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The battle for North Shropshire The by-election was a referendum on Boris Johnson's leadership

Definitely not a Christmas party (Leon Neal/Getty Images)


December 17, 2021   8 mins

Uncle Peter’s Fudge Shop in Oswestry, North Shropshire, sags under rain. A man sucks his pipe and tells his tale: he voted Conservative for 60 years until 2015 [when Brexit repelled him] but no more.

“I was sent out as a child to go and canvas for the Conservatives,” he says. “I was sent out to get money and you would come back with half a crown if you were lucky and a load of abuse.” He removes his pipe, replaces it, and sucks on it again. “I done my little bit, and these are not the people I grew up with. These are not the people I voted for. When I grew up there was an old lady down the road. The thing she used to say, it stuck with me all my life: ‘You can hide from a thief. You can’t do anything with a liar’. And he [Boris Johnson] is. He wouldn’t know the truth if he fell over it.”

North Shropshire is farm land, dotted with medieval wool towns and small villages connected by pot-holed roads on which expensive buses run infrequently and late. The landed class is wealthy and well-established; the working class is white, conservative, un-unionised and earns less than the average wage. The largest minority is Bulgarian.

This constituency never sought to be a referendum on Boris Johnson’s leadership, but fate said otherwise when Owen Paterson, MP for 24 years, resigned for breaking lobbying rules, and the Prime Minster allowed his advisors to break lockdown rules and feast as people died alone. Paterson’s majority in 2019 was an enormous 22,949: 62.7% of the vote on a turnout of 67.9%. It seemed an insurmountable wall of blue, but then Boris Johnson came with chaos in hand.

The electorate here is raging, and combustible; party loyalty no longer matters, as voters behave like consumers. In May, they turned the council of Oswestry – the largest town in the constituency – Green, because, I am told, the Greens worked hard and the Conservatives neglected the constituency, because it is so safe. (There isn’t a Labour or Liberal Democrat councillor in the whole of North Shropshire.) Even so, the Liberal Democrats think they can benefit from protest and repeat their victory in Chesham and Amersham. They are, as they always do, busing in activists from all over the country, and painting the constituency orange. Doormats are buried under their campaign literature. They phonebank ferociously, “trying,” says the Green candidate Duncan Kerr, “to create a tidal wave of perception that it is going their way”. If they behave like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, driving in and cleaning up, it is working. They are now the bookies’ favourite.

Meanwhile Labour, which came second in six of the last eight General Elections and took twice the number of Liberal Democrat votes in 2019, is wielding a local candidate in the manner of a magical object: like Excalibur. He was born in Oswestry itself. “I’m Ben Wood,” he tells my Dictaphone because he is young, “I’m Labour’s local candidate in the North Shropshire by-election. I’m fighting a local campaign on local issues and the big message we are getting across is that our towns have grown but our public services are shrinking.”

The ambulance station in Oswestry just closed, he says, alongside ambulance stations in Market Drayton and Whitchurch. (People wait eight hours for an ambulance here.) There are fewer police on the streets and the school receives less funding than the national average, he adds; this election, like all rural elections, is about centralisation at heart. “I’ve got skin in the game,” he says. “I want to be a local champion and get people to buy, sell and make more locally.” For emphasis, we stop at a bread stall to buy bread made in Wrexham. “Strong trade here?” Wood asks the bread-seller. “It is a good market,” says the man, “[from] years of building it up. It’s like any market. You can’t flit in and flit out and expect the trade to be there.”

Wood is campaigning with Daniel Zeichner, the shadow minister for food, farming and fisheries; they walk together, with a local activist taking their photographs for social media. “Labour is reconnecting with the whole country,” Zeichner says. “What we are finding is that we are absolutely back in the game and people are really pleased to see a genuine alternative.”

