Senior Conservatives have told Boris Johnson a swathe of seats in the “blue wall” across the south of England could be at risk, as his party was gripped by recriminations after the Liberal Democrats’ shock victory in the Chesham and Amersham byelection. Downing Street came under renewed pressure to ditch Johnson’s controversial planning reforms, which many backbenchers blamed for the humiliating loss of the Buckinghamshire seat. The byelection result represented a historic 25% swing to Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats, enabling their newest MP Sarah Green to overturn a 16,000-majority in a constituency that had been Conservative since it was created in 1974. A Tory MP representing a south-eastern seat said the upset was worrying, and that the Lib Dems had shown they could successfully rally voters against the government’s planning reforms, which would strip powers to object to developments away from local residents. They said: “There is going to have to be some consideration about either combating that messaging or changing the policy.” Backbench rebels now believe they have the numbers to defeat the legislation in its current form, though the bill is unlikely to come to the House of Commons until the autumn. Amanda Milling, the co-chair of the Conservative party, wrote on Friday night: “I am in no doubt that this result is a warning shot. And as co-chairman, I will ensure that we learn the lessons.” She cited planning and HS2 as areas of genuine concern. Fears are also running high in local government, with one Tory source warning: “No 10 needs to wake up quick to the fact that its ‘build, build, build’ agenda is going to destroy the home counties blue wall.” The Tory MP for Ashford in Kent, Damian Green, a former Cabinet Office minister, said the party could become “disconnected” if it failed to listen to voters. “People want some form of local control … people don’t want to feel that they’re going to have developments dumped on green fields near them when they and their local representatives have had no say over it,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “It’s a fairly thin form [of oversight] frankly and people don’t think it gives them enough protection.” Speaking at a victory rally in a Chesham community hall on Friday morning, Davey said: “Do you know what, I think there are many Conservative MPs across the country who are now worried.”
“People have been talking about the red wall. I think that after Chesham and Amersham, they’ll be talking about the blue wall, and how the Liberal Democrats are the main threat to the Conservatives in huge swathes of the country,” he said. To reinforce the point in a very literal way, Davey stood for the TV cameras in front of a wall made of blue plastic bricks and proceeded to knock it down with an orange mallet. He said there was “quite a bit of anti-Boris feeling” on doorsteps, and concern about the direction of the Conservatives under Johnson’s more populist and culture war-focused leadership. “For them, the emperor has no clothes,” Davey said. “Those sorts of traditional, liberal Tories care about foreign aid, things like free school meals for poor kids, and worry about civil liberties. And they’re just being ignored.” Johnson rejected the idea that he had neglected the south in his bid to conquer seats such as Hartlepool, which the Conservatives took from Labour in a byelection last month. He called the result disappointing and said there were “particular circumstances” at play. Aides suggested he was referring to HS2, the high-speed rail line which passes through the nearby Chilterns. Speaking to Sky News, Johnson said it was bizarre to accuse his party of being unpopular in the south. He pointed to the fact he had won the London mayoral election twice and insisted the Conservatives were “a great one nation party”. He also defended the proposed planning changes as sensible. “What we want is sensible plans to allow development on brownfield sites. We’re not going to build on greenbelt sites. We’re not going to build all over the countryside, but I do think that young people growing up in this country should have the chance of homeownership, and that’s what we’re focusing on,” he said. One backbench MP involved in campaigning against the planning reforms, however, said it was nonsense to blame the loss on HS2 alone. “It is related to planning: those members of parliament who went canvassing and saw the reaction on the doorstep know this to be the case. We’re being sent a message.” Some Conservatives privately blamed complacency at Conservative HQ for the loss of the previously rock-solid seat, but others pointed to Johnson’s stance on several issues, in particular the planning proposals. The Tory peer and psephologist Robert Hayward said: “It is clear that there will be a marked impact on Robert Jenrick’s intended planning legislation, because the message will come back for the whole of the south-east that this is what opposition parties are going to play on.” One Tory aide admitted: “I don’t think anyone in CCHQ expected such a big win for the Lib Dems.” They said building houses was important, but “we shouldn’t piss off our core Tory voters in the shires who could end up deserting us if we obsess too much on an unpredictable electorate in the northern ‘red wall’. We won them over in 2019 with a mixture of Boris and Brexit. Next time could be very different.” The former Conservative MP for South West Hertfordshire David Gauke, expelled from the party by Johnson over Brexit, said: “There is a realignment going on in British politics and that has favoured the Conservatives. It gave them a big majority the last time around because the first stage of this was the fall of the red wall. “But there are a group of seats, up to 30 or 40, where the Conservative vote is not Johnsonian, considers the government to be pretty populist, not focused on the interests of taxpayers, not sufficiently pro-business, and that vote is soft. And it’s vulnerable.” Highlighting Tory losses in his local area at recent local elections in “very prosperous, middle-class commuter areas”, such as Hitchin, Harpenden and Bishops Stortford, he said: “The current trajectory of the Conservative party is not particularly sympathetic to those areas, and the local residents are not particularly sympathetic to what the Conservative party has become.” The Liberal Democrats now have 12 MPs, eight of them women. In her acceptance speech, Green, a marketing company owner, said: “Together we have said: enough is enough, we will be heard and the government will listen.” Labour’s vote collapsed to just 622, behind the Greens on 1,480, suggesting the party’s supporters had swung their weight behind the candidate most likely to beat the Conservatives.