Kelly Tolhurst is doing an event in the constituency this afternoon. But it’s running late and so I’m afraid I’m going to miss it.
After a fleeting visit, I’m not an expert on Rochester politics, but I know a bit more about the byelection than I did nine hours ago. There are four more weeks until the vote, and the situation could easily change, but here are my answers to the questions I flagged up at the start of the day.
- Are the polls right? Is the Ukip lead solid? And will Ukip supporters stick with the party in the general election?
Yes, they probably are. The Ukip lead does look solid. And, if my conversations with Ukip supporters are any guide, these people are not going to flock back to David Cameron easily.
- Now that the Tories have a candidate (Kelly Tolhurst was selected last night, following an all-postal ballot of voters in the constituency), will that make a difference? Is she any good?
Not much difference, though she has made a good impression on people. (I haven’t met her.) And to find a Tory with strong opinions about Gaza (see 4.50pm) is a rare treat.
- Do Rochester voters like Reckless? The Tories believe he’s a less appealing candidate than Carswell, and there have already been hints they will run a negative campaign against him? Will that work?
Reading about the byelection from London, it did look as though the Tories’ only hope might be tear down Reckless with highly negative, personal campaign. But voters seem to respect him and, if that ever was an option, the Tories now seem to have abandoned it.
- Will Labour and Lib Dem supporters vote tactically to keep Ukip out? Or might they do the opposite, and back Ukip to undermine Cameron?
I didn’t find any evidence to suggest that tactical voting could help the Conservatives win. But I did not meet any Labour supporters planning to vote Ukip just to destabilise Cameron either.
That’s all from me for today.
Thanks for the comments.
And here’s an extract from the story.
In November 2012, Ms Tolhurst said she was “disappointed” that Britain had abstained during the United Nations vote on Palestinian statehood. Only last week, in the wake of the Parliamentary vote on Palestine, Mr Cameron reasserted the government’s position, saying recognition was an issue to include in peace negotiations.
During Israel’s Pillar of Defence operation to stop Hamas rocket attacks she posted tweets using hashtags including #Palestineunderattack and #VivaPalestina.
The Conservative Party has not yet responded to a request for a comment on Ms Tolhurst’s stance.
In a statement issued to the JC, Ms Tolhurst said: “I obviously condemn violence on both sides and agree with the Prime Minister that it is always wrong for anyone to target civilians.
“I am personally committed to the two-state solution; and think that the priority for our country is to work with our international partners in the region to ensure that a lasting peace is firmly established in Israel and Palestine.”
Tim Montgomerie, the founder of ConservativeHome, is not happy about this.
Very disappointing that the Tory candidate in Rochester advocates a boycott of Israel http://t.co/8Wx5ErGAiG
— Tim Montgomerie (@montie) October 24, 2014
Updated
Ladbrokes say they have made Ukip even firmer favourites to win in Rochester in the light of the EU demand for another £1.7bn. This is from the Ladbrokes press notice.
With developments in Brussels appearing to play into the party’s hands, the bookies have been forced to make them even firmer by-election favourites at just 1/7 (from 1/5).
Conservative candidate Kelly Tolhurst now appears to have a real fight on her hands and as such her odds of beating Mark Reckless have jumped instantly to 9/2 from 7/2. The Conservatives, who were odds-on for the race at the start of the month are now at their biggest ever price.
Despite being installed at 7/1 Labour have drifted to 33/1 giving the contest the appearance of a two-horse race.
On the subject of Mark Reckless’s drinking episode on budget night (see 4.12pm), a Ukip spokesman says that that this “does come up a bit” on the doorstep. But the spokesman says what people do not realise, is that Reckless has not had a drink since. In Ukip, where Nigel Farage is never seen without a pint in his hands, that must be quite a challenge.
10 things I've learnt from talking to the voters in Rochester
For those of us who write about politics for a living, talking to the people who actually do the voting is always a salutary experience. I spent more than an hour on Rochester high street and I had long conversations with about 20 people, and fleeting conversations with a few more. This is what I learnt.