Are they an alternative here: in a by-election, which is different from a general election?  The Liberal Democrats call themselves the opposition based on the undeniable truth that angry Tories are more likely to vote Liberal Democrat than Labour. The Liberal Democrats are both a brand and a bath of protest; you step in, lie down, and get out when you wish. Then there is their deceptive graph, which shows a “two horse race”: the Liberal Democrats closing in on the Conservatives.

The graph is based on the May Shropshire council elections (North Shropshire wards) in which, thanks to the Greens standing aside in many wards, they took second place for vote share, and lost their only seat in North Shropshire: in Wem.

Labour’s other problem is that their former candidate, Graham Currie, who stood for parliament three times, was prevented from standing this time for over-enthusiastic and unsanctioned Corbynism and posted a furious missive on Facebook: “These Stalinist tactics of the NEC flies in the face of the calls for unity within the Labour Party. I am now an outsider in my own party where I have campaigned and fought for many years alongside my fellow party members for a more equal, socially just and non-discriminatory society. Labour has a corruption in its soul.” Many local activists are staying home in protest, and some Labour voters might too.

So the opposition is divided. But the anger is not. I meet the landlady at the Bailey Head pub, opposite the town museum, which tells me that Barbara Pym and Wilfred Owen were born in Oswestry, and she says the Tories are now considered indecent; barely Tories at all. And if they aren’t Tories, you can abandon them, and remain a better Tory.

“This is a traditional community,” she says. “You have to be honest and decent in a small community because you will get found out. You can’t lie to people and deceive people and expect to get away with it. It’s really quite offensive to people who live like this, where everyone knows each other, we all know what’s going on, and people do look out for each other, to then realise someone you trusted has been so deceitful”. She repeats the party’s line on Paterson, bitterly: “He broke the rules, we will change the rules to suit him.” And then on the parties in Downing Street: “There wasn’t a party, or maybe there was, or we don’t know.” She continues, sounding astonished: “You are dealing with people who have faced losing their business or they had relatives die in hospital who they couldn’t be with and meanwhile Boris’s friends have had a party, and they are lying about it and they are laughing. There are people who have voted Conservative their whole life, now saying, ‘I can’t support that, I haven’t been able to see my kids’. And they have been taking the mickey out of us. There is a real sense of rage”.

One friend, she says, a man in his 70s, has always voted Tory but is now voting Liberal Democrat, “because he wants to give them a bloody nose”. She pauses and says with absolute conviction: “They can lose 20,000 votes here in a heartbeat.”  Many, she says, will stay home. Others are going to the Right: to Reform and Reclaim.

I cannot find Neil Shastri-Hurst, a barrister, for the Conservatives, but I am used to it: in four by-elections I have not met a single live Conservative candidate. They are shy, semi-mythical beings ever in peril of being chased into cupboards by Newsnight reporters. To appear in public is an opportunity to err. Shastri-Hurst is from Birmingham, which shares few issues with rural North Shropshire; he is a victim of the famous Conservative Party Central Office map, which pronounced that a farmer should stand in Hartlepool of all places. Shastri-Hurst’s enemies say he is from Birmingham in the same tone as you might say he is from France, or Iran. (One man suggested it was “dog-whistling”.) In any case, the Conservatives do not help themselves. During a flying visit to Oswestry, Boris Johnson called him Neil Shastri-Hughes [sic] and later, “Dr Neil”. “I’ve had much worse,” said the candidate, phlegmatically; and there was worse. “Very positive day campaigning in Wem for the North Staffs [sic] by-election,” tweeted Eddie Hughes MP.

There are novelty candidates too, of course: Russell Dean of The Party Party, who was born in Chester, is now a yacht broker living in Monaco and promises to fight sleaze and engage young people in politics. (His nephew is in charge on the ground.)

Then there is Earl Jesse for the Freedom Alliance standing for “political truth, medical freedom and individual prosperity” and bouncing around near Sainsbury’s in a flat cap hugging people with his party leader Jonathan Tilt. The problem with the Freedom Alliance is two-fold. First, they are too small to be a meaningful alliance. Second, though they have some good instincts — why close small shops in lockdown, when supermarkets stay open? — they rapidly sound completely insane. But they do hug you.

