Tag: Hertsmere

Hertsmere General Election preview, part one

The fringe parties

Nigel Farage raises a glass of red wine and his eyebrows in the green room at an episode of BBC Radio 4's Any Questions in Hurstpierpoint on 5 May 2017. He's wearing a blue suit and tie
“Fringe? Moi?”

Calm down. The general election could be as far away as 28 January 2025. It could be a lot sooner, though. Now that the Fixed Term Parliament Act is no more and Prime Ministers may call elections whenever they want, subject to the maximum term, the element of surprise is back. May 2024 looks good because it would coincide with some local elections. Earlier than that wouldn’t give the Conservatives time to claw back enough of Labour’s polling lead – which has been diminishing across the last few months but still stands at 16% or 200 seats. September 2024 is probably the latest it’ll practically happen. The unknown is how Rishi Sunak is feeling on any given day. Our money is on 2 May 2024.

Candidates have to submit nomination papers if they want to stand but they won’t be asked to do so until after Parliament is dissolved, so you’ve got plenty of time to raise the deposit if you feel like standing. Local parties are already selecting and adopting candidates. Oliver Dowden got the good news from his local party last month (Boris Johnson a month before that).

In Hertsmere, in addition to the incumbent, we now know about one other candidate for the 2024 general election. Darren Selkus, army veteran and CEO of an East London wood veneer company, has announced (on Twitter obvs) that he’s going to stand for election, for the Reform Party, successor to the Brexit Party and offspring of UKIP (Selkus stood for the party in the Hertsmere Borough Council election last week and polled 53 votes). If Mr Selkus does manage to get his papers in to stand in Hertsmere, he’ll be far from the first candidate from the populist right to do so, of course.

This post will be the first of our General Election previews and we’ll use it to discuss the fringe and populist parties that have stood in Hertsmere since it came into being in 1983. In later posts we’ll tell the stories of the bigger parties in the constituency.

The Referendum Party

A smiling Sir James Goldsmith campaigning for his Referendum Party at the 1997 UK general election. Behind him a party banner and a union flag

Buccaneer businessman, James Goldsmith – a man who, while still at Eton, won £250,000 in today’s money on the horses and promptly left school, a man who was a billionaire in the seventies, way before it was cool – started the Referendum Party in 1994, several years after Alan Sked founded the party that would become UKIP, but Goldsmith’s party will be remembered as the originator of the idea of a popular vote on EU membership. While UKIP was still a nerdy ginger group, Sir James was busy sending VHS tapes to five million British households (you’ve probably got one in your loft).

The Referendum Party was the absolute OG eurosceptic party, setting the tone for the two decades of populist tumult that would follow. Goldsmith’s party polled 1,703 votes in Hertsmere in 1997 and in the general election beat UKIP in almost every seat where both stood. The party’s programme looked pretty kooky back then but who’s laughing now? Goldsmith died later in the same year, the party disbanded and, well, the rest is history…

BNP

Photograph of British National party leader making a speech in front of a BNP union flag logo

Fast forward to the high-water mark for anti-immigration sentiment at the end of Labour’s 13 years in office. Immigration had increased steadily under Labour and a surge in asylum applications caused by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq had put Blair and later Brown on the back foot (there was discussion of withdrawing from the ECHR). Local man Daniel Seabrook polled 1,397 votes for the British National Party in Hertsmere in May 2010, a few months after Nick Griffin, the party’s leader, made his controversial appearance on the BBC’s Question Time. In this period the party held 50 council seats and in 2009 won over a million votes in the EU Parliamentary elections and sent two MEPs, including Griffin, to Strasbourg, where the party joined with other European racist and nationalist parties in the formation of a new group, the Alliance of European National Movements. The BNP had been founded in 1982 by former members of the National Front and has subsequently, at least in electoral terms, disappeared entirely – a measure, let’s face it, of how thoroughly the party’s bitter, hateful worldview has been absorbed by more mainstream parties.

UKIP

The United Kingdom Independence Party, thirty years old this year, is a paradox. A party that, like other parties on this list, has now more-or-less disappeared but can make a reasonable claim to being the most important UK political party of the last twenty years and is responsible, in a pretty direct way, for one of the most consequential changes in modern British history. A party that’s never had more than two Westminster MPs but turned British politics upside-down and routinely polled millions of votes in general elections. A party that, at its peak, had Britain’s fifth largest membership but has now been reduced to a bitter, anti-woke husk that can barely fill a village hall (but supports Hyperloop).

UKIP first stood in Hertsmere in 2010 and, in 2015, candidate Frank Ward, a local councillor who, nearly thirty years earlier, had won almost 20% of the vote for Labour, achieved a pretty decent 6,383 votes, a high-water mark and more than twice the Liberal Democrat vote in that election. Ward’s breakthrough was, of course, part of a national surge that saw the party win 3.8 Million votes, making UKIP comfortably the third largest party in the UK. In the 2014 European Parliament elections, UKIP won more votes than all other UK parties and 24 seats in the Parliament. You know what happened next.

It’s been downhill since then, of course. In 2017 the UKIP vote in Hertsmere was cut to 1,564 and in 2019 the party didn’t stand at all. UKIP limps on, with a policy platform that looks more like the BNP’s than the old UKIP’s, and won a total of zero seats in the local elections (losing 25) last week. The party now has no elected positions anywhere in the UK and is led by one-time Tory Minister Neil “Cash for Questions” Hamilton.

The Brexit Party

You’ll remember the Brexit Party, Nigel Farage’s one-policy, post-referendum party, which had a short and checkered history and absolutely smashed it in the last ever UK election for the European Parliament. The party made an awkward, unreciprocated deal with the Conservatives and, as a result, stood down in hundreds of Conservative constituencies for the 2019 GE, including ours. Farage moved on and the Brexit Party became the Reform Party.

The Reform Party

Richard Tice

At last week’s local elections the party that grew out of the Brexit Party “struggled to make headway”, as they say in the media. They wound up with a total of six council seats in England and Wales and, where they stood, they averaged 6% of the vote. In Hertsmere candidates in Potters Bar and Shenley managed a total of 130 votes. Nationally, the party’s founder Nigel Farage has lost interest and President Richard Tice has somewhat sunk from view, although he can be seen on Talk TV fairly regularly.

In Britain, the rigid FPTP electoral system obviously doesn’t favour minority parties and, as a consequence, they tend not to bother developing detailed policy programmes. There’s not much incentive to workshop a forty-page manifesto when you’ll never ever get a chance to implement it.

Slide from a Reform Party presentation about economics: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY – REFORM UK SOLUTION • BIG, BOLD, EFFECTIVE - £74 bn stimulus: • Cut tax – zero income tax below £20k / year = save almost £1,500 /year per person • Cut cost of living by reducing other taxes: • Scrap VAT on energy bills = save £100 / year per household • Scrap environmental levies = save £160 / year per household • Reduce fuel duty by 20p / litre = save £240 / year per driver • Cut wasteful Govt spending – save £5 in £100 = £55 billion per year • Reduce VAT from 20% to 18% - save £300 / year per household • Unlock Shale Gas Treasure: £1 trillion + of levelling up, by drilling down - will cut bills

So it’s interesting that Reform’s policy platform is quite well-developed. It looks a lot like those of some other European populist parties. The economics is interventionist and broadly expansionary, there’s a plan to invest in the NHS and it’s all costed and funded in some detail. As you’d expect there’s a lot of emphasis on tax cuts and energy independence. Immigration comes up but is not the primary concern. Although they’re probably due an update, the party’s four missions don’t look too different from the big parties’ (and no mention of ‘woke’).