1- Ukip seem well ahead. People planning to vote Ukip, or leaning towards Ukip, outnumbered Conservative supporters by at least two to one. I only spoke to one Labour supporter, and others were either undecided, or would not say.
2 - Immigration is overwhelmingly the issue affecting the voters I met. “It is about time somebody stood up and said enough is enough. This [immigration] has gone on for too long, especially when you’re someone like me who’s has a son who’s had a hard time getting a job,” one female pensioner told me. And this is driving Ukip support. When I asked Lee Frost, a former maintenance worker, why he thought Ukip would win, he told me it was because “everyone is pissed off” [with Europe and immigration]. A former prison officer said he was supporting Ukip because “at least Ukip are listening to what people say.” And it was not just blue collar workers who were making comments like this. A woman who works a GP practice manager told me that she was switching to Ukip from the Conservatives because she was fed up with the impact of immigration.
This area has gone down so quickly in recent years. There is a street here that English people cannot walk down without feeling threatened.
When I challenged her about it this, she would not name the street, but said it was “well known”. If you were Eastern European, you were okay, she said.
3 - Ukip is attracting support from all sides. Ukip supporters were more likely to be former Tories, but I found one person backing Mark Reckless who voted Labour in 2010 and another Ukip convert, Matthew, a 48-year-old electrician, who did not vote at the last general election, but who did vote liberal in the past.
4- Kelly Tolworth, the Conservative candidate, is well regarded. I did not find anyone raving about her, but those who had a view were positive. “She came to my parents’ house and I happened to be there and she’s a lovely lady,” said Baiju Patel, 37, who runs a cake shop and plans to vote Tory. “She’s a good candidate, a local girl,” said Helen Runcorn, 34, another Conservative voter from 2010, but one who now could vote Ukip.
5 - There is some hostility towards Ukip, but not much evidence of an anti-Ukip tactical vote. “I do like Mark Reckless, but I’m not quite sure about the party that’s he joined,” said Barbara Southworth, a retired medical records officer who was not sure she could vote for Reckless under a Ukip banner. I did not find anyone planning to vote Conservative to keep Ukip out, although a Tory campaigner told me he had met some people planning to do just that. By contrast, when I visited Newark earlier this year, there was a clear Labour/Lib Dem anti-Ukip tactic vote (for the Conservatives). One theory is that that is because Roger Helmer, the Ukip candidate in Newark, was more polarising because of some of his reactionary views.
6 - Mostly voters are quite favourable towards Reckless. A while back Tories were claiming that Reckless was an unpopular MP best known for getting so drunk one night he could not vote for the budget. I did not find any evidence of that. No one mentioned the drink incident, and, apart from one former Labour voter who blamed Reckless for a council decision to close a library, nobody seemed to bear any antipathy towards him. At one point it looked as if the Tories were going to run a negative campaign against him, highlighting the drinking episode and his supposed “treachery”, but sources at Tory HQ suggest that this plan, if it ever was being considered, has now firmly been dropped.
7 - Voters have noticed today’s story about the EU demanding an extra £1.7bn from Britain. At least two people mentioned it spontaneously, and seemed to have a good understanding of the details. It reinforced their intention to vote for Ukip.
8. Ukip’s call for an Australian-style point-based immigration system is popular and well understood. Again, two people mentioned it spontaneously when explaining why supported the party. “What they need to do is what they do in Australia, where they have a quota,” one man told me.
9 - Voters are sceptical about whether David Cameron can achieve real change in Europe. “Cameron is not going to get anything out of Europe. It is written into the constitution that we cannot stop them coming in,” said TP Chisnall, a retired oil industry adviser, echoing a point made by others.
10 - Opposition to immigration is fuelled more by concern about the impact on jobs and services than by anger about immigrants claiming benefits. In fact, none of the Ukip supporters I met complained about immigrants getting benefits. “Some of the East Europeans are the hardest workers,” said one man who had worked alongside Eastern Europeans in the building trade. There was, though, widespread concern about the impact of immigration on the health service. One woman said:
I’m not racist at all, but when our own people cannot get appointments because of how busy the Gps are, something has to change.