I find Boris Been-Bunged – also known as Faux Bojo — for the Rejoin EU Party in Oswestry by a yellow Mini that says Bollocks to Brexit (“vote tactically, we will be back”). He is a comedian and a Boris Johnson impersonator, who once pole danced with strippers as Faux Bojo in Secrets the nightclub and has burned his scalp from bleaching his hair blonde. His real name is Drew Galdron.  He believes that Westminster “isn’t a democracy, it’s theatre” and he would know. The resemblance is uncanny. He amuses passers-by (he takes on the voice, which is nothing like his own) and he seems, as is usual for a comic, far more at ease as the man he despises than as himself. “People imagine I get a lot of stick,” he says. “Actually, what annoys me far more has been the sheer amount of sycophancy I’ve seen from a lot of people who like him”. Later, he is heckled by a drunk woman, who calls him a cunt, which clearly dismays him. He takes refuge in the Liar Liar coffee shop, but some lads spot him through the window. “It’s Boris!” they scream, giving thumbs up but sideways; a half thumbs up, then. But I sense the love still: for his courage – it is a mad kind of courage. I wonder if they will vote for Faux Bojo because they think he is Boris Johnson, and this has all been a terrible mistake.

Laurence Fox is here too with his candidate Martin Daubney, a former journalist. They spend a lot of time in the Fox Inn, tweeting about living in a one-party state, and how Covid is just like a cold.

I meet Duncan Kerr for the Greens. “This place is similar to many places in England,” he says. “It’s been Tory for so long that they’ve got very complacent. They don’t listen to people. They haven’t got a plan. There is an awful lot of Cake-ism [in the campaign literature]. We will fix the potholes; we will fix the ambulance service; everything is promised”.

In Whitchurch, another fine medieval town with a pinkish Baroque church, I find hope for the Conservatives: if you can call ennui hope. The landlord at the Bulls Head pub says no one is discussing sleaze “and we have been quite busy. There doesn’t seem to be any take-up for it really. Everybody thinks its crazy; everybody does the same thing. I think people are fed up with it.”

But not all: “I’m appalled,” says one woman, formerly a lifelong Conservative, of the “party business. I felt really let down. He should be good and stay good.” But she twinkles at the thought of him, and in that twinkle is, potentially, his salvation. “Tell him.”

They still talk about him as if he were a naughty child; and they still believe in his redemption, which they think has a universal meaning: the king and the land are one. “I do like Boris,” says another in Costa Coffee. “I don’t know why. I’m not going to let him down now. He’s trying.” The relationship Johnson has formed with the voters is not broken yet. But it hangs by a thread.

It is easy to assume the Conservatives will win with a greatly reduced majority. Superficially at least, the Liberal Democrats have a harder task than in Chesham and Amersham, where the Conservative majority in 2019 was much smaller than it is here (16,223 or 55.4% of the vote) and Labour barely campaigned. There was almost a levity to the protest vote in Buckinghamshire. But here people feel more betrayed; their objection is less trivial, and more heartfelt. In Old Bexley and Sidcup, the by-election held this month after James Brokenshire died, the Tories lost more than 18,000 votes – though they won. Brokenshire was liked and admired. Paterson is not; and the electorate has never been more volatile.

Not everyone agrees. I meet a man whose job is to decide if Christmas lights can be hung on medieval houses in Whitchurch. He stares at them, holding a clipboard, pondering.  “Even if the Prime Minister came here and said he would sacrifice their first-born child they would still vote Conservative,” he says. He turns and looks at the line of medieval houses, thrilling in their irregularity, wondering which, if any, are sturdy enough to bear light.


Tanya Gold is a freelance journalist.

