Goodbye red wall, hello blue wall. The Liberal Democrats have been arguing for some time now that the outcome of the next general election will be determined not just by what happens in former Labour-held seats in the north of England, but by whether the Conservatives can hold on to their own heartlands farther south. Friday morning’s shock result in leafy Chesham and Amersham suggests that keeping Boris Johnson’s 2019 election-winning coalition together may be much more of a challenge than Conservative headquarters had thought. According to a recent analysis by the thinktank UK in a Changing Europe, there are 23 seats – most of them in southern England – which the Lib Dems could take from the Tories on a 10% swing.
They include Dominic Raab’s Esher and Walton seat, Jeremy Hunt’s in South West Surrey and Stephen Hammond’s in Wimbledon. The Chesham and Amersham result was a much larger 25-point swing. Of course, byelection results are rarely replicated in a general election, when challenger parties cannot pour all their resources into a single seat. But the outcome appeared to be a clear signal of unease in the shires, and sparked alarm among MPs whose seats could be vulnerable.
There were early warning signs for the Conservatives in the recent local election results, with the Lib Dems making gains across the commuter belt, including in Buckinghamshire. But on Friday, delighted Lib Dem activists said even they were surprised at the extent of disillusionment they had heard on the doorsteps. Johnson’s Conservatives occupy a very different ideological position from their Cameronian predecessors. They are less liberal on social issues, less cautious on the public finances – and less constrained by the traditional Tory values that saw Theresa May stick with the 0.7% foreign aid target Johnson has ditched (temporarily, he says). The expulsion of a string of well-known liberal Tories – including Dominic Grieve, whose Beaconsfield constituency is next door to Amersham and Chesham – as Johnson bulldozed his way to Brexit underlined publicly just how much the party had changed. At the 2019 general election, with Brexit still a live issue, and the Tories able to argue that a vote for the Lib Dems could “let Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street”, the Conservative vote held up relatively well in the south – with rare exceptions such as St Albans, which went yellow. But while they have been focusing their political energy on the red wall – taking Hartlepool from Labour last month, for example – it appears the other end of the Tories’ electoral coalition is now fraying. Johnson himself was quick to point to “particular circumstances” in Chesham and Amersham – a remark aides suggested referred to the bitter local antipathy to the HS2 rail project, which passes through the Chilterns. But perhaps, too, the relentless focus on “levelling up” means relatively prosperous areas in the south, which the Tories have held for many years, now feel taken for granted. The individual policy that best exemplifies the repositioning under way under Johnson is his radical planning reforms, aimed at taking on Nimbies, to boost housebuilding and win over a new generation of voters. The plans, which would make it harder for local people to object to developments once a top-down zoning has taken place, have infuriated traditional Conservatives, including May. An alliance of Conservative backbenchers, many but not all representing southern seats, now believe they can defeat the plans when the bill comes to parliament. No 10 is bullish – but planning looks set to become the next flashpoint in the battle for the soul of the Tory party.
For Ed Davey, who has struggled to put his party on the political map since winning the leadership, the timing of this result could not be better. After a shattering couple of years, in which Jo Swinson went from posting leaflets through thousands of doors introducing herself as the next prime minister, to losing her own seat, the Lib Dems are back in the game.