And one occupational therapy assistant, who wasn’t supporting Ukip even though her more vocal partner was, complained about the money being wasted on translators being brought in for people with medical appointments who failed to turn up. Race wasn’t a particularly issue either. One of most fervent Ukip supporters I met was a nurse from the Philippines who has been in the UK for 10 years and who, with her partner, told me they delivered leaflets for Ukip.
Updated
And here’s the Conservative HQ in Rochester.
Tory HQ in Rochester pic.twitter.com/CjimDnFkF8
— AndrewSparrow (@AndrewSparrow) October 24, 2014
Today’s Medway Messenger is running a story saying the HQ has attracted complaints. “This is, quite frankly, an eyesore in a conservation area,” Bob Ratcliffe, president of the City of Rochester Society, told the paper.
I’m still writing up my vox pop. It’s coming soon.
According a post that Laura Pitel has written for the Times’s Red Box email briefing, Ukip are using a new IT campaign tool in Rochester for the first time.
[Ukip] has spent two years on a campaign system that is being rolled out for the first time in Rochester. Built by a programmer for Lloyds investment bank and designed for use on iPads and smartphones, it combines socio-economic data with information from credit ratings agencies to target voters. It is said to be working well.
Ukip is of course very excited. But as the party has enjoyed good results with only clipboards and blank sheets of paper, the new system could be another important step on its journey towards professionalisation – and further success.
Ukip HQ in Rochester pic.twitter.com/VLXAIyoAOE
— AndrewSparrow (@AndrewSparrow) October 24, 2014
I’m back from my vox pop, sitting at a table at the (very good) Cafe@172, and ready to write up all I’ve picked up this morning.
Ukip tell me that Survation aren’t doing a poll for the Mail on Sunday after all. Apparently it was cancelled because it would come too soon after the ComRes poll.
At the Tory campaign HQ, which, like the Lib Dems’, is also on Rochester high street, they’re refusing to accept claims that their all-postal ballot was a bit of a flop. (See 8.53am and 10.56am.) One source said:
I’m not surprised that Ukip are talking us down, because their candidate was chosen by six people in London. Our candidate was chosen by 1,000 times more people.
As for the low turnout, compared to other all-postal primaries (see 8.53am), the party think that is to a large extent explained by the fact that there were televised debates between the candidates in the other, pre-2010 contests. That was not allowed this time because of election rules.
The Tories have got Michael Gove, the chief whip, and Stephen Crabb, the Welsh secretary, campaigning in the constituency today. Here’s a photo that Stefan Rousseau took last time Gove was here on a visit.
Photo du Jour: Michael Gove campaigns in Rochester for forthcoming by-election. By Stefan Rousseau/PA pic.twitter.com/A79YjDXuUO
— Stefan Rousseau (@StefanRousseau) October 16, 2014
Kelly Tolhurst, the Conservative candidate, is doing a campaign event this afternoon.
I’m now off to do some vox popping. I won’t be posting again for at least another hour.
Labour’s candidate in Rochester is is 28-year-old PR consultant Naushabah Khan. I’m not going to have time to spend with Labour today, but my colleague Rowena Mason covered their campaign yesterday.
Here’s an extract from her story.
Speaking to the Guardian, Khan acknowledged that Labour was not putting as much financial resources into this contest as its two big rivals. “The issue is partly that Ukip and the Tories have thrown the kitchen sink at this election and that is just not something that is possible for the Labour party, because we don’t have the same sort of millionaire donations that they do,” she said.
“We do have our canvassers out on the ground and we do have a strong activist base already … But, again, it does come down to the Tories [having] already spent a significant amount of money on this election, which we ultimately can’t match at that level.”
Labour sources agree they are not willing to spend the same amount of cash as the Conservatives, who are desperate to avoid a Ukip win that could spark a wave of defections and plunge Cameron into serious trouble within his party. While the Tories have already done two mailshots, including a personal message from the prime minister, at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds, Labour is just now delivering its first round of leaflets by hand.