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J Bryant
J Bryant
2 years ago

I’m not much into local UK politics but I must say the author can write. It’s wonderful to know England still has these small, rural towns where people live a life I thought had died out a couple of generations ago. Long may it continue.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
2 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

I used to live around there and the idea that these folk will risk letting a property- and business-hating Labour party into power in any election that counts is for the birds.

Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

It’s assumed by the political and journo and chattering classes that they are the puppet masters controlling the minds of us plebs, but I contend, it’s the other way round.
I mean by that, the politicos they are just projections of ground-roots ground-swells of hopes, wishes, desires, dissatisfactions, anxieties and so on. We are, in effect, creating them, they are projections of us (in aggregate, but with endless numbers of localised variations). The leaders are buffeted mercilessly by the wants and likes and dislikes of the mass of people, us, who created them. The puppet masters are us, not them. It’s almost like inventing gods simply so we can give them a good kicking once in a while. And if a few (or many) people also get kicked around as a side-effect, well, shit happens. Or as the Indians say, Shiv happens.

D Ward
D Ward
2 years ago

If you are going to go with a protest vote, for heaven’s sake don’t make it the Non-Lib Non-Dems. Take it from me. We are represented by one and it’s a disaster.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
2 years ago

It’s all very interesting, no doubt, but the fact is – as I keep banging on – that since 1945 there has been only one GE in which a government with a working majority was defeated and replaced by the opposition which won its own working majority. That one occasion was in 1970, when Wilson lost a majority of 66 to Heath, who won one of 30. But the 1970 electorate was not the same as that of 1966 because the voting age had just been lowered.
Every change of governing party since 1945 has been heralded by the government first losing its working majority before the contest. Attlee lost a snap election in 1951 that he went into with a majority of only 5. The Conservatives lost in 1964, but Wilson in winning gained a majority of just one seat. When ousted in 1974 the Conservatives were a minority administration, as was Callaghan in 1979, as was Major in 1997. Brown inherited a Blair majority for 2010 and hence the Conservatives didn’t defeat him outright but merely won the most seats.
There’s no reason to think this pattern will change. Boris’ majority would be 100 on fair boundaries so he’s not going to lose, not even to an incoming 2010-style minority. If that were on the cards Labour would be polling 47%, there would be years of solid Labour leads in leader approval, Labour would have a coherent plan for government and a credible non-anti-Semitic shadow cabinet, and the government would be losing all these by-elections rather than holding on or even winning them, as we’ve been seeing.
Boris’ popularity is taking a blip but none of the above is happening. The next election will be a Conservative victory. The interesting question is when and whether the Tories conclude that it will be smaller under Boris than under someone else; that and no sooner is the point at which he gets ousted.

Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

I agree. Because for Labour to win the most seats let alone a majority, they would have needed to be a street ahead by a year ago, which they were not. They should be 15+% up all the time by now and they are not. Absolutely everything is screaming the Conservatives will win a bigger majority next time than 2019, why is this not patent to everyone? If it is still Johnson at the helm, is a different matter. There are already indications that he is fed up, not with governing, but with that lack of earnings that entails. But he won’t want to go until he ‘secures his legacy’ – that’s always what Tory PMs are most bothered about. It goes with the self-myths the Tory party creates for itself.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
2 years ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

Yes, the key question here is what Conservative MPs make of it all. Those whose seats depend on a good win won’t be satisfied with a Conservative majority of 35, because that would mean at least 20 of them losing their seat (in reality more because there are net losses comprising gross losses offset by a few gains). That’s where the letters demanding a leadership election come from.
They’ll be looking at who’s best placed to deliver the same, or a bigger, majority in 2024. It need not be Boris, but Boris may be fortunate in that right now there are several plausible alternatives to him, rather than just one or none. Starmer is still in post partly because Labour always lets its leader fail in a GE before booting him, regardless of how rubbish he obviously is, but mainly because there is no obviously better successor – in fact, everyone else is far worse.