Four-part platform of the UK Reform Party: Lower Taxes Secure Borders CheaperEnergy Zero Waiting Lists

So, if the Reform Party stands in Hertsmere, what are their prospects? Well, they don’t look too good. The current government’s policy platform sits squarely on the populists’ lawn – ticking all the boxes, especially the big one labelled ‘small boats’.

The always fascinating Electoral Calculus actually projects a 7.1% share for the Reform Party in Hertsmere, better than for the The Green Party, but still gives the Tories a 67% chance of winning.

Reclaim?

There’s another right-wing party we should look at, not least because this party has just done what the others on this list have rarely achieved and acquired for itself an actual MP.

A black and white photograph of Laurence Fox wering combat camouflage, from the Reclaim Party web site. The text 'your freedom, reclaim it' is overlaid.

You might say that Laurence Fox’s Reclaim is not quite a party. It may have leapfrogged the electoral process into Parliament but it doesn’t yet have a policy platform. When the party’s leader does get an opportunity to communicate his priorities, it’s essentially 100% anti-vax and anti-woke. If Reform resembles a scaled-down Fidesz or a Brothers of Italy, serious parties of the populist right, with programmes and long-term ambitions, Reclaim resembles a protest group, formed in the tendentious shouting match of social media – and, if we’re honest, more of a vehicle for its charismatic leader than a movement. The ‘leadership’ page lists only one person and that person’s photograph appears three times on the homepage. The manifesto is inchoate. Here’s the whole thing:

The political platform of the UK Reclaim Party - text under six categories: free speech, sovereignty, a dynamic economy, power of the state, rule of law and equality
The entire policy platform of Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party

It’s worth keeping an eye on Reclaim, though, the party has already attracted substantial funding from the usual billionaires and with a Westminster seat we can expect the money to continue to flow. Don’t rule out a rash of Reclaim Parliamentary candidates in 2024.

The Greens

A large group of Green Party campaigners gathered for a portrait with placards

Is it fair to put the Green Party on this list, in between the loons and the lefties? Perhaps not. They have managed to get one MP elected – unlike almost everyone else in this post (no, Laurence, Andrew Bridgen does not count) – and they have, to an important degree, set the agenda in metropolitan Britain and in Scotland for some years. They’re like the anti-UKIP – a party of huge emotional and cultural relevance to a big chunk of the electorate but with not the slightest chance of winning a general election.

Of course, with net zero now official policy for all the major parties, the Greens might fear that they’re beginning to look a bit redundant. And now that, out of the blue, trans rights has become a wedge ‘culture wars’ issue for general and national elections, the party’s principled stance on the issue might turn into a serious electoral risk that it’s hard to mitigate, as it has for the SNP.

The Greens first stood in Hertsmere in 2010. Candidate Arjuna Krishna-Das polled 604 votes – not at all bad for a first try (although it was less than half the BNP vote). The candidate disappeared for the next election, though, and in 2015 there was no Green candidate at all in Hertsmere. We looked into it at the time and learnt that Krishna-Das had – confusingly – defected to a ‘counter-jihad’ UKIP spin-off calling itself Liberty GB, an outfit that has now so thoroughly disappeared its own web site has been taken over by spammers.

Since the Green Party returned to the ballot in Hertsmere it’s been all good news. The party added c 50% to its vote in 2017 and nearly doubled that in 2019. Electoral Calculus projects another doubling for the GE, so that must be encouraging. What’s fascinating about the Greens in Britain though, is how urban they are. The party evidently does have rural support but, even in areas like ours, where big chunks of the countryside are threatened by developers, they’re not strongly identified with opposition to building on the green belt and certainly aren’t seen as standing for the big rural or suburban causes.

It’s a confirmation, if needed, that the Green Party is really a party of the young and of the university-educated and not of the people who actually occupy the green bits of the country. Having said that, the party now controls its first council and it’s a pretty rural one.

Communists and socialists

A red hammer and sickle motif

The fringe parties aren’t always on the right, of course. In 1983, the year the constituency came into being and the year of Margaret Thatcher’s second landslide, a candidate standing as an Independent Communist won 1,116 votes in Hertsmere. We’ve long been puzzled by this fact – that there were, apparently, over a thousand communists in this prosperous part of the Home Counties at around the high point of Thatcherism, but we did eventually notice that the candidate’s name, Ronald Parkinson, was pretty close to the name of the winning Conservative candidate, Minister and confidant of the Prime Minister Cecil Parkinson. Since then we’ve been advising fringe candidates in Hertsmere to change their names.

James Dry stood twice for the Socialist Labour Party in Hertsmere, in 2001 and 2005, polling over 500 votes on his second try. The party, founded and led to this day by one-time miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, stood in 114 Parliamentary constituencies in 2001 but a split in the party that year, over the matter of support for relations with comrades in North Korea (we kid you not), diminished its standing. The party hasn’t put up a candidate since 2010 but continues to campaign for the reopening of the coal mines.

Even further out

A group of men wearing Natural Law Party t-shirts participate in yogic flying
Cutting crime

We’ve saved our favourite till last. In the early nineties, the worldwide Transcendental Meditation movement saw fit to start a transnational political party, the Natural Law Party. The idea was to apply the principles of TM, including the magical practice of yogic flying, to social and political problems. The party stood in at least 74 countries and even put up a candidate for President of the United States. In Britain the lavishly-funded party stood in every single Parliamentary seat and did so twice. In Hertsmere the party never did better than 373 votes (and we suspect the movement’s connections with Hare Krishna may have contributed to that total). The party’s presence across the country gave it access to TV election advertising and its broadcasts caused much amusement, not to say consternation. In this one, UK party leader Geoffrey Clements claims, for instance, that the yogic flyers had already reduced the crime rate in Liverpool and improved exam results across the whole country (he doesn’t address the fact that, if it’s possible for TM to improve things so much before they’ve been elected, there doesn’t seem to be a good reason to vote for them).

It’s tempting to think that what we need now, at this fractious time, is another political party that can solve deep social problems by the power of thought alone and without going to all the trouble of being elected.

2023 Local elections in Hertsmere – the results

Okay, let’s face it, the local elections are not the most glamorous in the calendar but they are, in some ways, the most relevant to our everyday lives.

Sign saying 'way in - polling station' printed on copier paper and stuck to the door of a polling station in the UK

(this post now updated with the results fron the 4 May local elections)

Turnout in local elections rarely exceeds half that seen for national elections and the big issues are always, of course, reserved for higher authorities but these local elections are about as close as ordinary electors get to the democratic process. There’s a decent chance you’ll know some of your local councillors and, once elected, they do have real power – especially in planning.

So here’s everything you need to know about the 4 May local elections in Hertsmere, including the results for Aldenham Parish Council and for the two Radlett wards in Hertsmere Borough Council.

Did you remember your ID?

This was the first election for which Britons were required to produce photo ID. Polling suggested that one in four voters didn’t know they needed ID before the elections and evidence is coming in that turnout was affected in a statistically significant way by the new requirements. Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was in the cabinet at the time the voter ID law was passed, says the new rules were a form of ‘gerrymandering’ (wrong word but we know what he means). This will make it harder to secure continued support for this and the governmemt may have to at least modify the acceptable ID list, which is the focus for unhappiness about this measure.

Which elections?

