With bunting fluttering and thousands of brightly blazered rowing enthusiasts lining the river for the Royal regatta, Henley-on-Thames looked every inch the Tory stronghold it has been for well over a century. But in the small hours of Friday morning its Conservative MP had fallen to a heavy defeat at the hands of a Liberal Democrat – the first time the former seat of Michael Heseltine and Boris Johnson had slipped from the party since 1906. Freddie Van Mierlo’s win over Caroline Newton with a 6,267 vote majority was no freak result. The affluent Oxfordshire town – a “rather self-satisfied” place was one voter’s thumbnail description – was the mid-point of an almost unbroken 200-mile arc of more than 20 constituencies seized from the Tories. Sir Ed Davey’s party won 71 seats – the most in its history. It was no wonder Davey was filmed dad-dancing to Sweet Caroline at Lib Dem HQ while activists cheered him on. The party was again the third largest in parliament, replacing the Scottish nationalists. The swathe the Lib Dems cut through the southern Tory heartlands started in Eastbourne in East Sussex, passed through seats in Surrey, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Somerset before ending in north Devon. Gone were bastions of Tory rule held by the former housing secretary Michael Gove and the former prime minister Theresa May as lifelong Conservatives delivered an electoral punishment beating. In Henley and Thame, their ire was not so much reserved for the party of Rishi Sunak but for that of his predecessors Liz Truss and Johnson. It was widely felt they had done the damage.
So, on the rowing club terraces and among the boathouses from which crews of rowers were periodically cheered out on to the water, it was surprisingly easy to find voters who had turned to Davey’s party. Martin Copus, 69, a sports consultant, was watching his son Jamie compete and said he had voted Lib Dem on Thursday partly because of the commitments the party made to clean up Britain’s waterways. His son, he said, may have contracted E coli from this stretch of the Thames while training. “The big issue round here is the sewage in the water and the Lib Dem candidate was very big on that and took the water companies to task,” he said. “There’s an awful lot of rowers here and if you really care about the river and what’s going down in it, you are going to vote Lib Dem.” The party had made a big play of tackling water pollution, with Davey paddling, falling and splashing about for the cameras in rivers and lakes across the country – and it had worked. “He was making an effort to get across to everyone,” said Piers Ashley-Carter, a construction executive, sipping champagne with rowing friends by the Leander Club. “I do think it was effective.” Ashley-Carter switched his Conservative vote to the Lib Dems in the nearby Abingdon constituency partly because he had lost trust in the party to tackle planning and environmental reforms, both important for his work.
He also highlighted Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget, saying: “For someone so intelligent, how the hell did he screw it so, so badly? For the first time ever, I voted Lib Dem.” Henley had been the scene of one of the Lib Dems’ myriad campaign stunts. Daisy Cooper, the party’s deputy leader, successfully photobombed a campaign appearance by Sunak when she ploughed up the river in a boat packed with orange sign-wielding activists. But it was not just the stunts that worked. Repeatedly voters said it was the number of door knocks they received from the Lib Dems, and the volume of signs and posters in the area, that persuaded them the party was serious. The new Lib Dem MP for the neighbouring seat of Bicester and Woodstock, Calum Miller, ascribed his own victory over the Tories to “a positive, optimistic campaign”, but conceded many voters were punishing the incumbents. “People were being driven away from the Conservatives first and then considering us, but towards the end of the campaign there were people saying we came to you in protest [but] now we like what we’ve found,” the former senior civil servant told the Guardian. Away from the spectacle of the regatta, David Holliday, 43, a restaurateur who previously voted Tory but switched to Davey’s party explained: “I got very weary of it all – the fact they can’t govern themselves let alone anyone else. It’s an embarrassment.” He talked about the way businesses struggled to cope during the pandemic and said: “[The government’s] example was terrible – fast-tracking all their mates [for contracts].” He added: “A large section of the population has come to the conclusion a toddler could do a better job than what has been going on in number 10.”
For Zoe Ferreira, 42, owner of the Henley Larder delicatessen, voting Lib Dem was “a no-brainer”. “The candidate was good,” she said. “He talked about business while the Conservative candidate didn’t say anything. When I met her she said she was not familiar with the shops in Henley. Henley has been under the thumb of the Conservatives for too long.” Ferreira said she wanted the place to become more progressive. Meanwhile, having a beard trim at a Turkish barber, rowing coach Mark Banks said he had voted for the Tories since the days of Margaret Thatcher but had switched to the Lib Dems. Asked why, he said: “There’s so much. They have been giving more money to the NHS and it is still broken. We’re paying more tax than ever before, but I can’t think of one thing that has got better over the last 14 years.” Johnson’s intentions to reform social care and level up were admirable, but the party had failed on both fronts, he said. “If you were overseas and had to say the reasons to come and live in the UK, I can’t think of any.” On 4 July, the people of Henley were in no mood to continue their 118-year relationship with the Conservatives.