David Coburn, the Ukip MEP, has taken to Twitter, to declare the Tory all-postal primary a disaster.
There is something terribly wrong going on in Tory Rochester campaign - Primaries only got 4,000 votes cast - Disaster
— David Coburn MEP (@DavidCoburnUKip) October 24, 2014
Here are the key polling figures for Rochester.
The general election result in 2010
Conservatives - 49.2% (23,604)
Labour - 28.5% (13,631)
Lib Dems - 16.3% (7,800)
English Democrats - 4.5% (2,182)
Greens - 1.5% (734)
The Survation poll from the start of October
Ukip - 40%
Conservatives - 31%
Labour - 25%
Lib Dems - 2%
The ComRes poll from yesterday
Ukip - 43%
Conservatives - 30%
Labour - 21%
Lib Dems - 3%
Greens - 3%
Survation are doing another poll for the Mail on Sunday this weekend, according to Ukip.
At Ukip HQ they are surprised that Kelly Tolhurst won the Conservative all-postal primary only very narrowly. From the way senior Tories were going out of their way to promote her, it seemed obvious that the party expected her to emerge as their candidate, Ukip say.
That was also the view of journalists who saw Tolhurst alongside the other Conservative in the all-postal primary, Anna Firth, at an event last week.
My Guardian colleague John Crace said in his sketch that Tolhurst was clearly the better candidate.
First up on the hustings after the prime minister’s introduction was Anna Firth, a local barrister. She lost her audience the moment she opened her mouth.
The Tories aren’t going to hold off Ukip with a candidate straight from central casting and a voice that sounds like a radio presenter from the 1950s. “This is the Home service,” she said. “Today I want to talk to you about hospitals, schools and preserving the village green … ” Radio static from decades past mercifully filled the airwaves and blocked out the rest of her address.
Then came Tolhurst, a larger than life local woman who talked as if she’d happily take Reckless out in under three rounds.
And the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts came to a similar conclusion.
Miss Tolhurst rose, doing so with such vigour that her chair yelped. She is daughter of a Rochester boat builder and spoke with a Kentish accent.
Throwing her strawberry-blondeish hair off a bean-shaped forehead, she proclaimed her local credentials – why, this was the very hut where she had once collected her Brownies presentation badge.
Words fell from her as fat Bramleys from an autumn orchard’s bough. Rochester was her home town and she would never wish to stand for Parliament elsewhere.
I’m one of you,’ she said, lowering her head like a heifer about to charge, a hint of a squint in her determined gaze.
She kept using the word ‘deeply’, uttered with a shudder of her upper timbers and a flick of the lips. ‘I care DEEPLY about hospitals. I care DEEPLY about the NHS.’
She had been in hospital only last week and her life had once been saved there ...
Mrs Firth seemed a decent sort but if the open-primary voters next Thursday have the remotest concern for the guild of parliamentary sketchwriters they will select Miss Tolhurst.
Life with Kelly, I have a fancy, is seldom dreary. She is the sort of normal-background, Eurosceptic, plain-talking snorter of a lady the Tories need more of. And I bet she’d scare the pantaloons off public schoolboy Reckless.
As expected, Ukip are ecstatic about the EU demand for the UK to pay it another £1.7bn.
I’m just been in the Ukip office on Rochester high street, and, as I was leaving, two of their MEPs, David Coburn (Scotland) and Nathan Gill (Wales) arrived for a day’s campaigning. It was the first thing they wanted to talk about.
This is from Coburn.
This is going to absolutely crush Cameron. It’s going to be dynamite. It could not be better. If that doesn’t hit him, nothing will. We are expected to bail the French out and it is going to cost £27 for every man, woman and child in Britain.
And this is from Gill.
Cameron is making huffing and puffing noises now, but he is not going to not pay this money. It seems like the EU is now punishing us for success. We did not join the euro, we’ve worked damn hard as a nation to get back on our feet, and we are now being asked to pay another £1.7bn, while they are giving money back to the French and the Germans because they are not doing so well.