Here in Radlett, we voted in two elections, for Hertsmere Borough Council and for Aldenham Parish Council (there are no Hertfordshire County Council elections until 2025).

Map of the Hertsmere Borough Council electoral area from the MapIt web site
The Hertsmere Borough Council area

Hertsmere Borough Council consists of 16 wards; in Elstree and Borehamwood, Bushey, Potters Bar, Shenley and Aldenham (which is made up of Radlett and the small settlements of Letchmore Heath and Aldenham). Each ward returns either two or three councillors, for a total of 39. Aldenham is divided into two wards. Most of Radlett’s area, including the bustling downtown area, is in Aldenham East (map) and Aldenham West is mostly rural, stretching out to take in Aldenham, Letchmore Heath and the aerodrome (map). The Borough Council meets at the council offices in Borehamwood. From Radlett we send a total of four councillors to the Borough Council, two from each ward.

Screenshot of a segment of the list of allowances claimed by Hertsmere Borough councillors in the financial year 2021-22
Allowances

Borough councillors are not paid for their work but can claim an allowance – and it can be quite substantial. In 2020-21 (the most recent published year), for instance, Morris Bright MBE, leader of Hertsmere Borough Council and friend to the stars, received an allowance of £44,523 for his service to the Borough. Deputy Leader Caroline Clapper received £20,509.23 (details on the Hertsmere web site). You may also know Ms Clapper as Radlett’s County Councillor – she’s a hard-working representative for the Watling ward that takes in the whole of Radlett and Elstree. For that role she received an additional alowance of £22,607.04 in financial year 2022-23 (details on the HCC web site).

All Borough councillors can claim a basic allowance of £6,045 per year and there are additional payments for cabinet responsibilities, travel and so on, so a number of Labour and Liberal councillors will now be seeing a substantial increase in their allowances. The rules are on the Hertsmere web site.

Mayor of Hertsmere Borough Council Chris Myers in his ceremonial chain of office
Mayor Chris Myers

As a result of the elections, Hertsmere has a new Mayor – Labour Borough councillor Chris Myers. He and his deputy are of the old-fahioned, chain-bearing, ceremonial variety, though, elected by their fellow councillors, not the thrusting new kind of directly-elected Mayor. Councillor Chris Myers was chosen by other councillors at a meeting last week.

Official portrait of Councillor John Graham, Mayor of Hertsmere Borough Council in Hertfordshire, in his cermonial chain of office
John Graham

Previous Mayor John Graham was a long-serving Hertsmere Borough councillor from the Aldenham East ward and sat as a representative of Hertsmere Borough Council on Aldenham Parish Council, where he is Vice Chair to new Chair Helen Jones.

Map of the Aldenham Parish Council electoral area from the MapIt web site
The Parish of Aldenham

Aldenham Parish Council is divided into two wards and they are the same as the Borough Council wards – Aldenham East and Aldenham West. The Parish Council meets in the offices above Radlett library. In the Parish we elect a total of 12 councillors, six for each ward. Eight of these councillors are elected here in the Parish and four are appointed as representatives of Hertsmere Borough Council and Hertfordshire County Council.

The parties

Both of the councils in which we voted on 4 May are historically controlled by the Conservatives but Hertsmere has, for the first time in over 20 years, changed hands and is thus ‘no overall control’. The Conservatives are still the largest party but power will now be shared by Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Hertsmere now has a Labour leader and a Labour Mayor and Deputy.

The green surge in the local elections, which saw the Green Party’s representation grow by more than any other party in the local elections, did not touch Hertsmere but there are now Green councillors in neighbouring districts. The Green Party is benefiting from its ‘clean hands’ – they’re not touched by the Tories’ catastrophic national performance nor by ambivalence about Starmer’s careful triangulation, so some voters consider them an attractive option.

Hertsmere Borough Council is presently divided like so:

PartySeats
Conservative16
Labour (and Cooperative)14
Liberal Democrat9
39
Source: Wikipedia

All four of the Borough councillors returned from the two Radlett wards are still Conservatives and, let’s face it, will be until the end of time.

After the 2019 elections the picture looked very different:

PartySeats
Conservative29
Labour7
Liberal Democrat3
39
Source: Wikipedia

At the Parish level it’s simpler – all twelve councillors are Conservatives. Other parties do stand (see the lists below) and politics in Hertsmere is active and disputatious but, let’s be real, Radlett is a prosperous Home Counties town and is likely to be Tory forever.

Who was elected?

Here are all the candidates elected in the Parish and Borough Council elections on 4 May, starting with Hertsmere Borough Council. Incumbent candidates, re-elected at this election, are shown in bold.

Official portrait photo of property developer and Chair of the Aldenham Parish Council planning committee Mark Cherry
Mark Cherry, developer

Mark Cherry, who was an Aldenham Parish Councillor and Chair of the Council’s planning committee, stood down. Mister Cherry recently withdrew a planning application for a widely-opposed development of eight homes in the centre of Radlett. Jackie Lefton, Aldenham East Councillor and one-time Chair of the Parish Council, also stood down.

Hertsmere Borough Council, Aldenham East ward, 4 May 2023 (re-elected in bold)

CandidatePartyVotesElected?
Denton-Cardew, BenLib Dem311N
Goldman, Joshua Jack NathanLab179N
Howard, Stuart JohnLib Dem300N
Rosehill, Brett AshleyCon853Y
Selby, LucyCon967Y
Treves Brown, Julian PatrickLab167N
Source: Hertsmere Borough Council

Hertsmere Borough Council, Aldenham West ward, 4 May 2023 (re-elected in bold)

CandidatePartyVotesElected?
Al-Saadoon, Saif MadidLib Dem214N
Clapper, Caroline SaraCon882Y
Dhadra, Ronan DashLab171N
Huff, Sandra AnnLab200N
Lambert, David StephenCon752Y
May, JonLib Dem186N
Source: Hertsmere Borough Council

Aldenham Parish Council, Aldenham East ward, 4 May 2023 (re-elected in bold)

CandidatePartyVotesElected?
Ali, Sahil SinghCon853Y
Benjamin, Sandra RuthCon922Y
Graham, JohnCon955Y
Jones, HelenCon901Y
Rosehill, Romy MichelleCon860Y
Samuelson, EstelleCon973Y
Treves Brown, Julian PatrickLab396N
Source: Hertsmere Borough Council

Aldenham Parish Council, Aldenham West ward, 4 May 2023 (re-elected in bold)

CandidatePartyVotesElected?
Butwick, AnthonyCon758Y
Diskin, ClareCon753Y
Huff, Sandra AnnLab363N
Khawaja, SaleemCon646Y
Lambert, David StephenCon789Y
Nygate, Daniel WilliamCon671Y
Woolf, Carl ElliottCon729Y
Source: Hertsmere Borough Council

Previous elections

Here are the results of the 2019 elections, for our Hertsmere Borough Council seats and for Aldenham Parish Council. The councillors with a ‘Yes’ in the ‘Elected?’ were elected and you can learn more about them by clicking on their names.

