Election focus: West Worcestershire
The beautiful countryside of rural West Worcestershire has been Conservative “since the Romans”. After years of legwork, could a Liberal Democrat insurgency be about to make an improbable breakthrough?
Its quaint villages and green fields, from the River Severn to the Malvern Hills and much further north of Worcester, makes this one of the country’s most quintessentially English seats. It is the sort of place where people measure petrol prices in pounds per gallon, not pounds per litre. Getting stuck behind tractors on narrow lanes is an everyday occurrence. Roadside signs advertise the forthcoming British Asparagus Festival.
There could not, on appearances, be anywhere more Conservative. Sir Michael Spicer is stepping down after 36 years as the constituency’s MP. It and its predecessor constituency Worcestershire South, which was established in 1950, has never been anything else.
It’s as if Conservatism – with both a big and little ‘c’ – is engrained in the local culture. The parish networks, the fabric of rural life, are intricately connected with the party’s dominance. Who would want to change anything about this? Not the farmers. Not the elderly people enjoying the slow pace of life.
In the remote village of Elmley Castle, on the south-western border of the seat, I met a Conservative councillor who embodied these qualities. She had got involved in developing the village hall, a smart little building used by the 80-odd local schoolchildren. Solar power on the roof helped raise £1,000 for local coffers. This is what David Cameron is talking about when he asks for ordinary people to join ‘the government of Britain’.
Yet astonishingly, almost inconceivably, the streets of West Worcestershire are becoming increasingly filled with diamond-shaped orange signs. There are no superficial differences between here and next door Mid-Worcestershire, the safe-as-thatched-houses seat of the Commons’ business committee chairman Peter Luff. But Liberal campaigners have spent years – some say decades – focusing on this patch of glorious England. Some have literally been working the seat since the 1980s.
That makes the Lib Dem candidate, Richard Burt, something of a latecomer. He has been working on this seat for four years, combining his life as a PPC with being the husband of Solihull’s Lib Dem MP Lorely Burt.
“We have worked incredibly hard,” he says. “We are taking nothing for granted and will keep both our feet firmly planted on the ground.” Yet the implied sense is that the Lib Dems are on top, genuinely expecting to take this seat. Can it really be so?
Burt points to local politics to back up his point. Six of the constituency’s ten councillors are liberal, bucking the county-wide trend. Last October the Lib Dems won a hotly contested local by-election with a 16% swing. True, they lost control of the Malvern district council in 2007. But the party brushes this away, in private at least, by referring to its disastrous proposal to shut a number of public toilets. The bottom line, no pun intended, is significant Lib Dem progress.
That has all come since the 2005 election, when candidate Tom Wells halved Sir Michael’s majority to just under 2,500. In the Lib Dem campaign headquarters, bizarrely located in the depths of a furniture warehouse in Malvern, strategists point out Wells achieved that result despite only reaching just over 70% of voters. Things have improved logistically: one campaigner proudly points out that 100% penetration, or near enough, has been reached this time. In a constituency of 80 square miles, which takes well over an hour to cover from one end to the other, that’s quite a feat.
Burt is keen to downplay the idea that the Lib Dems don’t fit in Worcestershire, of course. The party has representation in Montgomeryshire and Herefordshire, as well as the MP for Ludlow for over a century. “All around this area there’s been a very strong liberal tradition,” he says.
“In Malvern, there’s a huge well of retired intellectual liberals who give their weight and support to our campaign. People like what they see and think this time they might vote for it.”
His big selling point on the doorstep, however, is not intellectual liberalism. It’s himself. The word “proactive” crops up time and time again on the doorstep, as Burt seeks to sell himself as a busier, more engaged MP than his predecessor. Sir Michael, Lib Dems claim, only held one two-hour surgery every month. As the seat takes 75 minutes to drive across from north to south, that’s not much.
Harriett Baldwin, Burt’s Conservative rival in this campaign, understands she needs to offer something more. While very carefully skirting around her predecessor’s record, she says she will offer a very different “style and approach” to constituency surgeries. “I want to be out and about and accessible,” she pledges. Baldwin will hold one surgery a week, rotating between West Worcestershire’s towns and villages.
She is also on the defensive over her background. It’s surprising this is an issue, as Burt doesn’t own a home in the constituency. He explains this to voters by talking about his wife’s work as an MP. “We have a very strange life, really,” he muses, adding “we’ll share our married life in London during parliamentary time”. It wasn’t clear whether the woman on the doorstep shaking her head slowly was being sympathetic, or just confused.
Despite this, Burt is pressing forward by attacking Baldwin as an outsider. “I think it’s quite clear that Harriett has been parachuted into this constituency,” he says. She sought to get into the Folkestone and Hythe seat, but failed, so she came to West Worcestershire. She was a former “City banker” in London for 20 years. The phrase is dripping with negative connotations.
“She’s had plenty of time to explain her view in banking and city bonuses,” Burt says frankly. “I don’t think she’s done that successfully to other people’s satisfaction in the constituency, so it is a bit of a legacy and a bit of a millstone around her neck as we lead up to polling day on May 6th.”
Baldwin is frustrated by his approach – “they’ve indulged in cheap banker-bashing” – but refuses to attack her opponent. Instead of a dirty campaign, she and her team of local Conservatives are concentrating on highlighting Lib Dem policies. In particular their amnesty on illegal immigrants, capital gains tax hike and “rejection of our approach to tackling the deficit now” are being highlighted. Baldwin thinks this approach is paying off.
“The sorts of people who are likely to find the Lib Dems appealing have had four years to look at what they’re offering,” she says.
“I don’t get much sense there’s that much shift in the numbers… They are outnumbered by the sorts of people who want to see the back of Gordon Brown and a change of prime minister.”
This, really, is the heart of the Conservative campaign – here and everywhere else where the Tories are up against the Lib Dems. The argument is about making sure a Tory MP gets in, giving a boost to David Cameron’s attempt to secure an overall majority. It seems a long way from television studios here in the countryside, but Baldwin feels after the “honeymoon” with “telegenic” Nick Clegg “voters will realise where they need to put the cross in the box”.
Ultimately, though, it’s the geography of this seat which marks it out. On the brief canvassing trip I went on with the Tories, Baldwin didn’t talk to a single voter. We wandered up a beautiful countryside lane. The Tory candidate stuffed leaflets into three or four letterboxes. It was idyllic, a million miles away from Westminster.
In this landscape, it’s easy to wonder whether West Worcestershire’s inhabitants know there’s a contest on at all. This presents both parties with its own challenges. The Lib Dems call it ‘cultivating’ voters. The Tories calling it “letting them know we’re here”. Which of Burt or Baldwin heads to parliament could come down to whose team is most effective at galvanising their vote.
