Hove: The seat the Conservatives forgot how to win
One of the many anecdotes that have grown up around Labour’s landslide election win in 1997 concerns Hove, Brighton’s slightly more staid seaside neighbour. It is said that Tony Blair was on a plane down to London from his Sedgefield constituency when he heard Labour had taken Hove, long regarded as a Conservative stronghold. He woke up a sleeping Cherie to tell her: “I can’t believe it: we’ve won Hove – it must be a landslide.”
Although the details of this story may owe something to invention, Blair has in the past admitted that winning Hove was an important moment for Labour, one that showed they had extended their electoral reach into Conservative heartlands that had always been off limits.
For equal, if opposite, reasons, the Conservatives are desperate to regain the seat. Their candidate is Nicholas Boles, director of the Policy Exchange think-tank and a former Westminster councillor. Sitting in a cafe on Hove’s Grand Avenue, he says its residents typify the kind of middle-class people that the Conservatives stopped appealing to in the 1990s and who punished them so severely in 1997.
“This is basically a seat that we had forgotten how to win,” he says.
His chances have been boosted by the resignation of the sitting MP, Ivor Caplin. Having overturned a 12,000 Conservative majority in 1997 to win by 3,000 votes – and held that majority in 2001 – he decided to stand down early this year. His replacement, former BBC journalist Celia Barlow, has Sussex roots, but after only a couple of months of campaigning she inevitably has a lower profile than Caplin had.
Boles’ task is complicated, however, by the changing demographics and ambitions in the area, which mean it is no longer rock-solid Tory. Hove, famously, has long been seen as conservative area populated by retired colonels who, keen to distinguish themselves from the inhabitants of brasher, hipper Brighton, proclaim that they are “from Hove, actually”.
But during the last ten years, Hove has become a much more diverse, tolerant place, its residents say. Young couples are moving there to start families, and like Brighton it has a large gay population, as well as substantial Jewish and Sudanese communities and students from the two local universities. There is also a large transient population, and even some homeless people.
The Liberal Democrats’ candidate, local councillor Paul Elgood, lives in an apartment in a Georgian terrace overlooking one of the huge landscaped squares on Hove’s seafront. However, he says his Brunswick ward is “an area of contrast” where millionaires live next door to bedsitters, and where a third of the population turns over each year.
He says: “We’re not where we were ten years ago. We’re not quite a natural Tory seat – the profile doesn’t quite match that any more, although it did ten years ago.”
Boles, however, welcomes the changing demographics, describing Hove today as “easy-going and tolerant” and, later, “indulgent” – although he admits that it remains a more staid alternative to the bright lights of Brighton.
The Conservatives were slow to catch on to the demographic changes, he concedes – in 1997 and 2001 there were large swathes of the middle classes “that we didn’t know how even to talk to” – but he insists the lessons have been learnt.
A lot of hard work has been done to ensure the Tories no longer give the impression, as they once did, that they disapprove of all the social changes that took place post-1950, he says. Even though he does not believe in a “gay vote” as such, he believes the Conservatives can now attract the votes of the gay community when once they made “almost impossible” for that to happen.
“We have focused much more on what are the key things that impact most people’s quality of life … We’re not banging on about Europe,” he adds.
Barlow, not surprisingly, disagrees. Sitting in Hove’s town hall, she says the changing demographics help Labour – “that’s one of the reasons we got elected in 1997” – and that the memory of the Conservatives’ failures is too strong to be erased. People will remember their mismanagement of the economy and the bad times that saw people “scavenging in rubbish heaps”, and contrast it with Labour’s successful economic stewardship.
“We’ve done so much,” she says. “And I think the vision for Hove and Portslade … [is one] where people have a national health service for all of us, schools and colleges for my children that will mean a choice of educational establishments wherever you are in the constituency, and a secure and healthy retirement for … all pensioners within Hove and Portslade.”
In 2001, the 3,800 people who voted Liberal Democrat were the difference between Labour on 19,000 and the Conservatives on 16,000. This time round, Elgood aims to double the Liberal Democrat vote; if he can do so, he will wipe out Labour’s majority, and the Lib Dem vote will determine the outcome of the election.
He says the Liberal Democrats are putting in “triple, quadruple” the resources they put into previous elections and will be fighting for every vote in a way they never have before. That will allow them to pick up on what he calls a “groundswell” of feeling among groups – pensioners, the intelligentsia, students, people opposed to the war in Iraq – who are dissatisfied with Labour but not willing to turn to the Conservatives.
“In Hove, they can afford to have a protest, a by-election style protest and I think that’ll come to us in big numbers,” he says.
Boles says the Liberal Democrat aim is “not unrealistic”. He thinks there are around 3,000 “soggy left liberals” who voted Labour in 1997 and 2001 not out of love of Labour but because they hated the Conservatives, and that they are now sufficiently “pissed off” to turn to the Liberal Democrats.
He points to a recent council by-election where Labour lost to the Liberal Democrats. Their vote went down ten percentage points, the Liberal Democrats picking up 8-9 of those points and the Conservatives 1-2. In a general election, that could be expected to shift in the Conservatives favour so that they gained 2-3 points – which would be enough, he says.
“If I win, it will be likely that my vote has gone up but it’s gone up quite a lot less than the Labour vote has gone down.”
Barlow is more sceptical, claiming that any “floating” votes will go not just to the Liberal Democrats but also to Greens, independents and UKIP. Residents must understand that if they do not vote – or vote for a “minor” party – they will in effect be electing a Conservative MP. And, she says, they should ask themselves: do they want a Conservative MP in a Labour government, or a Labour MP who will be in a position to influence policies?
The strength of the Labour vote is not a worry, she says – her only problem is “a lack of time” in which to impress voters. (Boles, for his part, says: “Two months is not long enough [for her] to do it.”)
Regardless, the candidates agree that the election will be extremely close.
It is hard to identify one single issue that could change the election’s course, but there is no doubting that Hove residents are worried about overdevelopment. Billions of pounds of construction and housing work is planned for Brighton and Hove over the next decade, and many residents feel the town’s character will be lost if the Georgian terraced houses that are Hove’s most distinctive architectural feature are demolished to make way for apartments.
Barlow says there are many aspects to the housing problem. Average house prices have more than tripled since Labour came t