Hertsmere Borough Council, Aldenham East ward, 2 May 2019

CandidatePartyVotesElected?
AI-Saadoon, Saif MadidLib Dem204N
Dickson, SueInd251N
Graham, JohnCon1,058Y
Harris, David JohnathanLab160N
Huff, Sandra AnnLab143N
Selby, LucyCon1,097Y
Turnout 40.28%
Source: Hertsmere Borough Council

Hertsmere Borough Council, Aldenham West ward, 2 May 2019

CandidatePartyVotesElected?
Clapper, Caroline SaraCon1,001Y
Kirk, Richard ArthurLab175N
Lambert, DavidCon845Y
Maizels, John HenryLab160N
Watson, PaulLib Dem197N
Turnout 33.2%
Source: Hertsmere Borough Council

Aldenham Parish Council, Aldenham East ward, 2 May 2019

CandidatePartyVotesElected?
Al-Saadoon, Tariq SaifLab214N
Bass, Diana MaryLab208N
de Skuba, PrzemekCon865Y (resigned January 2021)
Dogan, ZeynepLab201N
Harris, David JohnathanLab244N
Huff, Sandra AnnLab224N
Jones, HelenCon1,093Y
Khawaja, SaleemCon971Y
Kilhams, CatherineCon1,096Y
Lefton, JacquelinaCon1,109Y
Wickham, DermotCon1,082Y
Wood, LeeInd378N
Turnout 39.8%
Source: Hertsmere Borough Council

Aldenham Parish Council, Aldenham West ward, 2 May 2019

CandidatePartyVotesElected?
Cherry, MarkCon816Y
Evans, BenCon864Y
Kirk, Richard ArthurLab214N
Lambert, David StephenCon839Y
Maizels, John HenryLab210N
Pownall-Harris, Melanie FrancescaLab223N
Walton, Garry RobertCon792Y
Samuelson, EstelleCon831Y
Walton, Garry RobertCon845Y
Turnout 33.6%
Source: Hertsmere Borough Council

Meanwhile, would you like a professional Mayor?

Hertsmere could have a directly elected Mayor. In fact, any local authority at the District level or above can decide to have a directly-elected Mayor and it could be up to us, the electors.

A black and white photograph of a distinguished gentleman in robes and chain of office sitting on a throne, taken in about 1900 in Ireland. From the National Library of Ireland on Flickr
An OG Mayor

The government’s process for switching to an elected Mayor (this only applies in England) involves either a vote by the elected councillors or a referendum which would be held alongside a local election in the Borough. To trigger a referendum 5% of the electorate of the Borough must sign a petition – in Hertsmere that’s currently calculated to be 3,921 people. Don’t hold your breath, though. Elected Mayors are not popular. So far, most referendums held in England have voted ‘no’ and there are only three Borough Councils in England with elected Mayors – Bedford, Copeland and Watford.

Elected Mayors are professional, full-time administrators and the job attracts a salary. Watford’s Mayor is paid £73,607. The logic of switching to this more ‘Presidential’ model is that a professional Mayor, working for the area’s interests, can provide some additional visibility and prestige and advance the big causes. Elected Metro Mayors at the top level – Andy Street, Sadiq Khan, Andy Burnham etc. have brought some coherence to local government and raised the visibility of their cities and regions. It’s not at all certain that this would work at the town or district level, though.

This report from the House of Commons Library is an excellent overview, in case you’re thinking of gathering some signatures.

See also

Elections in Hertsmere – including general elections – are administered by the excellent elections team at Hertsmere Borough Council. They maintain the information web site and make sure that notices of elections, lists of candidates and results are posted online in a timely way. Most of the data in this post comes from their published documents.

Data. We’ve added all the numbers in this post to a public spreadsheet (Google Sheets). It also includes general election results, going back all the way to the first in Hertsmere, held when the constituency was created, in 1983. This data is all obtainable online, of course, but this is really the only place you’ll find it all in one document – feel free to download and use the data if you need it. There’s also a fantasically-useful open source spreadsheet of all the 2023 local election results.

Maps. You can find accurate maps of the Parish, Borough, County and Parliamentary constituencies on the MapIt web site, maintained by MySociety, the excellent not-for-profit that also runs the indispensible They Work For You.

History. Our post about Hertsmere elections covers the whole electoral history of the Parliamentary constituency.

How does Hertsmere vote?

Our constituency has only ever had three MPs: a Thatcher ally removed after he turned out to be quite possibly the greatest heel in Tory history (in a competitive field); a diligent but unremarkable backbencher, ejected to make room for a SPAD on the fast-track; and the SPAD himself

Chart showing election results in the Hertsmere constituency between 1983 and 2024. Full data at a link below the chart.
Voting in the Hertsmere Parliamentary constituency from 1983 to 2019 (full data)

This post has been updated to reflect the 2024 general election result and the polling data in this spreadsheet now includes every election in Hertsmere between the creation of the constituency in 1983 and 2024.

The chart shows 41 years of Hertsmere General Election voting, from the Thatcher high water mark of 1983 (the biggest landslide since Labour’s 1945 win) to 2024’s national Labour landslide, via that other high water mark – Blair’s even bigger 1997 landslide.

The Hertsmere Parliamentary constituency has only existed since 1983. Before it there was a constituency called South Hertfordshire that itself only lasted for three general elections. Cecil Parkinson was Hertsmere’s first MP. He had entered Parliament in the 1970 general election that brought the Conservatives under Edward Heath to power. Parkinson became a close ally of Margaret Thatcher and joined her cabinet in 1979. He moved to the new Hertsmere constituency for the 1983 election (the ‘Falklands election’), when he also ran the successful Conservative election campaign. He resigned later that year, after a particularly grim scandal and, although he had returned to the cabinet in the meantime, stepped down again on the day of Margaret Thatcher’s resignation and left the Commons in 1992 (ennobled, of course), to be replaced in Hertsmere by James Clappison, who went on to be a popular and hard-working constituency representative – always a backbencher – for five Parliamentary terms.

Clappison was summarily dumped by his party – one of those brutal ejections that the major parties are fond of, for the 2015 election. History records that our constituency very nearly became home to one Boris Johnson. In the event, though, Johnson was installed in Uxbridge and South Ruislip and we got David Cameron adviser Oliver Dowden instead. Dowden featured in Cameron’s now-infamous 2015 dissolution honours list – that’s when he acquired his CBE (people think it was Boris Johnson who invented the shameless advancement of pals and nonentities. Not true).

Dowden’s progress

Once elected, local boy Dowden became a hard-working constituency MP, visible in the area and always ready to support local causes or to make a speech next to a bin. He’s had an interesting few years, first promoted to a junior ministerial role by Theresa May (in the same reshuffle that brought another Class-of-2015 rising star, Rishi Sunak, into government). Dowden was Paymaster General.

Boris Johnson promoted Dowden to the top job in the Cabinet Office, where his portfolio expanded to take in everything from cybersecurity to propriety and ethics to public appointments and Chinese spooks. His period as Culture Secretary took in the pandemic and a bail-out for theatres and art galleries. For some reason he also saw fit to take on the fraught matter of stolen artefacts in British Museums – opposing the deals being done by some curators with countries of origin and even suggesting using the law to prevent returns. This was puzzling because polling suggests that most Britons think artefacts like the Parthenon marbles ought to be returned. Moved to the holding position of Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party he took up the Culture Wars with a vigour that some found surprising. In that period he famously endorsed privet hedges and took up arms against unisex toilets and woke road signs.

Boris Johnson and Oliver Dowden jumping
Johnson and Dowden jumping

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 (we learn that he was partying with at a hotel in Leicester Square the night before Kwasi Kwarteng’s dismissal. Schadenfreude, much?). Ultimately, of course, Sunak was choppered in by the membership and Dowden’s (quite short) period in the wilderness was over. There was some speculation beforehand that he might not stand in 2024, which could take place no later than 28 January 2025.