Last edited 2 years ago by Jon Redman
Colin Elliott
Colin Elliott
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

I suppose one bright light in the current darkness is that starting from scratch, we are now two years into this Conservative government, and accumulating track records for the contenders for senior appointments, a kind of survival of the fittest.
I feel most sorry for Patel, because as is well known, the Home office is the hardest to survive.

Last edited 2 years ago by Colin Elliott
Ferrusian Gambit
Ferrusian Gambit
2 years ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

I doubt Labour can win – at least not with a full majority – because the demographics of the party now make that nigh-on impossible for them unless they radically rebrand to appeal to the normal non-London middle England, a task of which Kier Starmer look completely incapable. But equally this kind of numerology about parties needing to be x% above y years before the election is just meaningless pattern spotting. It is true that low-points in popularity tend to occur within the lifespan of a government just by sheer probability given the majority of the time they are not in campaign season. And yes it is true some governments are stuck in a death spiral and lose the election because they never recover and stay in low ratings – that of course foretells landslides like 1979 or 1997.
But it is just as dangerous to suddenly have one of those random blips of low popularity happen by chance just before or during an election – ask Ted Heath and the 1974 election after the miner’s strike which led to a Labour government despite the fact Labour had not been consistently popular during Heath’s time, or indeed before, really since the moment Wilson devauled the pound in 1967.

Last edited 2 years ago by Ferrusian Gambit
Jon Redman
Jon Redman
2 years ago

The overall rule I set out still applies regardless.
In 1959 the Tories won a 98-seat majority. In 1964 Wilson was unable to overturn this decisively and won only a 2-seat majority. This wasn’t an adequate working majority so in 1966 he called a snap election and improved it to a decent 66 seats. In 1970, he became (and remains) the only PM since 1945 to lose from a majority to an Opposition that gained its own (28-seat) majority – but as noted, the electorate of 1970 wasn’t the same.
In Feb 1974 Heath lost that majority, but to a hung parliament; again, Labour couldn’t defeat outright an incumbent majority government. In October 1974 Wilson improved again, to a majority of just 2. This wasn’t a working majority either, it became a minority, and Labour was thus able to be defeated at the next GE.
By 1997 Major’s 20-seat majority had gone and his was a minority propped up by the UUP. Unlike 1992, when they faced a majority of 100, this time Labour was able to win.
Brown’s poll ratings before 2010 were cataclysmically bad, but his 60-seat majority ensured Cameron could not defeat outright an incumbent majority government.
There is simply no way the Tories lose to a rival majority in 2024, any more than the government did in 1966, 1974, or 2010, and probably they don’t lose at all. If such an upset were going to happen, it would be evident in polls, council elections, and Labour by-election victories already. It’s not.
Boris’ 2019 result was thus a two-term victory: he won 2019 and 2024. The question now is who is best placed to deliver another two-term victory, i.e who in 2024 can win big enough to secure 2028/9 as well – which may no longer be Boris.

Last edited 2 years ago by Jon Redman
Ferrusian Gambit
Ferrusian Gambit
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

“There is simply no way the Tories lose to a rival majority in 2024, any more than the government did in 1966, 1974, or 2010, and probably they don’t lose at all. If such an upset were going to happen, it would be evident in polls, council elections, and Labour by-election victories already. It’s not.”
Agreed, but I think this has more to do with the anaemic state of the Labour party in 1966 and today (or indeed the Conservative party in 1974 or 2010) than any psephological iron law of politics.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
2 years ago

The two things may be opposite sides of the same coin. You win a majority because the other guy is rubbish. It takes a while for the punters to be persuaded the other guy has improved. So he doesn’t win outright until the punters perceive that’s he’s solid and you’re rubbish.
Net, the effect is that you don’t recover from epic defeats like 1959, 1983, 1997 or 2019 in one term. You’re going to need two more elections before it turns round.

