The Conservatives have selected a councillor as their candidate to contest the byelection to replace David Warburton as the MP in Somerton and Frome after his resignation after allegations of harassment and drug use. Faye Purbrick, who sits on Yeovil Town Council and Somerset county council, was chosen to contest the vote that is expected to take place on 20 July – the same day as two other byelections in England. Last weekend, Warburton announced he will be resigning, 14 months after losing the Tory whip and being suspended from the party pending the outcome of an independent complaints and grievance scheme (ICGS) investigation into allegations of harassment and drug use. He admitted taking cocaine after drinking “tons of incredibly potent” Japanese whisky, but denied allegations he harassed a female political aide in his Westminster flat. He told the Mail on Sunday he felt he was denied a fair hearing by the watchdog.
One of Purbrick’s competitors is the Lib Dem candidate Sarah Dyke, who has admitted she “messed up” in an awkward interview with the Guardian politics podcast. Asked by John Harris about deprivation in the area, Dyke replied she had drunk her coffee a bit too fast, before asking: “What do you want to know? Something that’s a subject I don’t know anything about … I mean there’s pockets of deprivation. “I mean, what can we say on that really? … I don’t feel that I’m prepared at all for this, Ami [the Lib Dem press officer]. And it’s all getting a little bit above my station, sorry.” After audio footage went viral on social media, Dyke wrote on Twitter: “I messed up in an interview on the first day of this campaign. My passion and desire to do this job got the better of me and I got nervous. “I’m going to spend every day campaigning hard and proving to the people of Somerton and Frome that I’m the best choice for our area.” On Thursday, Labour said their candidate would be Neil Guild, who fought Taunton Deane for the party at the last election, which the Conservatives won. He served in the army with the Princess of Wales’s Royal regiment in Iraq and worked in highway services for Somerset county council. The Somerset seat that Warburton vacated has been safely Tory since 2015 – Warburton had a majority of more than 19,000 with the Lib Dems in second place – but the Conservatives are trailing in the national polls. On 20 July date there will also be elections in Uxbridge and South Ruislip in west London after the resignation of Boris Johnson a fortnight ago, and in Selby and Ainsty in North Yorkshire after his ally Nigel Adams also quit. A fourth MP, Nadine Dorries, who represents Mid Bedfordshire, also announced her intention to resign but is yet to do so formally. • This article was amended on 23 June 2023. An earlier version said that David Warburton’s Somerton and Frome constituency had been Conservative since 2010. This should have said 2015.