Lib Dems’ byelection victory suggests trouble for Tories in ‘blue wall’

Goodbye red wall, hello blue wall. The Liberal Democrats have been arguing for some time now that the outcome of the next general election will be determined not just by what happens in former Labour-held seats in the north of England, but by whether the Conservatives can hold on to their own heartlands farther south.

Friday morning’s shock result in leafy Chesham and Amersham suggests that keeping Boris Johnson’s 2019 election-winning coalition together may be much more of a challenge than Conservative headquarters previously thought.

According to a recent analysis by the thinktank UK in a Changing Europe, there are 23 seats – most of the them in southern England – which the Lib Dems could take from the Tories on a 10% swing.

They include Dominic Raab’s Esher and Walton seat, Jeremy Hunt’s in South West Surrey and Stephen Hammond’s in Wimbledon.

The Chesham and Amersham result was a much larger 25-point swing. Of course, byelection results are rarely replicated in a general election, when challenger parties cannot pour all their resources into a single seat. But the result appears to be a clear signal of unease in the shires.

The Lib Dems had already made significant gains across the south at May’s local elections, including in Buckinghamshire. But chipper Lib Dem activists on the ground said even they were surprised at the extent of disillusionment they felt on the doorsteps.

Boris Johnson’s Conservatives occupy a very different ideological position from their Cameroonian predecessors. They are arguably less liberal on social issues, less cautious on the public finances – and less constrained by the traditional Tory values that saw Theresa May stick with the 0.7% foreign aid target Johnson has now ditched (temporarily, he says).

The expulsion of a string of well-known liberal Tories – including Dominic Grieve, whose Beaconsfield constituency is next door to Amersham and Chesham – as Johnson bulldozed his way to Brexit underlined publicly just how much the party had changed.

At the 2019 general election, with Brexit still a live issue, and the Tories able to argue that a vote for the Lib Dems could “let Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street”, the Conservative vote held up relatively well in the south – with rare exceptions such as St Albans, which went yellow.

But while they have been focusing their political energy on the red wall – taking Hartlepool from Labour, for example – it appears the other end of the Tories’ electoral coalition is now fraying.

Perhaps the relentless focus on “levelling up” means relatively prosperous areas in the south, held by the Tories for many years, now feel left out of the national debate.

And without the bogeyman of Corbyn for Johnson to define himself against, it may be more evident to moderate former Tories that their party has left them behind.

There are specific policies, too, that have irked traditional Conservatives such as May, and which Number 10 could now hurriedly look at again – most obviously the dramatic overhaul of planning rules that will make it harder for local people to reject building projects.

For Ed Davey, who has struggled to put his party on the political map in the past year as the pandemic has narrowed the focus of the national debate, the timing of this result could not be better.

After a shattering couple of years, in which Jo Swinson went from posting leaflets through thousands of doors introducing herself as the next prime minister, to losing her own seat, the Lib Dems are back in the game.