Dowden, survivor

Reader, he did stand and he is still our MP. In Parliament he presently occupies the uniquely pointless role of Shadow Deputy Prime Minister. On the day of the 2024 election – half an hour before the polls closed, in fact – it was announced that Dowden would become a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in Rishi Sunak’s own dissolution honours. To his credit he remains a diligent and accessible constituency MP and one who is largely in touch with the concerns of his constituents: active regularly on the Israel-Palestine war, on green belt and development issues and on public transport, so important in this commuter-belt constituency.

In an unexpected twist, we learnt the other day that he’s been interviewed by the Gambling Commission about the rash of betting on the date of the election that preceded Rishi Sunak’s May announcement. He’s keen to point out that they’re not investigating him, though – it’s the others. Presumably, since his role at the time nominally covered propriety and ethics, he was asked if he’d observed other Tories entering a betting shop in the critical period.

Dowden, Kingmaker?

We’ve often written about Dowden’s apparent instinct for picking winners but, in the present Conservative leadership tussle, he’s been very quiet. His early endorsement of Victoria Atkins looks like it wasn’t serious and, anyway, Atkins had some kind of breakdown and then quickly disappeared from view before the contest had even begun. Since then he’s been scrupulously observing the code of silence that applies to the shadow cabinet. Do you know who Dowden is supporting in the contest? Leave a comment.

Three-quarter length portrait photograph of King Charles III, wearing the uniform of an admiral with lots of braid and medals, in a corridor in one of his palaces

One thing we’ve been wondering about since the election is what happened to all those portraits of King Charles they couldn’t get rid of? It was Sir Oliver’s job to get them out onto the walls of the nation’s scout huts and council offices. During the election campaign he announced that a wider-range of organisations would be able to claim one of the roughly A3-sized framed photos – “hospitals, coastguard operations centres, job centres, universities, Church of England churches and other public institutions” to be specific. The scheme is now closed so presumably they’re stacked up in a warehouse somewhere. Could they not now be given to anyone who wants one? Have you actually seen one of these portraits hanging on a wall? Leave a comment.

The nitty-gritty

So, back to the elections. What all the results in our chart have in common, of course, is the winner. Hertsmere has been a comfortably Conservative seat for its whole history. Even the two Labour landslides, in which Blair’s party took 418 Parliamentary seats (still the largest number ever held by a UK party) and Starmer’s 411 couldn’t (quite) touch that. Corbyn’s surprising 2017 result, in which he secured the largest number of votes for Labour since that Blair landslide (and over three million more than Starmer in 2024) obviously didn’t move the dial. The Tories are as dominant in Hertsmere as they’ve ever been.

In some ways, the Liberals’ trajectory in the constituency since 1983 is the grimmest of all – essentially a steady fall from a quarter of the vote – and second place ahead of Labour – to less than half that and a poor third place. Among the also-rans, you can see the collapse of the far-right parties as their platforms have been absorbed by the ever-adaptable Tories.

This chart shows the Conservatives’ winning majority in Hertsmere, over the 41-year period. You can see just how close things got in 1997. It’s also interesting to note how long it took the party to recover from that enormous electoral shock – essentially a whole political generation.

Chart showing the Conservative candidate's winning majority in parliamentary elections in the Hertsmere constituency between 1983 and 2024
Full data

And this chart shows turnout over the same period, a pretty steady picture that puts Hertsmere a little above the 2024 average for the UK – although roughly in line with other constituencies with a similar, older-than-average, age profile. That little drop in the most recent election is telling, though, isn’t it?

Chart showing turnout in parliamentary elections in the Hertsmere constituency between 1983 and 2024. Full data is in a spreadsheet linked below this graphic.
Full data

To keep the top chart simple, we’ve left out the minor parties – the levitating transcendentalists from the Natural Law Party (please watch their amazing 1994 European Parliamentary election broadcast); James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party, whose programme looked pretty kooky at the time but now looks like a model of sanity; the Independent Communist candidate whose vote exceeded 2% back in 1983; Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party and the BNP, whose Daniel Seabrook ran once in 2010 before being rendered entirely irrelevant by UKIP (later rendered entirely irrelevent themselves). Also Hertsmere’s 2024 ‘Gaza independent’, Ray Bolster, whose 536 votes looks respectable alongside some of Hertsmere’s other fringe candidates across the years.

2024 was ‘the year of the MRP poll‘. This opinion polling technique, which involves a much bigger sample than ordinary polls and clever demographic weighting, was first used in Britain in the 2017 election campaign. There were dozens during the 2024 campaign – and they’re expensive to run, which tells you something about the feverish mood in the parties and the media – although perhaps not in the electorate. In January 2024, polling company YouGov published a big MRP poll – commissioned by the Daily Telegraph, projecting 385 seats for Labour. The result induced visible terror in Tory MPs and a frenzy of recrimination in the corridors and meeting rooms. We applied this result to Hertsmere. Predictably enough, although the effect was dramatic, our projection left Oliver Dowden in his seat:

Chart showing election results in the Hertsmere constituency between 1983 and 2019 plus data from a January 2024 YouGov opinion poll. Full data available in a spreadsheet linked below this graphic.
Full data

In fact, of course, when the time came, it would be even worse for the Tories. A string of other MRP polls, including this one, also from YouGov – the first to be made after Sunak’s election announcement – consistently gave Labour a huge margin.

The opinion polls largely missed the other big story of the election in Britain – the one that might turn out to be the most important in coming years: the fragmentation which produced big gains for smaller parties and independents. Parties that are not Labour or the Tories won a larger share of the vote in 2024 than at any election in the last 100 years. Only the first-past-the-post system is holding back a real explosion of political competition in the UK.

The raw data, including the smaller-party numbers not shown above, is in this spreadsheet, with the graphs, in case you’re interested, you weirdos.

  • Sources: Wikipedia, BBC and YouGov.
  • The detailed voting data for the whole period – plus the January 2024 YouGov MRP polling – is in this spreadsheet – the only way you’ll get all this data in one place.
  • The Wikipedia entry for the Hertsmere constituency is typically thorough and has some detail about the boundary changes which affected voting in the 2024 general election.
  • We saw one of Sir Oliver’s portraits of the king on the wall in a Fish & Chip shop not long ago. We wondered how they’d obtained it, since fast food outlets weren’t on the list of approved applicants. Apparently they’d printed it out off the Internet and bought a frame from Ikea. The resourcefulness and patriotism of ordinary British people on display there.
  • The MRP technique is significantly more accurate than ordinary polling but not infallible. YouGov’s 2017 poll came very close, predicting the hung Parliament and some of the outlier results but their 2019 polls were less accurate, underestimating the size of Johnson’s majority.
  • How do you get 1,116 votes for a Communist in a solidly Tory home counties seat? You give him the same surname as the winner. In 1983, the Conservative candidate and the Independent Communist were both named Parkinson.

Battle commences

A new-build housing estate in the countryside

Liz Truss’s first Prime Ministers’ Questions passed without Oliver Dowden’s presence but our MP’s definitely been pitch-rolling* for the big green belt fight

Hertsmere stays blue but only just

The Tory Party’s own Anti-Growth Coalition smells blood. Parliament is back after a long conference season break, extended by the Queen’s funeral. Labour is now an average of 30 points ahead of the Tories in national opinion polls. If there was a general election tomorrow Labour’s parliamentary majority would be over 300. Dowden would hang on to his seat but his majority in Hertsmere would be smaller even than the historic low of the 1997 Blair landslide. The weakness of the government brought about by the Chancellor’s catastrophic mini-budget hasn’t just empowered the opposition, though, it’s boosted critics inside the governing party too.

