On Skegness pier, the rain was coming down hard. Perfect Tory launch weather, someone joked, as three candidates assembled for the shivery second hustings of the day: the Conservatives’ Matt Warman, his LibDem opponent, Richard Lloyd, and the Reform chairman, Richard Tice, who hastily declared his candidacy here only after the election had been called. Though a curious tourist in a mobility scooter trundled up for a brief look, most barely glanced up from playing the seafront slot machines as the politicians traipsed past.
Earlier, at the BBC Radio Lincolnshire hustings, Tice had hammered home lines designed to jolt the apathetic into paying attention: that the Tories haven’t stopped the boats, that you can’t believe a word Westminster politicians say, that net zero kills jobs, and immigrants put too much pressure on public services (as opposed to, say, keeping them afloat by working in them). But if Reform is the party of horribly easy answers, then Warman, a remain-voting one nation Tory who has represented the normally safe (and heavily leave-voting) Boston and Skegness seat since 2015, is the candidate for “actually it’s a bit more complicated than that”.
