Two doors along from Reptile World – “For all your reptile needs!” – in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, is the constituency office of local MP Peter Bone. On the signboard over the front entrance run the words “Listening to Wellingborough and Rushden”. But the signs are that Wellingborough and Rushden is no longer listening to Bone. On Friday one of the office’s windows was boarded up and the interior looked to be undergoing a makeshift refurbishment. To the front door someone had affixed a P45. In the box marked “leaving date”, they’d filled in “ASAP”. Last week the independent expert panel recommended that Bone should be suspended from the House of Commons following a report that found him guilty of a number of acts of bullying and “one act of sexual misconduct” – the report said that he dropped his towel and exposed himself to an employee on a work trip in 2013. Bone denies the allegations, but his parliamentary career appears to be living on borrowed time. If a six-week suspension is confirmed, a recall petition will be triggered and it’s likely that a byelection will be called. Bone has already had the Conservative whip withdrawn, but after the humiliating double defeats they suffered last Thursday at the hands of Labour in the formerly safe seats of Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire, it would be another byelection the Tories could dearly do without. Bone won at the last general election with more than 62% of the vote. In the current feverish political climate, however, constituencies with 18,500 majorities almost qualify as marginals. The “blue wall” looks like it is crumbling from a bad case of moral rot, the like of which has not been seen since the dog days of John Major’s government. With Chris Pincher, who had represented Tamworth, falling to sexual assault allegations and Nadine Dorries, former MP for Mid Beds, resigning having been denied the peerage that she deemed to be the pay-off for her devotion to Boris Johnson, there’s a distinct last-days-of-Rome feel about the long reign of Conservatism.
Just up the road from Bone’s office is the Swansgate shopping centre, one of those 1970s developments long due for an overhaul that never seems to be short of a birthday card shop. Milling around the precinct are one or two customers who remain Bone loyalists, but most shoppers say they wouldn’t vote for him, and of those many say the same about the Tory party. Typical is Tony, a senior citizen. “I’ve always voted Conservative before,” he says, “and I’ll never vote for them again. They haven’t got a clue what they’re doing.” He says he’ll vote for the Liberal Democrats if there’s a byelection. Joseph Sinyoro, a mathematics lecturer, goes a step further. “I’ll vote Labour this time,” he says. For Sinyoro, who didn’t think much of Bone as a constituency MP, the problem with the Tories is that they have had too many leaders and inflation is too high. “They haven’t managed the economy very well,” he says, adding that as a tax payer, he’s also concerned about asylum seekers. “If I voted Conservative again it would have to be Boris,” he adds, naming a man not well-noted for his sound financial governance. “He took us through Brexit and Covid.” Wellingborough voted heavily in favour of leaving the EU, and Bone has been an arch-Brexiteer. Sinyoro doesn’t think that Brexit has gone well, but he’s still pleased by the UK’s “autonomy” . Mike Parnell, who voted Conservative and for Leave, is more emphatic. “Brexit hasn’t worked out,” he says simply. In what specific ways? “Because of all the migrants,” he explains. “That’s what we voted for, and it’s not happened. It’s just got worse and worse.” Bone has actually sung this constituent’s song, voting consistently to toughen immigration laws. But Parnell says he wouldn’t vote for Bone “as a person after all that has gone on”. It leaves him uncertain where to go politically, though he hasn’t ruled out the Tories. Up until 2010 Wellingborough had flipped back and forth between Labour and Conservative. Bone or Brexit or perhaps both turned it into a safe seat. With widespread buyer’s remorse about the false bill of goods the Leave campaign sold, and Bone a politically cut-off figure, the conditions that secured the Tory monopoly no longer hold true. Instead there’s a lot of anger in Wellingborough about the situation in which Tory voters now find themselves. Josephine Clapson-Paige, who works in retail and is the mother of a young child, feels that the cost of living crisis has left her without a political home she can trust. “We’re in that in-between place,” she says, “where we’re earning too much to get help but not enough to be able to afford stuff. I’ve got no idea how to vote now. I think they’re all a bunch of morons.” Is Rishi Sunak listening to Wellingborough and Rushden?