Tory backbenchers may mobilise against cuts in benefits that they can see will be disastrous, or they might decide that the NI increase that was going to fund social care must be reinstated. Let’s face it, though, what’s really got them going is the prospect of winning concessions on proposed planning reforms from the embattled front bench. The 2019 manifesto pledge to build 300,000 new homes per year – so far undelivered of course – looks like it’s about to be scrapped so the anti-growth Tories might record that as victory number one in the coming war.

It won’t be the first time Tories from the shires and the home counties have derailed planning reforms. Economic growth will always be secondary to protection of the green belt in these constituencies. Almost everyone – and especially the economically liberal end of the think tank spectrum – recognises that Britain’s bizarre and sclerotic planning regime is holding back vital infrastructure investment and improvements to the housing stock. For Tory MPs, though, this remains the ultimate third rail issue.

It seems that Tory backbenchers are also teaming up with Labour MPs in constituencies threatened with the prospect of fracking. If your response to the government’s announcement that fracking would restart was “it’ll never happen” give yourself a pat on the back.

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 is out of ministerial office and, for the time being, out of favour. He continues to use his time out in the cold to restore his bond with Hertsmere constituents in time for the general election. He’s defending the green belt on Twitter and insisting on local consent to planning decisions. He’s firing off written questions to ministers in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (the planning ministry). So far they’ve all been about planning and the green belt. We shared the first three in an earlier post. His most recent questions are:

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, whether he will take steps to protect the Green Belt in the National Planning Policy Framework.

Question from Oliver Dowden, 10 October 2022

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what the Government’s policy is on the calculation of new housing targets in local authorities which are predominately made up of Green Belt land.

Question from Oliver Dowden, 10 October 2022

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what steps the Government is taking to address local housing projections which are based on out-of-date numbers.

Question from Oliver Dowden, 10 October 2022

The minister assigned these questions, Parliamentary Under Secretary Lee Rowley, responds with a holding position:

Existing Government policy is to help make home ownership affordable for more people and to help more people rent their own home. To do that, we will need to deliver more homes. The standard method for assessing local housing need is used by councils to inform the preparation of their local plans and, as part of the local plan process, Councils are responsible for determining the best approach to development in their areas, including taking into consideration important matters such as Green Belt.

The previous Government undertook a review of the standard method formula in 2020 and, after carefully considering consultation responses, they retained the existing formula providing stability and certainty for planning and for local communities. As with all policies, we are monitoring the standard method, particularly as the impact of changes to the way we live and work and levelling up become clear.

Written answer from Lee Rowley, 10 October 2022

National planning frameworks, local plans, rules about affordable housing, a tapestry of historic green belt protections – this is a complicated business and dry as dust (we practically nodded off typing this) but there can’t be a better-informed group than these home counties MPs. They’re planning ninjas, with hundreds of years of opposing major projects and reform to the rules between them. We can only sympathise with Mr Rowley, whose inbox, we feel certain, is going to be pinging constantly as these questions pour in. A quick search of They Work For You suggests that many Tory MPs have kicked off the new session with detailed questions about planning. They’re going to be a tough crowd and the action returns to the floor of the house soon. Meanwhile the markets remain unimpressed, mortgage rates are now rising faster than during the financial crisis and the Winter looms.

* If you’ve been listening to the increasingly desperate defences of the Truss-Kwarteng mini-catastrophe from various leadership proxies you’ll have heard the phrase ‘rolling the pitch’ or ‘pitch-rolling’, as in “…the suspension of politics in the mourning period left no time to ‘roll the pitch’ and warn investors of his plan.” We think this awkward (but obviously very Tory) phrase was first applied to politics by David Cameron. Here’s an example from 2014.

Oliver Dowden is the Anti-Growth Coalition

He swerved his party’s conference and he’s getting ready for a battle with Truss over planning and the green belt

We’re not insiders here at Radlett Wire, just observers. We can’t tell you what’s going on in our MP’s head, we can just tell you what he’s up to, what he’s saying in public, how he votes.

So we have no idea what Oliver Dowden was thinking during the last ten days of chaos in the financial markets, surging bond yields and mounting anxiety about the highest mortgage interest rates in 14 years. We do know that he was completely silent, on all platforms for over a week.

We also know that Dowden was on and that Rishi Sunak’s position on Truss-Kwarteng’s voodoo economics is well known. The former Chancellor even essentially predicted the present chaos. We also know that Dowden is not in Birmingham for his party’s conference (only loyalists attended, and even those who did sloped off early). Gordon Rayner in The Telegraph speculates that Dowden’s disilllusionment might even cause him to stand down at the next election (and the party might decide to replace him with a more compliant candidate anyway, of course, as they did when Dowden himself was helicoptered in to replace the hapless James Clappison).

Britain is still in shock. We all knew that Liz Truss and her Chancellor were prepared to ‘challenge economic orthodoxy’ but no one expected the arbitrary, unhinged intensity of that Friday morning in Parliament and the spiralling chaos of the following hours and days, the Bank of England’s emergency action, the withdrawal of thousands of mortgage products, the despair of young borrowers. The damage to Tory Party prospects might well be terminal.

Ouch. This poll of polls does not look good (New Statesman, October 2022)

Opinion polls are showing vast, 1997-style leads for Labour, the kind of leads only overcome by an incumbent once in electoral history – by Margaret Thatcher, as it happens – although she needed to win a war in the South Atlantic to achieve that. Kwasi Kwarteng, in a YouGov poll, has pulled off the extraordinary feat of going straight from being ‘mostly unknown’ to ‘mostly disliked’ with no honeymoon period at all, even among Conservative voters. Danny Finkelstein, Tory peer and realist, says in The Times that Tories must brace for a rout worse than 1997. Another insider, Tim Montgomerie, founder of the influential Conservative Home web site, told BBC radio that Truss will have to go or the party will face a choice of being ‘a joke or dead‘ by Christmas.

Kwarteng’s moment in the sun, one for which he seemed oddly unprepared (or was that just us?), the ‘mini-budget‘ that made Britain a laughing stock, lays out an economic programme that teeters, like an upside-down jelly pyramid of stupid, on a single chart – long discredited – which asserts that cutting tax rates can increase tax revenues by promoting investment (it’s called the Laffer Curve, this chart, and even Laffer says it doesn’t mean what they think it does). Kwarteng’s announcement will be remembered for one of the worst outcomes for a Chancellor since they executed Thomas Browne for treason in 1460.

So what has Oliver Dowden been doing with the time he might have spent walking the corridors and hotel bars in Birmingham? He’s been preparing (cue training montage, like the one in Kung Fu Panda or in Rocky IV). Search Parliament’s feeds and you’ll find he’s been working on his game for the planning debate for when Parliament returns, firing off a sequence of barbed questions about planning and the protection of the green belt, the Tory Kryptonite.

On 28 September he submitted this written question:

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what the Government’s policy is on the ability for the Planning Inspectorate to override planning decisions made by local councils.

and this one…

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what steps the Government will take to ensure local authorities can put in place Local Plans which ensure the protection of local green spaces.

another another…

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, whether the Government will take steps to prevent overdevelopment of Green Belt land in its future planning reforms.

