Tag: Labour

First mover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The operator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The players

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minister for junk mail

Careful, your MP wants your email address

Spam

Oliver Dowden, MP for Hertsmere, Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party and unlikely attack dog in the Culture Wars, has a new, slightly demeaning job. He’s been tasked with adding names to the Conservative Party’s email marketing list. He’s doing this by attacking some Labour politicians for supporting the RMT’s strike action. Nothing new about attacking organised labour, of course, but Dowden’s approach is unusual and quite possibly unprecedented – he’s started a petition which will apparently be delivered to the opposition Labour party.

The eccentricity of this approach: a governing party – and one with a 75-seat majority in the House of Commons – petitioning the party that is currently out of power for action in an industrial dispute – will not have escaped you. But the oddball logic will become clear if you actually try to complete the petition. It’s a fake petition. You’ll find that, although you’re offered two options (condemn the strikes, don’t condemn the strikes), whichever way you vote you’ll be required to provide an email address and agree to receive email ‘about the Party’s campaigns and opportunities to get involved’. Boom, you’re on the list.

This kind of data collection mechanic disguised as a campaign has, as you’d expect, been imported from US politics, where Donald Trump and others have been building huge email and telephone databases and surveilling voters via similar devices for years. In this country, political parties are governed by data protection regulations just like other organisations and this petition looks legit but you may want to take your usual precautions against the kind of epic quantities of spam that political parties routinely produce.

Top tip: if you have one, use a special email address when you’re obliged to sign up for junk mail in this way – we have one which deletes all email before we even see it.

And don’t forget that the Conservatives have form when it comes to dodgy online marketing. There was that time they broke Twitter’s rules by pretending to be a ‘fact checking’ organisation and that other time when they were fined £10,000 for breaking data protection law.

Of course, whether it’s a dignified thing for a prominent politician – one who until not long ago was an actual Minister of the Crown (he was replaced by Nadine Dorries) – to be grubbing around for qualified leads for the party’s junk mail department is another matter – one we’ll leave to Mr Dowden’s conscience.

If you’d like to sign it, the ‘Stop the Strikes’ petition is on the Conservative Party web site. The Information Commissioner has detailed guidance for the use of personal data by political parties.

Elections in Hertsmere since 1983

A line chart showing Hertsmere Parliamentary election voting data, from 1983-2017That’s 34 years of Hertsmere General Election voting data, from the Thatcher high water mark of 1983 (the biggest landslide since Labour’s 1945 win, you’ll remember) to 2017’s most surprising result, 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, a close ally of Margaret Thatcher, held the seat from 1983, when he also ran the extraordinarily successful Conservative national campaign. He was replaced, after a particularly egregious scandal, for the 1992 election, by James Clappison, who went on to be a popular and hard-working constituency representative for five Parliamentary terms.

Clappison was summarily dumped by his party for the 2015 election, though, to make room for David Cameron adviser Oliver Dowden. Dowden himself has spent the last two years building a reputation for hard work and commitment to the constituency and he has, of course, now been re-elected with a higher share of the vote, although a slightly smaller majority.

What all the results in the chart have in common, of course, is the winner. Hertsmere has been a comfortably Conservative seat throughout. Even the Blair revolution, in which Labour took 418 Parliamentary seats, the largest number ever held by a UK party, couldn’t (quite) touch that and, although Fiona Smith has lifted the party further from that dreadful 2010 result, the Corbyn uprising has done essentially nothing to close the gap.

In some ways, the Liberals’ trajectory in the constituency since 1983 is the grimmest of all – steadily falling from a quarter of the vote and second place ahead of Labour – to little more than 5% this year. That’s a snapshot of the national challenge for Farron and his party.

This chart shows the Conservatives’ winning majority in Hertsmere, over the 34-year period. You can see just how close things got in 1997. It’s fascinating to note how long it’s taken the party to recover from that enormous electoral shock.

Chart showing winning majority in Hertsmere Parliamentary constituency from 1983 - 2017

And this chart shows turnout over the same period.
Hertsmere General Election turnout data, 1983-2017

To keep the top chart simple, I’ve left out the minor parties – the levitating transcendentalists from the Natural Law Party (please watch their 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. The smaller-party numbers are all included in the raw data, though, in case you’re interested.
(sources: Wikipedia and BBC)

What we know about your candidates for the 2017 General Election

There are five candidates for the 2017 election in Hertsmere. That’s one more than in 2015 – the Greens have returned to the fray.

