For most byelection candidates, knocking on voters’ doors generally brings a response ranging from the apathetic to the openly hostile. But Alistair Strathern had a different experience canvassing in Mid Bedfordshire after Nadine Dorries finally announced her resignation.
“We were able to break the news to people on their doorsteps, and it was one of the most surreal evenings I’ve had,” said Strathern, the Labour candidate to replace the hard-to-dislodge Conservative MP, who quit 11 weeks after first saying she would.
“You could see the excitement it was causing,” he said. “I had some people calling their children to hear the news at the door. One woman got her dad from upstairs so he could hear the news too. It was a real moment. It really typified how frustrated people have been with the absence of representation.”
After her long and bitter resignation statement on Saturday, Dorries, the former culture secretary who clung on in the hope of discovering why she had been denied a peerage in Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list, formally became an ex-MP on Monday.
Strathern, a 33-year-old councillor in Waltham Forest who grew up in Mid Bedfordshire, said he had already been campaigning for 80 days, averaging 30,000 steps a day, with the date of the byelection still to be set.
There was, he said, nonetheless a sense of relief among local people “who have been increasingly fed up at the limbo” as Dorries, a fervent Johnson supporter, vented her frustrations with Rishi Sunak while being seemingly absent from the area she represented.
Despite very obvious local disquiet with an incumbent who last spoke in the Commons more than 400 days ago, Dorries won a near-25,000 majority in the 2019 election, which is a vast margin for Labour to overturn.
Complicating matters even further is the fact that the Liberal Democrats are equally bullish about their chances of winning the seat, and are the bookmakers’ slight favourites, despite coming a distant third in 2019.
Labour points to polling and modelling that suggest a Labour victory, and for the Lib Dems to again come third. Strathern said he and his team had encountered large number of disillusioned Conservative voters who had not only decided to abandon their support, but pledged to switch to Labour.
“We’ve been struck, even again today, by how many lifelong Conservative voters have been telling us that they are fed up with the way things have gone,” he said.
While the Lib Dems have enjoyed recent byelection successes in similar seats comprising rural areas and a handful of towns, such as North Shropshire and Somerton and Frome, Strathern said Mid Bedfordshire was more akin to Selby and Ainsty, the North Yorkshire constituency where Labour overturned a 20,000 Tory majority in July.
“It’s a rural seat, but it’s a rural commuter seat,” he said. “A lot of the people here go to work in places like Luton, London, Bedford, Milton Keynes, which obviously have got a much more traditional Labour presence.
“It’s a different type of rural. It’s feels very similar to the types of demographics of voters which we saw come back to us in Selby.
“And so far we’re having exactly the same warm response, exactly the same strength of, and all of the same signs that there are thousands of Conservative voters across the seat that, this time, will be looking to support us.”
The Lib Dems are, however, in no mood to back down, prompting speculation that a lack of an obvious anti-Conservative candidate could see this vote split, allowing the Tories to win again.
Speaking at the launch of polling firm WeThink, the Lib Dem president, Mark Pack, said Labour’s record of winning byelections from the Conservatives in southern England was “remarkably poor”, and that it had not pulled off such a feat in decades.
Mid Bedfordshire, said Pack, “is the sort of seat where the ceiling on the Labour vote is much lower than it is on the Lib Dem vote”.
That concern was shared by a Labour shadow cabinet minister, who privately admitted the party may have “hit its ceiling”. Pack also said national polling suggested that those intending to vote Tory were more likely to consider voting Lib Dem than Labour.