(Click the links above for the minister’s predictably anodyne answers)

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’s doing something that Tory MPs in the green and suburban bits of Britain will all be doing right now – he’s getting ready for the big fight over planning, a fight that will set heartland Tories like him against newer ‘red wall’ MPs and against the market headbangers in the cabinet. A key aspect of the Truss government’s ‘growth plan‘ (still pretty thin, if truth be told) is a loosening of planning law and an opening up of the green belt for development. The darkly hollow phrase ‘with community consent’, which either renders the government’s plans for an explosion in new development meaningless or suggests a very special definition of ‘consent’, really doesn’t make the plan seem any more deliverable. This is going to be one of the major battles inside the Conservative party in the new Parliamentary session. Our MP, formerly Minister for Privet Hedges, remember, is going to be on the front line.

Spare a thought for the left-behind

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

Honestly, you have to feel for our MP. Almost the definition of ‘left behind’. The man whose early resignation threw the switch for the final Johnson meltdown and one of the first to come out for Rishi in the leadership contest, he’s been silent on all platforms since before the ‘mini-budget’. The mini-budget that seems to have confirmed everything he and #TeamRishi said would happen if Truss won.

He and the other non-headbangers in the Parliamentary party must be grinding their teeth as Britain turns awkwardly, like a burning airship in a black and white film, and descends into a whole new economic category. Borrowing costs for the UK government are now higher than for the ‘PIIGS’, the nations stricken by the European debt crisis ten years ago. Larry Summers, former United States Treasury Secretary, calls this new category ‘submerging’, which you’ve got to admit is funny, but also captures the dark truth of Britain’s rapidly shifting status.

Historians tell us that Britain’s decline as an economic and geopolitical power can in part be attributed to the fact that the country was the first to industrialise, the first to marry capitalism with the modern nation-state. To simplify, with capitalism it’s first-in, first-out. Truss and Kwarteng seem to be almost desperate to confirm the theory, to accelerate Britain’s passage from economic Premier League titan to shabby Championship has-been.

So the question, for a Remainer Tory of the old school (or at least a school fairly closely associated with the old school) like Oliver Dowden, concerned with the ancient verities of fiscal probity and economic competence, is when to move, when to put your head above the parapet.

The risks are obviously enormous – if he goes public with criticism of the Truss-Kwarteng supply-side suicide-pact and, by some chance, the regime scrapes through and is still in office in the New Year, Dowden’s one-way ticket to outer darkness will be confirmed. But if he goes early, sets out his stall cleverly and Truss-Kwarteng are driven into retreat (or even out of office) he could be well-placed for a senior role in the clean-up team.

In an office at BBC Broadcasting House, left to right, Cllr Morris Bright, Leader of Hertsmere Borough Council, Oliver Dowden MP, Tim Davie, Director-General of the BBC - photo from Oliver Dowden's web site
A pointless meeting

In the meantime, Dowden does have some things to be getting on with. The former Culture Secretary managed to get a pointless meeting with BBC boss Tim Davie about the proposed sale of BBC Elstree. According to his website, Dowden and the Hertsmere Councillor he took with him have secured a committment from the BBC to continue making Eastenders at the studio. As far as we know, the BBC’s plan has always been to sell the studio and lease back the Eastenders set. The BBC’s commercial arm has also just signed a lease for the use of other studios at the site. There was never any threat to take the soap elsewhere so the ‘commitment’ is essentially meaningless. Classic Dowden.

In party news, the antisemitism row in the Hertsmere Conservative party rumbles on, although we still don’t pretend to understand it. A councillor who was reprimanded has resigned from the party. Dowden’s role in the mess relates to the fact that he was Party Co-Chairman when the rules were retro-actively changed to allow the five members involved to appeal their reprimands.

Keeping busy

You have to wonder what a former party Co-Chairman gets up to during a turbulent time like this

Oliver Dowden's social media endorsement of Rishi Sunak. The text reads: "Rishi is the best person to lead our country and unquestionably the best person to beat Labour. That's why I'm backing him to be our next Prime Minister. Ready for Rishi
Dowden’s tweet in support of Rishi was one of the first, on 8 July. It’s exactly the same as all the others because it was provided by the super-organised Sunak campaign team.

He’s ready for Rishi. You already knew this. Oliver Dowden’s social media is saturated with Sunak endorsements. If there’s no Ministerial role for our MP in September it’ll be because the other weirdo won. Sunak may be weird but if you rose during the Cameron era like Dowden, he probably looks like the nearest the Conservative Party has to a normal human being right now – the anti-chaos candidate (but wait until Dowden hears about Sunak’s actual policies – don’t think our privet hedge guy is ready for ‘Charter Cities‘).

He ‘wielded the knife’. Johnson loyalists are making a list of MPs they think were instrumental in the Prime Minister’s fall. Dowden may have missed the Pinchergate action but he’s right at the top of the list anyway. Andrew Pierce, in his breathless Johnson panegyric in the Mail says “News of his resignation came through when the PM was in Rwanda. Boris knew immediately that Dowden had planned it in advance.”

He’s mixed up in a complicated anti-semitism scandal. We don’t pretend to understand this case but if you’re a local democracy nerd you may remember that back in April a QC-led internal Conservative Party inquiry into the abuse of a Jewish Labour Party candidate standing in Hertsmere concluded with reprimands for four Conservative Councillors and a local Agent for ‘enabling anti-semitism’. Jewish News quoted the findings, saying the five accused Conservatives were “party to a personal campaign against the claimant in relation to the 2020 by-election, and which continued for many months.”

A cutting from Private Eye magazine No. 1577, 15 July - 28 July2022
From Private Eye 15-28 July 2022

According to Private Eye’s Rotten Boroughs column (which keeps an eye on local authority malfeasance), the Conservative Party’s disciplinary code was changed after the inquiry’s verdict to permit the reprimanded members to challenge their punishment. The Eye’s assumption is that, as Co-Chairman of the Party at the time, Dowden would likely have been well aware of these changes. Apparently the appeals lodged by the party members are ongoing.

The thankless work of a Party Chairman

An open letter to the Leader of the Opposition, from Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party Oliver Dowden.

Oliver Dowden, our MP, is Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party. It’s an unelected role that’s in the gift of the leader of the party (Boris Johnson), so it’s often used as a place to ‘park’ useful Ministers while they’re out of formal office (this also explains why there’s quite often more than one Chairman – it’s a kind of waiting area for soon-to-be-recycled ministers). While the party is in government the Chairman is also typically given a sinecure role such as Minister without Portfolio, which allows them to attend cabinet meetings.

In his role as Co-Chairman Oliver Dowden is required to do a fair amount of political spade work – defending the party leadership, keeping the latest policy wheezes in the news, rallying the troops at conferences, carrying the message to sympathetic foreigners, that kind of thing.