Ukip MEPs Nathan Gill and David Coburn at Ukip HQ in Rochester pic.twitter.com/qlK7f2s2WG
— AndrewSparrow (@AndrewSparrow) October 24, 2014
I’m writing this up now from Costa Coffee. Here’s the view from the street outside.
Rochester High Street https://t.co/r1a7ohxDbH
— AndrewSparrow (@AndrewSparrow) October 24, 2014
At Rochester station Conservative activists were handing out four-page leaflets promoting Kelly Tolhurst, the businesswoman and councillor selected as the party’s candidate last night. She was chosen in an all-postal primary, which involved ballot papers being sent to every voter in the constituency (not just party members).
All-postal primaries are expensive, and the Tories have used them just twice before, in Totnes and Gosport. The big advantage, though, for a party is that this is a process that should produce a candidate with wide, mainstream appeal.
But there are suggestions that this has not worked in Rochester because the turnout was only 7.5%, which is far less than it was in Totnes and Gosport.
This is from Mike Smithson, the Political Betting editor.
Putting CON Rochester primary turnout in context Totnes 2009: 16,497 Gosport 2009: 12,659 Rochester 2014: 5,588
— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) October 23, 2014
And this is from Rob Ford, the academic and co-author of Revolt on the Right, an authoritative study of Ukip.
Low turnout in open primary another setback for Cons in Rochester. Aim was to engage and energise members - looks to have totally flopped.
— Rob Ford (Britain) (@robfordmancs) October 23, 2014
In a post for Political Betting, Smithson explains why he suspects the real turnout could be even lower than 7.5%.
I’m off now to the Ukip HQ.
Updated
Is Jean-Claude Juncker, the incoming European commission president, a closet Ukip agent? That would be one explanation for the news that the European commission wants Britain to pay an extra €2.1bn (£1.7bn) into the European Union budget by the end of next month. In four weeks there will be a byelection in Rochester and Strood and it is hard to think of anything Brussels could do more likely to boost Ukip’s chances.
Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, has described this as the most important byelection for 30 years. There are probably at least half a dozen byelections that could fit that description, but this is a very important one for Ukip, and for David Cameron too. Earlier this month Ukip won its first election to the House of Commons when Douglas Carswell retained his seat after leaving the Conservatives, defecting to Ukip and triggering a byelection. In Rochester another former Tory, Mark Reckless, is doing exactly the same thing. But there is a crucial difference. In Clacton the Conservatives took one look at the seat’s demographics, and at Carswell’s popularity, concluded they had no chance, and effectively threw in the towel before poling day. In Rochester, they took a decision that they could win and that they would fight it with all they’ve got. After the Clacton loss there were only faint ripples of discontent in the Conservative parliamentary party. If David Cameron loses Rochester, some MPs are predicting a leadership challenge.
And so far it is not looking good for him. There have been two polls in the constituency and they have both shown Ukip in the lead: by nine points (Survation for the Mail on Sunday at the start of October), and by 13 points (ComRes yesterday).
I’ve just arrived in Rochester and I’ll be here all day writing a blog about how the campaign is going. Here are some of the key questions I’d like to address.
- Are the polls right? Is the Ukip lead solid? And will Ukip supporters stick with the party in the general election?
- Now that the Tories have a candidate (Kelly Tolhurst was selected last night, following an all-postal ballot of voters in the constituency), will that make a difference? Is she any good?
- Do Rochester voters like Reckless? The Tories believe he’s a less appealing candidate than Carswell, and there have already been hints they will run a negative campaign against him? Will that work?
- Will Labour and Lib Dem supporters vote tactically to keep Ukip out? Or might they do the opposite, and back Ukip to undermine Cameron?
I’ll be talking to people in the constituency during the day and so I won’t be updating the blog quite as regularly as I normally do. But by the end of the afternoon there should be plenty of posts here that give a good insight into the campaign.
If you want to follow me on Twitter, I’m on @AndrewSparrow.
