The Personal Side of Elections
On 4 July 2024, like the rest of the country Portsmouth went to the polls to elect an MP. It was one of the greatest privileges of my life to be on the ballot for the city where I was born, and the campaign was full of experiences that I will never forget.
This time last year I had no expectation that I would run for Parliament, but I got a call from an old friend and City Councillor who asked me to put my name forward in Portsmouth South.
This decision wasn’t one I took lightly, and it followed conversations with my family who I lived with at the time. At the back of my mind through these conversations was safety. It’s impossible to be a candidate now without thinking about the dangers MPs and prospective MPs face. As a result many candidates, myself included, chose not to have their full address on the ballot paper. On reflection, that was one of the most important choices I made during the election.
A few weeks after that, I had one of the most challenging conversations I’ve ever had with my family. I had to inform them that we had received a particularly nasty death threat against me following a campaign email. I reassured them that our address was not shared anywhere, but that they should be careful just in case. In the days that followed, I attended security briefings with Hampshire and Isle of Wight Police and all candidates were offered Home Office security.
While Portsmouth South was won by the Liberal Democrats as recently as 2010 and the party has run the city for 16 of the past 20 years, I was under no illusion that it was a challenging seat. With a secure Labour incumbent and a bloc of voters who support UKIP and the Brexit Party the wind was not in our favour.
Early in the campaign one thing stuck out – where are all the Conservatives? At the last election, they won almost 18,000 votes and from 2015 to 2017 there was a Conservative MP. Yet after several evenings knocking on doors, I couldn’t find a single Conservative voter. Had their vote really dropped so far? Perhaps they were shy?
It became clear as we started homing in on where the Conservative vote had historically been strongest. I recall one conversation in particular, where a lifelong Conservative voter answered the door, more than happy to talk. Once I asked how they now intend to vote, it was as if I’d opened a jar of immense frustration – they told me “I will never vote Conservative ever again. I even voted Green in May”.
This was the first time I’d found someone on the doorstep so readily saying they were deserting the Conservative Party. Upon some discussion, it seemed to all come from one event; not Partygate, not the mini budget, not the sewage dumping scandal, all of which were later mentioned by others as reasons they wouldn’t vote Conservative. It was down to a single leaflet the Conservatives put out during the local elections.
“They wrote about lycra-clad cyclists who eat avocado and enjoy spacious cycle lanes which should be ripped out” the voter explained to me. After a brief pause, this voter said “They are talking about my husband!”.
At that point it struck me. A political earthquake is afoot as large parts of the Conservative Party had started to attack its own base – the upwardly mobile, professional classes who once propped up the Conservatives were now the target of the right wing of the party. Meanwhile, the voters that the right of the party sought to appeal to had already left, singing to the tune of Nigel Farage and his Reform Party candidates.
While in my own patch this didn’t shift the dial, I thought about the surrounding seats in the Home Counties where the Conservatives entirely depend on this ‘lycra-clad, avocado-eating’ demographic. As I visited these seats – Winchester, Guildford, Chichester and East Hampshire, it was all borne out, there were massive changes going on where the Conservative vote was clearly collapsing. Day after day, we got trickles of electrifying news about this seat or another where the Blue Wall was crumbling.
I couldn’t be prouder of the result we achieved nationally. I still feel lucky to have been part of that result, and to have won the support of almost 4,900 people locally – the first time the Liberal Democrat vote share has increased since 2010 in the constituency.
After the election I have a renewed respect for those who put their name forward in more challenging seats. Without the expectation of a surprise result, they put themselves on the line to give each of us the chance to vote for a vision we all believe in. I am fortunate to have shared a campaign with first-time candidates from the Green Party, Reform, Conservatives and an Independent who all played this critical role in democracy with me.
