although it’ll obviously be a years before any computers are purchased for DC01UK, it’s just possible that the geopolitical chaos unleashed by Donald Trump will turn out not to be an obstacle at all but, in fact, an advantage.