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

The Labour majority in 1966 was 98, not 2, one of the largest ever, and one of the few times a party won more than 50% of all votes cast. In 1964 it had been 4, not 2, and gave Wilson a working majority.
Which rather collapses the whole theory.
But more relevantly to present circumstances, the fact that the previous government had a large majority does not mean that it is bound to win the next time. Look at elections until 1945 (when Attlee won a huge majority overturning a massive National Conservative one (from 1935)). Voter behaviour can be very fickle and change rapidly; and there is the factor of the influence of third parties, such as LibDems, Scots and Welsh Nats, and Northern Ireland. Any collapse of the Scots Nats from now would almost certainly vastly increase the Labour vote in Scotland.
If the Tories continue to behave in an incompetent way and sleaze allegations are proven further, they will loose to Labour in 2024, or before. There is an issue of the failure to sort out constituency boundaries which is costing around 20 seats to the Conservatives (because Conservative constituencies are larger); it is very strange that Boris does not use his majority to deal with this.
But if Starmer goes on retaking the middle ground and if he can make some headway in Scotland he has a very good chance of winning; the unknown is whether disaffected Tories will flee to the LibDems. They might, if Starmer looks moderate

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
2 years ago
Reply to  JR Stoker

It was 1964, not 1966, when Labour won its 2-seat majority; they needed 316 and they won 317. 2 seats are not a working majority. One death or bout of illness and you no longer command the house.
You’re correct re 1966 being bigger but it was 96, not 98, and they won 48% of the votes, not a majority. It took Labour two elections after the Conservative 1959 victory for them to achieve a majority of their own.
The point still stands – unless the demos changes, as it did between 1966 and 1970 with the reduction in the voting age, you don’t overturn a majority the size Boris has in one election cycle. That Starmer will fail to do so is evident is his leader ratings, the mediocrity of his team, his failure to win by-elections and the absence of any sign of recovery in mayoral or council elections.

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

1964 Labour won 317, Conservatives 304, Liberals 9. That’s a majority of 4. A new Speaker was then elected from Labour. Working majority 2

1966 Labour 364, Conservatives 253, Liberals 12. That’s 99, but the existing Speaker stayed on, majority 98

So we are both right!

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
2 years ago
Reply to  JR Stoker

Whether 2 seats or 4, it’s still not enough to govern, which is why there was another election within 2 years. Attlee’s majority was reduced from 140-odd in 1945 to 5 by 1950 and because he couldn’t govern with a majority of 5 he called an election in 1951, to try to get a bigger majority, which instead he lost.

Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

I hope you’re right. I just want tories in power for the next 10 years so we can fully embed Brexit and start getting its strategic benefits in train. Everything else is just fluff – but disenchanted tories are in a rage about the fluff and have that air of complacent hubris that usually foretells disaster in other walks of life. And the electorate seems rather flighty.

Last edited 2 years ago by Ian Stewart
Philip L
Philip L
2 years ago

Laurence Fox is here too with his candidate Martin Daubney, a former journalist. They spend a lot of time in the Fox Inn, tweeting about living in a one-party state, and how Covid is just like a cold.

We mock the downplaying of severity and yet:
Professor Tim Spector told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the “majority of symptoms” of the Omicron variant are like a common cold, including headaches, a sore throat, runny nose, fatigue and sneezing.
He said: “In London, where Covid is increasing rapidly, it’s far more likely to be Covid than it is to be a cold.”
Panic buy Kleenex?
Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-59664383

Cheryl Jones
Cheryl Jones
2 years ago

First guy stopped voting Tory in 2015 so is irrelevant. Weird because everyone I speak to doesn’t really care about Christmas parties because ‘we all broke the rules at some points if we’re honest’ and see this furore as a distraction and political opportunism. To be honest with all the shenanigans and media hyperbole and just being fed up of Covid the public might just decide to give the govt a bloody nose. Another weird thing is though, that Labour and the LibDems assume that if the Tories are unpopular that they will be popular. I personally think a lot of people are pissed off that the Tories aren’t conservative *enough* and Reclaim, Reform and others might do the damage by splitting the vote.