Here’s what we know so far. I’ll add more here as we get it.

In alphabetical order:

Oliver Dowden, Conservative. The incumbent. A local man and a former Cameron adviser, helicoptered in by CCHQ for the 2015 election, he’s managed to retain his relevance in the May era, principally by the simple expedient of absolute loyalty. You won’t find a single vote in defiance of the whip in his Parliamentary record and he’s been heard saying “strong, stable leadership” on a number of occasions, including on this episode of Radio 4’s Westminster Hour in April.

David Hoy, UKIP. Chairman of Hertsmere UKIP. Hoy stood in the 2014 and 2016 local elections. He’s on Twitter, where his bio reads: “Don’t care I will do it anyway”, although he hasn’t tweeted since Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.

Joe Jordan, Liberal Democrats. Jordan’s a software engineer and a scientist (with a doctorate). He’s a Liberal activist from Huntingdonshire, where he’s been looking after social media and the web for his local party. He stood in Royston at the 2015 General Election. He’s set up a web site for his Hertsmere campaign and he’s on Twitter (and he’s definitely the only candidate to have his own comic book-style custom Twitter avatar).

Fiona Smith, Labour. Interestingly, Smith has served in both the military and the police force. She’s on Twitter and recently found herself explaining a tweet critical of Israel sent in 2014 (although it looks like it was a tweet sent automatically when she signed an Amnesty online petition). She supported Liz Kendall in the 2015 Labour leadership election so is unlikely to be a Corbyn loyalist.

Sophie Summerhayes, Green Party. Summerhayes joined the Green Party “just before the green surge in 2015” and she’s co-founder of Watford Young Greens. She’s also on Twitter.

Jewish News has some more detail on the candidates. I’ve made a Twitter list for the Hertsmere candidates – follow it to keep up with their tweets during the campaign (Oliver Dowden doesn’t seem to be using Twitter at the moment).

The 2017 County Council elections in Radlett

Hertfordshire County Council elections 2017, Watling division results

UPDATE: Saturday 6 May.

The County Council results are all in. The details shows a strong swing towards the Conservatives. They’ve gained five seats. Labour has lost six, including their leader on the Council, Leon Reefe. The Liberals gained two. Turnout was 34.1%, substantially up from 28.9% in 2013 (turnout here in Watling Division was also up substantially, from 25.8% to 33%).

UPDATE: 8:40am Friday 5 May.

About a third of Hertfordshire’s County Council electoral divisions will be counting today, but the results so far are clear: a big win for the Conservatives, with an increased majority. The Watford Observer has the live story and the BBC’s results pages will have the national numbers.

Results here in the Watling division also show a big increase in the Conservative share of the vote. Caroline Clapper has taken votes from Labour and from UKIP (who helped out by not standing at all). It’s also likely that an increase in turnout has helped the Tories. An interesting local detail is that the Liberals have almost doubled their 2013 vote.

3,726 votes in total (2013 votes in brackets)
Saif Al-Saadoon, Liberal Democrats 318 votes, 8.5% (176, 6%)
Caroline Clapper, Conservative 2,889 votes, 77.5% (1,874, 63.7%)
Peter Halsey, Labour 344 votes, 9.25% (392, 13.3%)
Jessica Wand, Green Party 175 votes, 4.75% (did not stand)

Wednesday 3 May

Elections. Oh God. Will they never end? Here’s another one to worry about. If you’re resident here and you’ve registered to vote (you have registered to vote, haven’t you?) you’ll be able to vote in the Hertfordshire County Council elections on 4 May – like a kind of warm-up for the big one in June. This is just for the County, though – not District (Hertsmere) or Parish (Aldenham).

If you live in Radlett, your County Councillor is Caroline Clapper (Conservative) and she’s standing for re-election. She represents an electoral district (to avoid confusion, they’re actually called ‘divisions’ at County level) called Watling, which also takes in Aldenham, Letchmore Heath, Elstree and a bit of Borehamwood. Watling Street cuts right through the division, from the Northern end of Radlett to the Southern end of Elstree, where it meets the London Borough of Barnet. 15,000 people live in the Watling division and we’re quite an elderly lot: 54% are over 40 and the largest segment in the age distribution is 50-54 (8.5%). More about the Watling electoral division on the Hertfordshire web site.

