Alistair Strathern hates the photo chosen to be splashed across his advertising boards. “Good poster”, shouts a schoolboy between mouthfuls of crisps at the gently blushing Labour candidate across Dunstable Street in the centre of Ampthill, one of the 48 towns and villages that make up the constituency of Mid Bedfordshire. “I look smug,” Strathern explains of his discomfort. “Maybe you think I always look smug but I don’t think I look that smug.”
It’s a shame that Strathern feels this way as his boards are absolutely everywhere. Like a constituency-sized “Where’s Wally?”, Strathern’s face pops up from out of hedges, emerges smiling from behind trees and stares back from front gardens just daring a chastened voter to have the gall not to back Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party.
There’s a strategy behind this. Strathern is a reassuring prospective parliamentary candidate for Thursday’s byelection. He is on unpaid leave from his job at the Bank of England where he specialises in the regulations around climate insurance but the 33-year-old has had numerous other roles on Threadneedle Street. In short, he knows money. He is empathic, personable and does not dodge the questions asked of him on the doorsteps, including on Starmer’s unusually outspoken comments around the need to face down local opposition to housebuilding.
Strathern is also not known to hold any views about dark deep state forces in Downing Street conspiring to oust Boris Johnson. He is not, to be abundantly clear, the former member of parliament and conspiracy detective, Nadine Dorries.
Mid Beds, a rural constituency, 50 miles north of London, where the Conservatives enjoyed a 24,664-vote majority at the last general election, is one of two seats up for grabs on Thursday along with Tamworth, some 80 miles further north-west, where the Tory majority in 2019 was almost 20,000. Despite these figures putting the constituencies squarely in safe Tory seat territory, they are this week very much in play.
Mid Beds is a three-way fight, with the latest polling suggesting the Tory vote has collapsed from 60% to 29%, with Labour also on 29% and the Lib Dem candidate Emma Holland-Lindsay a close third, with 22%. There hasn’t been any polling in Tamworth but it is looking tight between the Conservatives and Labour, with disaffected former Tory councillors in the region saying they believe Labour’s momentum will swing it.
Halloween may still be a couple of weeks away but it is evident from visits to both constituencies that the Conservative candidates have been horribly haunted on their respective campaign trails by ghouls from the past.
For the Mid Beds Tory hopeful, Festus Akinbusoye, who is the police and crime commissioner for Bedfordshire, the spectre on the doorstep has been the unusual behaviour of Dorries, a former culture secretary under Johnson, who had said she would resign as an MP last June on the promise of a peerage from the former prime minister but only did so 10 weeks later after realising that the seat in the House of Lords was not quite as “oven ready” as had been suggested.
She refused to budge, despite the despairing appeals from cabinet ministers and until she had completed her own investigation into why she had not been duly ennobled. Her previous decision to spend some of her time as an MP in the Australian jungle on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! also still rankles with some.
In Tamworth, it has been “the man, the myth, the legend” that is Chris Pincher, as one despairing constituent put it, who has been metaphorically lurking over the Conservative candidate, Andy Cooper.
It was only last month, that Pincher, a former whip, finally quit as MP after losing his appeal against an eight-week suspension from parliament for allegedly groping two men at a private members’ club last summer.
It was, for those whose political memory did not survive the shock treatment of the Liz Truss administration, Johnson’s dissembling over what he knew about Pincher’s reputation before appointing him that ultimately led to the cabinet resignations and his ousting from Downing Street. “Pincher by name, Pincher by nature,” Johnson had once reportedly summarised.
In both constituencies, the Tory candidates, when it has come to national media, appear to have taken the unusual approach of ticking the “no publicity” box.
Appearances have been highly limited, perhaps for fear of the Dorries and Pincher questions. A visit to the Conservative association near the centre of Tamworth, where piles of undelivered leaflets were waiting on trestle tables, did not tempt out Cooper, a councillor and engineering assurance manager at Network Rail who served six years in the army. The Tories do not have an office in Mid Beds but appeals at the doorstep of the registered address of his campaign, a stables near the village of Henlow, did not prompt a call from Akinbusoye.
The same cannot be said of their opponents. Indeed, the noisy politicking of the Labour and Lib Dem campaigns – with claim and counterclaim of dirty tricks, from the distribution by the Lib Dems of fake newspapers with misleading poll graphs to stake board stealing and volunteer harassment – has been picked by Akinbusoye’s campaign as a reason to stick with the Tories. “Labour and Lib Dems dive into the mud,” said a recent leaflet.
“I just don’t recognise that,” says Holland-Lindsay, 39, who has been knocking doors since Dorries said she would resign in June. She adds that she does not believe “that Westminster stuff” will impact on the final poll. “So, the Nadine Dorries experience is huge,” she says. “I mean, I’ve had so many lifelong Conservatives who have just said: ‘I’ve had enough I cannot do it any more.’ And that is a mixture of, you know, people saying to me: ‘I write to my MP. I didn’t get a reply.’ Or: ‘She refused to help me.’ You know, people saying that she’s not held advice surgeries.”
One female constituent on whose door Holland-Lindsay knocks in the pretty village of Milton Bryan pithily sums up the local feelings about Dorries: “Oh she is shit; she did not care.”
Holland-Lindsay’s claim to be the rightful inheritor of this Tory collapse is her longstanding work on the local council, and her insistence that “for the lifelong Conservatives, which of course there’s loads of here, it’s just a step too far for them to go to Labour”.
Peter Kyle, the shadow science, innovation and technology secretary, has accused the Lib Dems of a “scorched earth” approach that risks the Tories winning by default.
“There is a risk of course, that the Conservatives get back in but that’s why we’re campaigning so hard,” Holland-Lindsay says. “You know, we’ve done it in four other elections over the last few years.”
Labour’s candidate nevertheless has his tail up. The recent party conference shows Labour is ready for power, he says, with real momentum picking up in “the last week or so”.
Strathern claims he has seen voters “go on a journey, you know, from staunch Lib Dem to I will vote tactically, to I have already voted for you because I have seen the [September] poll”.
Thursday night could turn out to be a clean sweep, with Tamworth also turning Labour for the first time since 2005. “I think people are looking for change, and it isn’t any different in Tamworth,” says John Wade, a Tory councillor who became independent last year in protest against the party’s lethargic response to the Pincher accusations
Peter Thurgood, a former Tory mayor of Tamworth, who also now sits as an independent on the council, agrees Labour will probably nudge it. “It is going to be tight,” he says. “I think Labour will continue to grow in this area.”
Quite what Pincher is up to these days is unclear. Dorries has been publicising her book, The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson. She may soon be surprised to discover that the conspiracy to get Tories out reaches deep into the electorate.