Colin Elliott
Colin Elliott
2 years ago
Reply to  Cheryl Jones

Boris must feel sore that he’s pilloried for a ‘party’ he didn’t even attend and of which he may not have been aware at the time. To me, it looks as though the office simply enjoyed some time at their employer’s expense, as indeed have I and colleagues in several companies over more Christmases than I wish to count.

John Riordan
John Riordan
2 years ago

“He believes that Westminster “isn’t a democracy, it’s theatre” and he would know.”

What, because of saying Bollocks to Brexit and campaigning to overturn the 2016 referendum even though it has been confirmed in every general election since?

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
2 years ago
Reply to  John Riordan

These clowns are useful splitters of the left vote.

Dustin Needle
Dustin Needle
2 years ago

An article that saves me going to the Guardian website and finding out (at zero cost) what they think.

Leon Wivlow
Leon Wivlow
2 years ago
Reply to  Dustin Needle

Well, you certainly wouldn’t pay for The Graun.

AC Harper
AC Harper
2 years ago

Every stand alone by-election is ‘Referendum’ on the current prime minister and government. Sprinkle on a few comments from some colourful characters and stick in some info on the candidates.
Honestly the stuff writes itself.
Now predict the winner and their majority and I’ll start paying attention. The last two paragraphs don’t quite achieve that state of certainty.

Last edited 2 years ago by AC Harper
Jonathan Story
Jonathan Story
2 years ago

For readers from North Shropshire: the repeated sting jobs on Johnson are nothing more than that. There is a 12-month olf film of Ms Stratton, giggling: what has this to do with Johnson? Zilch. Don’t believe a word of it. Johnson opted to lead Brexit: the reason for that is that we MUST be self-governed. Johnsion delivered. He is NOT a liar.

Cheryl Jones
Cheryl Jones
2 years ago
Reply to  Jonathan Story

He has a flair for dramatic obfuscation though. But yeah I don’t fall for this constant screaming of liar liar liar – methinks they doth protest too much.

Colin Elliott
Colin Elliott
2 years ago
Reply to  Jonathan Story

But it’s very useful material for uninterrupted propaganda by those who wish to destroy him, or at least influence today’s by-election, including the state-owned broadcaster.

Al M
Al M
2 years ago

I find Boris Been-Bunged – also known as Faux Bojo — for the Rejoin EU Party in Oswestry by a yellow Mini that says B0ll0cks to Brexit (“vote tactically, we will be back”)”
They just can’t leave it alone, can they?

Colin Elliott
Colin Elliott
2 years ago
Reply to  Al M

No. I’ve happened upon fora which plot and dream, and are quite direct about it, so the EU’s strategy of ensuring negotiations continue for years to come has potential, and I doubt we’ll have the benefit of that second referendum.

Zorro Tomorrow
Zorro Tomorrow
2 years ago

If the Tory squeezes in that’s still a warning. If the LibDems squeeze in N.Shropshire are annoyed. Labour? They are livid and will put up with 18 months of nothing until it’s time to chuck them out. Tice or Fox? Now that would be time to sit up and take notice. I still think Sir David Arness’s seat will be the wake up call.

Cheryl Jones
Cheryl Jones
2 years ago
Reply to  Zorro Tomorrow

Sir David’s seat isn’t being contested though.

Zorro Tomorrow
Zorro Tomorrow
2 years ago
Reply to  Cheryl Jones

Poor turn out?

Christine Hankinson
Christine Hankinson
2 years ago

This England eh. Tears flowed.

Dylan Regan
Dylan Regan
2 years ago

Very well put together article. Great read

Iris C
Iris C
2 years ago

I think it also helped that the Liberal Democrats voted not to endorse the additional Covid restrictions recently placed on the populace by the Conservative hierarchy.

