Here's Why The South West Is Key To The Tories' Hopes Of Avoiding Electoral Oblivion
Torquay, in the seat of Torbay in Devon (PoliticsHome)
7 min read
The South West hasn't featured greatly in discussions about the Tories' biggest headaches heading into 4 July.
However, having won nearly 90 per cent of seats in the region at the last general election, the Conservatives face hemorrhaging territory to both the Liberal Democrats and Labour next week. If they are obliterated in the election, it is likely this area of the country will be a key one – and with discontent over everything from housing to the party's behaviour, they face an uphill battle.
“You’ve got to win, you’ve got to kick the Conservatives out”. Steve Darling, the Liberal Democrat looking to unseat the Conservatives in the seaside seat of Torbay, got the backing of one voter while he was out delivering leaflets this week.
Torbay is just one of many constituencies in this corner of England where Tory candidates hope highly localised campaigns — with limited reference to Rishi Sunak's struggling national party — will be enough to help them cling on.
The Conservatives won 48 of the 55 seats in the South West five years ago as part of former prime minister Boris Johnson's general election victory.
According to one Tory insider, however, because so much of the party's focus has been on 'Red Wall' Midlands and the North since that victory, the South West has been allowed to slip off the party's radar. They said figures in party high command had failed to remember the region's importance in electoral battles of the past.
“They forgot that we’ve lost the South West before, and they forgot that we’ve lost to both Labour and the Lib Dems in the South West," they said.
With less than a week to go until polling day, Ed Davey's Liberal Democrats are eyeing swathes of victories in Conservative-controlled seats across the region, while Keir Starmer's Labour, which opinion polls suggest will very likely win next week's General Election, could take back seats across Cornwall, Somerset, and more urban areas such as Swindon.
It would mark a stark change from the Johnson victory in 2019, when Labour’s successes were restricted to the cities of Bristol, Plymouth and Exeter, while the Liberal Democrats recorded their single win in Bath.
Devon’s patchwork of urban, coastal and rural constituencies means that issues such as farming and the regulation of holiday lets feature heavily in conversations on the doorstep, in addition to salient national concerns like cost of living and the NHS where the Tory record is under intense scrutiny.
Voters in smaller communities in the South West also stress the importance of respect and decency — values which some feel were trashed by Partygate.
Conservative candidates in the region describe local delivery as their strongest pitch to voters heading into polling day. The emphasis among Tories in the South West has been on local messaging, rather than visits from Rishi Sunak and other Cabinet ministers.
Anthony Mangnall, the Conservative candidate in the new South Devon seat, formerly Totnes, acknowledged that voters have had “a very very tough time” since the last election, but said that his own local record is being cited to him on the doorstep by voters who want to “stick up and support” his campaign.
Housing is usually the top policy concern in his seat and other across the region, Mangnall believes, with the demand seen up and down the country in a “balance” with the tourism sector that keeps the local economy turning.
He praised Government plans for a tightening of the rules on holiday lets, but also believes he and Kevin Foster, who is up against Darling in the next-door Torbay, have “secured a huge amount” for the area, and pointed to levelling up cash and improvements in local healthcare as their successes.
“If we lose maybe it will be for other reasons," said Mangnall, "but most people do recognise how much we have done for the bay and for South Devon and hopefully that comes out at the General Election.”
Simon Jupp, who has been in Parliament since 2019, is fighting the redrawn Honiton and Sidmouth seat against another incumbent, Liberal Democrat Richard Foord. Jupp had been the MP for East Devon, which no longer exists.
He thinks their unusual fight has focussed minds and like Magnall, believes that incumbency is important “because people are looking to politicians who aren’t just the one who sits in Westminster and gets up and talks on green benches but also gets stuck in locally and lives locally.”
Conservative campaigners in the South West's more rural areas have expressed frustration that the party's offer around farming and food, which they see as one of the strengths of their manifesto, that been drowned out by scandal and controversy.
It is in these rural areas where the Liberal Democrats are the Tories’ main opposition. The party won 15 seats at the 2010 General Election, but were left to build again from the ground up when that was wiped clean to zero just five years later.
Liberal Democrats leader Sir Ed Davey pets Jennie, the Guide Dog belonging to parliamentary candidate for Torbay, Steve Darling (Alamy)
Speaking to PoliticsHome, Darling said that he is “not taking anything for granted" in the Torbay contest, but the party has been buoyed by a recent council by-election result that saw them come within nine votes of the Tories in a usually safe blue seat.
Following the party’s near-wipeout nationally in 2015, the Lib Dems’ resurgence in the South West since the pandemic has been marked by a number of by-election victories in Somerton and Frome and Tiverton and Honiton.
While party leader Davey spent the first part of the campaign making headlines for his antics on paddleboards and waterslides, off camera the party's ground operation has had a discipline this time around that had not quite been there before, say Lib Dem sources.
Campaigners have been drafted in from other seats to help in those the party believes it has the best chance of winning, while moving resources away from constituencies where they have less of a chance, including those where Labour are stronger challengers.
Foord, Jupp’s opposition in Honiton and Sidmouth and one of the Lib Dem by-election victors, overturned a Tory majority of almost 25,000 two years ago. He believes the party's electoral operation is more refined than it has been in the past in this part of the country.
"We’ve had in the past some disappointments around overtargeting, around being overly ambitious in the types of seats we’ve targeted before," he said.
"We’re determined not to do that this time and to keep the focus.”
One Tory activist conceded that a collapse in trust of the government will have been acutely felt in rural communities, like a number of those across Devon and the West Country.
“Integrity matters in rural communities... Integrity and your word really matters because we don’t move around very much," they told PoliticsHome.
"The lack of integrity over the last couple of years has really rubbed up people in the South West in the wrong way. If you can’t trust your neighbour then your life is worse, because you rely on your neighbour, and that’s the way that we expect to be treated by everybody else.”
Both Darling and Foord say that the scandal of Partygate could be coming back to haunt the Conservatives, even more than two years on.
Darling believes people there remain “deeply deeply upset” by the Conservatives over the Partygate scandal, which remains, he says, “a deep scar on people’s lives”.
“I speak to lifelong Conservative voters who lost relatives and weren’t able properly to say goodbye to them," said Darling. He believes it "deeply deeply upset" people and left a "deep scar on people's lives".
Foord told PoliticsHome: “That may feel like a very long time ago to those of us who follow politics closely and have watched so many things unfold since but for many people who lost loved ones at that time or who feel that the economic turmoil has followed — this is their chance, this is the long overdue election where they get to deliver their verdict.”
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