Marching alongside her fellow Liberal Democrats through Oswestry, their orange placards thrust triumphantly in the air, North Shropshire’s new MP insisted her sensational byelection win was about more than just voters aghast at recent headlines. “It was moving towards us even before the Christmas party stuff last week,” Helen Morgan argued. “We found that people really felt they’d been taken for granted here. When we told them they could have an MP who would listen to them and fight their corner, that message really resonated.” Something certainly resonated. Morgan’s win counts as one of the biggest byelection shocks ever, turning a near-23,000 Tory majority in the 2019 election to a Lib Dem victory margin of just under 6,000. “When did we know we were going to win it?” Morgan said. “Well, you never know until the day. But we were starting to feel more confident as the campaign progressed. People here really wanted change, and they wanted to send a message to Boris Johnson.” The victory was not without effort. “The Lib Dems have worked so hard here, the volume of literature and the number of calls, and the overall visibility of their campaign has been really fantastic,” said Jessie Miller, who works at an organic food shop in the town and voted for the party for the first time. Others certainly noticed the all-out Lib Dem campaign, likened by one weary rival to “carpet-bombing”, with households reporting they had been sent up to 15 leaflets. This was seen as the only way to stand a chance in what one Lib Dem campaigner called “the truest of blue Tory seats”, which in its various forms has had a Conservative MP for all but two of the last 189 years. John Biffen, who held a series of cabinet posts under Margaret Thatcher, was the local MP for 35 years. He was followed by Owen Paterson, born and bred in the area, who served for 24 years until his resignation after breaching lobbying rules in November. Initially, there was talk of opposition parties giving way to an “anti-sleaze” unity candidate, as happened in Tatton in 1997, when Martin Bell overturned a Tory majority of more than 22,000. Bell was also reportedly approached by the Lib Dems to stand for them, but declined. In the end, Paterson’s name and the lobbying scandal came up fairly little. But it was still a “toxic cocktail of local and national issues”, as one Lib Dem campaigner described it, that conspired to overturn the Tory majority. Access to healthcare and ambulance waiting times are a huge issue in the seat, with many voters telling the Guardian this was one of their main priorities when deciding how to vote. All four of Shropshire’s community ambulance stations, including in Oswestry and Market Drayton, closed in October to much local outcry. According to a West Midlands ambulance service boss the county “ran out” of ambulances on one day in November because all vehicles were queueing outside hospitals. A Lib Dem tally of the wording used on the many leaflets sent in the campaign said that while sleaze was mentioned 13 times, ambulances were raised 72 times, and farming on 41 occasions.
But then nine days before polls opened, the party was handed extra ammunition through repeated reports about parties at Downing Street in December last year, prompting nationwide anger. “It was like Barnard Castle on steroids,” one Lib Dem campaigner said. The party went full throttle, promoting a photograph of a Conservative HQ Christmas party, complete with buffet, to North Shropshire voters on Facebook within an hour and a half of it emerging. “Tell them the party is over,” quickly became their tagline. After his defeat, the Conservative candidate, Neil Shastri-Hurst, said the party would need to “reflect upon the result” and some Tory campaigners have been quick to blame “partygate” for the loss. But a number of voters also told the Guardian they were frustrated the Tories had not chosen a local candidate and felt Shastri-Hurst, a lawyer living in Birmingham, had little in common with the community. Tactical voting also played a major role in a seat where the Lib Dems, with Morgan standing, came third in 2019, with just 10% of the vote. In a speech on Friday morning, the former Lib Dem leader Tim Farron thanked “people who support Labour and the Greens who chose to lend us their vote”. Considering Labour has been the runner-up in every general election in the constituency bar one for the past two decades, the local Labour campaign was irked at the Lib Dems’ unilateral declaration that only they could challenge.
But there was no doubt the Labour candidate, Ben Wood, faced a lack of complete party HQ support. His campaign team say their chances were hampered all the more when one of the party’s MPs, Yasmin Qureshi, said in a radio interview: “Labour are never going to win North Shropshire. The Lib Dems do have an opportunity to do so.” Jessie Miller was among those who switched: “I always voted Labour, pointlessly, sadly, so this is the first time I felt like my vote has counted.” The Lib Dems were pushing the message that the shock result had burst the “Boris bubble”. “If we can win North Shropshire we can win anywhere,” Morgan said. But questions remain about whether the shock result shows a genuine shift in the tide of UK politics, or was itself the product of a byelection bubble.