Clapper (who is also a Hertsmere Borough Councillor), as well as being a member of the full County Council is also on the Enterprise, Education & Skills cabinet panel and the Overview & Scrutiny Committee.

In Radlett, she recently consulted local people about the redevelopment of Newberries car park via the Radlett Facebook group and the overwhelmingly negative response must have informed her decision to step down from the Hertsmere committee responsible for the planning decision. She’s cannily expressed no personal opinion about the development but she says “I strongly believe that Radlett residents and businesses should have a big say in any major development proposed for our village.”

Clapper won her seat in the 2013 election with a 63.7% share of the vote so she’s unlikely to be packing her desk at County Hall any time soon. The other candidates for this election are: Saif Al-Saadoon for the Liberal Democrats, Peter Halsey for Labour and Jessica Wand for the Greens. Although they came second in 2013, with a 16.5% share, UKIP are not standing this time. Here are the 2013 County Council election results (scroll down for the Watling division results).

Police and crime commissioner – no surprises but a big increase in turn-out

David Lloyd, Police and Crime Commissioner for Hertfordshire, standing in front of a Hertfordshire Police signConservative David Lloyd has been re-elected. Most people don’t know who their Police Commissioner is and surveys have shown that many have no idea what they do. Something’s obviously changed in Hertfordshire, though, because turn-out for the vote more than doubled, from a disastrous 14.5% in 2012 to an almost creditable 29% this year – and that’s in a year with no local authority elections to boost the vote.

None of the candidates secured 50% of the vote in the first round so counting went to a second round, in which Lloyd beat the Labour candidate Kerry Pollard 126,069 votes to 85,854. Chris White, the Liberal candidate, came third, with 38,488 of first round votes. The UKIP candidate, who is a financial adviser to ‘professionals and the comfortably well-off’ in Royston, came dead last.

How you voted

Screenshot of Hertsmere general election result from BBC web site, 8 May 2015It was never going to be the most exciting of elections for us in Hertsmere. No earthquake for us. It’s a Conservative hold, of course (as it is across Hertfordshire). And the Hertsmere numbers tell the national story pretty well. Conservative, Labour and Ukip all saw increases, both in absolute numbers and in share of the vote. And the source of those extra votes? The Lib Dems, by and large (an increased turn-out also helped – it was 65% in 2010). Share of the vote for the party whose candidate was reportedly too busy to campaign fell by a wapping 11.8% to 5.5% (2,777 votes – she’s just retained her deposit) The biggest gainer was Ukip, whose share jumped by 9.1%. Ukip candidate Frank Ward polled more than twice as many votes as Sophie Bowler (6,383). For Hertsmere, there’s the story.

Stay tuned for the Hertsmere borough and Aldenham parish election results, which we should have from about 4pm today.

General election 2015 – the nominations are in and no, you can’t vote Green

Statement of persons nominated for the Hertsmere parliamentary constituency for the 2015 general election

If you voted for the BNP or for the Greens at the last general election and you were thinking of doing so again this time, you’re out of luck. Neither is standing in Hertsmere in 2015 and the deadline for candidates to get their names on the ballot has now passed, so that’s it.

Between them, in 2010, the two parties attracted around 2,000 votes or 4% of the vote. According to Buzzfeed “almost Everyone In England And Wales Will Be Able To Vote For The Green Party”. The Greens are putting up candidates in nearly 95% of UK seats (535 out of 573) and around 40% of their candidates are women, the highest proportion for any party at the general election. Before the deadline passed, I reached out to the 2010 Green Party candidate Arjuna Krishna-Das to ask if he planned to stand but it turns out he’s no longer Green and, in fact, he’s now supporting a right-wing group calling itself Liberty GB.

The task of gathering nominations for elections falls to local authority Returning Officers. You can download nomination documents – including those for the Borough and Parish council elections – from the Hertsmere web site and, for reasons which presumably pre-date the World Wide Web, you can pick them up in person from the council offices. The Your Next MP web site, has up-to-date lists of candidates for the whole country and you can add information yourself, where it’s missing.