Richard Slack
Richard Slack
2 years ago

There is nothing like a by-election is there. What is not to like? Well actually the residents in the constituency usually don’t like it. When a by-election is caused by the death of the sitting member then there is a degree of sympathy and an acceptance for the need to another contest but if the member resigns in disgrace or in a huff then the electorate does not easily storm back to the ballot boxes (the only exceptions I would make is when a member resigns and re-contests the seat on a point of principle.)
By-elections used to take place in a mood of distinguished ennui but now, of course they are big box-office for the media. The result will usually be that all sorts or rather unusual and sometimes unpleasant people will throw their hats (usually decorated top hats) into the ring and attempt (and usually fail ) to engage the electorate with a mixture of agit prop and street theatre.
Shropshire North didn’t let us down and there was a clear majority for stay at home which is not reflected in any of the usual post election post-mortems (such as “is the the end for Boris”, “is this the sign of a Lib Dem revival” “has Starmer overcome the Corbyn legacy”). And why should it, if party politics is seen in such old-fashioned formulaic terms.
I am just about old enough to remember the Orpington By-election in the early 1960s which was supposed to herald the start of a new Liberal revival, by 1970 they were down to only a handful of votes and their leader almost lost his seat. The Liberal By-election wins in the early 70s left little behind by 1979. Those that won seats for the SDP in the early 1980s soon lost them having held up the promise of serious mould-breaking. When in 2010 the Lib Dems finally achieved the Holy Grail of the “balance of power” they sacrificed their position to support the Conservatives in a flurry of privatisation and austerity in return for a half-arsed referendum on Proportional Representation which the Tories allowed happen while opposing it.
My reading of history suggests there have only been 2 by-elections which actually effected anything, Fulham East in 1933 which convinced the National (i e Conservative) Government that re-armament would not be popular and Maldon in 1942 where the wartime truce was by-passed when the Journalist Tom Driburg ran as an independent on a policy of a more vigorous conduct of the war and a firm plan for reconstruction afterwards. He probably achieved this as the pressure to commission the Beveridge report was too much for Churchill to resist. He also added a great deal of gaity and wit to British politics

Ferrusian Gambit
Ferrusian Gambit
2 years ago
Reply to  Richard Slack

The same thing happened in Chesham and Amersham which was occasioned by the death of Dame Cheryl Gillan. This analysis seems to be a case of whistling past the graveyard to me. The Tories have been taking their core constituency for a ride in the aim of gaining seats in red wall Labour areas by spending like a sailor on shore leave – mainly with the money of the hardworking and dynamic people of the shires – and trying to destroy the value of their hard earnt properties and people aren’t happy.

Last edited 2 years ago by Ferrusian Gambit
Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
2 years ago

We need a new Whig party

Cheryl Jones
Cheryl Jones
2 years ago

The SDP?

Mel Shaw
Mel Shaw
2 years ago

Looking at the numbers last time and assuming a 30% turnout and that reform and UKIP will siphon off a couple thousand votes, I think this could be recount territory this time. I don’t know who will win, except Boris certainly doesn’t.

Christopher Gelber
Christopher Gelber
2 years ago

Very nicely written. All anecdotes and extrapolations, but I got a feel for the place, and that shows ability.

Last edited 2 years ago by Christopher Gelber
Ferrusian Gambit
Ferrusian Gambit
2 years ago

Or maybe it was a referendum on the whole ‘Red Tory’ strategy. With Brexit done keeping to coalition together was going to be impossible despite what some talking heads here (delusionally) wanted to believe.
The Thatcherites will soon be back in the box-seat and there will be plenty of salty tears from Red Tory types.

Last edited 2 years ago by Ferrusian Gambit
Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
2 years ago

The Tory party should be renamed the ” ToileTory Party”, given that is is run by and for polyester clad, pointy shod ” reound veowel seounds” from the Sevenoaks tribe, whose knowledge and understanding ” eoutside” of their own petit bourgeois tribe is zero.