Today’s grunt work is a strongly-worded open letter to the leader of the opposition, part of a dizzying 36 hours in Westminster politics that seems worth a closer look. Let’s try to put Dowden’s letter into a sequence:

  1. Tuesday evening (19 April). Boris Johnson attends a meeting of Tory MPs, ostensibly to apologise for partygate and rally the troops. He takes the opportunity to criticise the Archbishop of Canterbury and the BBC. As expected, the content of his speech is quickly made public.
  2. Later Tuesday evening. Friendly media outlets are briefed about the speech – that the PM asserted that the Archbishop has been more critical of the Government’s plan to deport refugees to Rwanda than he has been of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, for instance. Also that the PM was unhappy about the criticism of the plan on the BBC.
  3. Wednesday morning. This is where it gets complicated. The press may also have been briefed that the PM was unhappy with the BBC’s coverage of Ukraine. On Wednesday’s Today on BBC Radio 4, Justin Webb picks up this line and grills Paul Scully, the unfortunate junior minister who happens to be on duty that morning, about the Prime Minister’s criticism of BBC journalism – “can you come up with an occasion when Boris Johnson has put his life on the line for the truth as Jeremy Bowen has, as Lyse Doucet has, as Clive Myrie has?” Webb’s line of questioning becomes part of the story, of course. There are complaints and a line is provided by the BBC press office (quoted in this Telegraph article).
  4. Wednesday lunchtime. Webb’s line of questioning obviously hits home, though, and when Keir Starmer accuses Johnson of slandering “decent people in a private room” and says “how can the Prime Minister claim to be a patriot when he deliberately attacks and degrades the institutions of our great country?” at Prime Minister’s Questions, The PM responds furiously – “…he must be out of his tiny mind…”
  5. Wednesday afternoon. So, by now the disagreement comes down to whether the PM criticised the BBC’s coverage of the Rwanda plan or its coverage of the Ukraine war (or both) in his speech to MPs.
  6. Thursday morning. Central Office concludes that this calumny – that the Prime Minister has criticised the BBC for its coverage of the Ukraine war – cannot stand and must be tackled head-on. One aspect of the response is Oliver Dowden’s letter to Keir Starmer, published on his Twitter account. It catalogues Boris Johnson’s various defences of press freedom (not a very long list, in truth) and finishes with a routine reminder that the Labour Party was once led by a Kremlin apologist who routinely wore a slightly communist hat. Ministers tour the breakfast studios to demand an apology from Starmer, newspapers pick up the letter and run it under headlines like Sir Keir Starmer told to retract claims Boris Johnson criticised BBC’s Ukraine coverage (The Telegraph) and Boris Johnson ally suggests he shouldn’t apologise to Commons – but Keir Starmer should (The Mirror).

And this is all in a day’s work for a hard-working Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party.

  • The Conservative Party has a useful page about the duties of the Party Chairman. Oliver Dowden’s letter is on Dowden’s own Twitter, not on the Party’s web site or even on an official Twitter account. Does anyone archive this stuff? Are Government librarians scouring MPs’ social media for material? Will historians be able to access statements like this in the distant future? Or does it actually serve politicians that official statements are now no more permanent than tweets?

Culture wars update

Woke police officer

One of the things we’ve done on this blog – with, let’s face it, limited consistency – is keep an eye on the public statements and Ministerial actions of our MP Oliver Dowden who, these days, is Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party and Minister without Portfolio (we started, in fact, under his predecessor, James Clappison, a long-serving MP who had represented Hertsmere since the creation of the constituency in 1992).

Although Mr Dowden is currently without formal Ministerial responsibilities (his role does allow him to attend Cabinet meetings, although without a portfolio to represent he’ll probably just do a crossword or something) you might be forgiven for thinking that he ought to adopt the title Minister for the Culture Wars. He’s all over it. The Google alert that keeps us up to date with Oliver Dowden’s business is essentially all culture wars, all the time these days.

So you won’t be surprised to learn that the Co-Chairman’s message to electors ahead of the 5 May local elections, which you can read on Conservative Home, is heavy on the culture wars and includes two uses of the word ‘woke’ (‘woke warriors’ and ‘woke vanity projects’).

We’re not 100% sure we want to reduce this blog to a chronological account of Mr Dowden’s statements about statues, unisex toilets, woke street names and so on. But it does seem worthwhile to record the fact that a prominent MP, once confidant to a Prime Minister and until recently a full Minister of the Crown, can be so diminished in office as to be obliged to churn out talking points for Facebook (Mr Dowden is so far silent on David Attenborough’s woke dinosaur, though).

So, let’s get it over with. Oliver Dowden’s latest Culture Wars sortie relates to guidance apparently given to police forces to use gender-neutral language when addressing the public (we can’t find this guidance online, although the Mail’s claim is that it was obtained by a FOI request to Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire constabularies). The Minister for Woke’s statement on the matter says that the police should be arresting crims and

…not wasting time trying to condition officers who extend a basic courtesy to the people they serve.

Oliver Dowden MP, quoted in The Mail, 16 April 2022

It’s not clear what Dowden means by ‘condition’ but the quote has surfaced in multiple outlets, from GB News to The Sun, to The Daily Star to Kremlin-funded RT (recently banned from UK TV by Ofcom, as you’ll remember, but obviously still on the mailing list for these press lines). We’re curious as to how this happens. How is a line like this distributed? It’s not contained in an official press release that we’ve been able to find. Is there an email d-list? We’re naive about the ways of Government press offices. Can you enlighten us?

Anyway, our bet is that Mr Dowden’s interest in the Culture Wars will sharply decline immediately the council elections are out of the way in a few weeks (no elections in Hertsmere this year, though, remember, so don’t get excited).

Oliver Dowden on partygate

A photograph taken from a window at Number 10 Downing Street in May 2020, showing Prime Minister Boris Johnson, his wife Carrie Johnson (with her newborn baby Wilfred) and two aides thought to be Dominic Cummings and Martin Reynolds. Part of a larger image that shows other staff on the lawn neyond the terrace.
The Prime Minister and Number 10 staff during the first national lockdown

UPDATE 13 April 2022. As expected, the Prime Minister’s fixed penalty notice has arrived (two in the letterbox in fact). Our MP was not the only loyalist to be dropped in it by the news, of course, although Oliver Dowden’s “…he is not going to be subject to a fixed-penalty notice because he is confident that he has not broken the law” from three weeks ago was more fulsome than most. Along with dozens of other Tory MPs, Dowden has now shared the official line:

Fixed penalties are starting to land on the doormats of Conservative Party staff, civil servants and, quite possibly, MPs and ministers. We don’t know how many have been issued but the BBC says it’ll be at least 15 but more likely 20 and there may be a second and subsequent batches. The investigation takes in 12 events, though, so it seems unlikely it’ll stop at 20.

From the Telegraph we get this complicated construction: “Downing Street said Boris Johnson has not been told by the Metropolitan Police that he is being fined over the ‘partygate’ scandal.” The Met won’t be providing a list of those fined (they don’t normally publish the names of people issued with fixed penalties) but we’re willing to bet you a tenner right now that there’ll soon be a list in the public domain. Still no word on the Prime Minister, although his promise to tell us if he is fined presumably still stands.

So, although as Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party and Minister without Portfolio his loyalty is obviously guaranteed, it’s possible that Oliver Dowden was going out on a limb a bit last week when he told James O’Brien on LBC:

The prime minister is actually absolutely resolutely clear that he is not going to be subject to a fixed-penalty notice because he is confident that he has not broken the law.

Oliver Dowden, LBC, 21 March 2022

The mood music this week suggests Johnson’s innocence is not quite such a sure thing, though. You’ll find a dozen news and opinion pieces since we learnt that fines were imminent, even in the Tory press, that suggest Johnson’s partygate woes are not over, even that his leadership may still be in peril. The Evening Standard, for instance, owned by the Prime Minister’s friend Evgeny Lebedev, is pretty sure that ‘a day of reckoning’ is coming, although the loyalists questioned are pretty sure that it won’t be till after the Ukraine crisis.

And then there’s the Sue Gray report (bet you’d forgotten about that), the final, unexpurgated, version of which is due after the Met’s investigation is finished.