‘It’s only my second time in here,” laughs Victoria Collins, the new Liberal Democrat MP for Harpenden and Berkhamsted, as she nibbles a chocolate-chip muffin in her local branch of the upmarket bakery chain Gail’s.
“There are a lot of other great coffee shops apart from Gail’s,” she is keen to stress. But she is here today, on a summer morning on Berkhamsted High Street, because as well as selling fancy pastries, the rapidly-expanding chain has become an unlikely political bellwether. The Lib Dems surged to their best-ever general election result in July by ruthlessly targeting Conservative constituencies. And one rule of thumb the party used for identifying areas where voters might be ready to ditch the Tories was this: “Does it have a Gail’s?”
