11 Jul 2024
The ballot papers have been stored away, the Champagne bottles and campaign posters are in the recycling and sleep-deprived supporters, volunteers, council officers, journalists and candidates are starting to feel normal again after a weekend spent recovering from the overnight count.
So what now? With Daisy Cooper and Victoria Collins having created a golden bubble in the centre of Herts, what does the future hold for their determined rivals?
We caught up with some of them to talk through the events of the past few weeks and gauge their opinions on the state of British politics going forwards.
Local lad James Spencer was the Tory opposition to Daisy being re-elected in St Albans, but despite his efforts he was almost 20,000 votes behind her, something he puts down to national disillusionment with his party rather than his personal performance.
“I’m naturally very disappointed with the result, but I think it was a reflection on the Conservative Party as a whole, rather than my campaign or me as a candidate.
“I’ve been clear from the outset that this was going to be a David and Goliath battle. Not only was I up against the deputy leader of the Lib Dems, we had to face off against the Liberals’ juggernaut of a campaign machine.
“Despite the loss, we’re finishing the campaign with more activists than we did at the start, and the green shoots of life of a resurgent Conservative movement in St Albans. I’m very proud of that achievement.”
He said he would have liked to have talked to more people during the course of the campaign: “Having significantly increased our campaigning for the locals and then straight into the General Election, I probably had face-to-face conversations with about 5,000 people. Clearly we needed to do more, but with a relatively small (but dedicated team) there is a limit to how much ground one can cover.”
Fighting for political office is obviously a serious matter, but did anything make him smile over the past six weeks? “Watching Simon Grover (my Green Party counterpart) pull out a stream of taped-together Lib Dem leaflets at the environmental hustings, saying that the Lib Dems clearly don’t like trees! Thinking of it still makes me chuckle!”
Although he’s going back to his day job with youth leadership charity One Young World, with just eight weeks to go before
their annual summit in Montreal, he intends to remain an active figure locally: “I’m not going anywhere soon. I’m still going to be involved in local politics and vocally hold the Lib Dem council to account. We must restore political balance and accountability to St Albans, and I’m not going to rest until we achieve that.
“It’s been the privilege of a lifetime to have been a Parliamentary candidate in my home city and I have enjoyed every minute. Politics has been a huge part of my life, so to have started out as a Sandridge Parish councillor at 18, to end up being a Parliamentary candidate for St Albans has been wonderful.”
The Greens’ Simon Grover said the overall result in St Albans was as expected, with a big majority for the Lib Dems, but the extent of the collapse in the Tory vote was a surprise.
“With the Conservatives and Labour both on very low scores, it underlines the dominance of the Lib Dems in St Albans and the need for strong opposition on the district council, which is what the Greens are providing as the second largest group of councillors.
“We were pleased with our General Election score of over 3,000 votes, tripling what we got last time. We did very little campaigning here, concentrating instead on the party’s national target seats, so it was great to see the Green vote here reflecting the overall rise in support across the country.
“Over the next few weeks there is more council work to be done before the summer break. I’m particularly looking at the idea of setting up an electric bicycle hire scheme in St Albans, as they have in several other Hertfordshire districts. Green councillors will continue to scrutinise what the council is doing – the need for which has recently been shown again in the council’s policy to put up market fees.”
He is confident of seeing the Green vote in St Albans and nationwide continuing to grow: “In St Albans we are increasingly recognised as the main opposition to the Lib Dems, very nearly winning two further council seats in May.
“Nationally the two million votes received was an all-time record, and resulted in Greens not just winning four seats but coming second in 40 others. Those 40 will be where our next wave of MPs will come from and we’ll be building for that over the coming years.”
Reform UK candidate John Dowdle laid the blame for his performance on technical issues: “After the General Election was announced for 4th July, there was a degree of ambiguity as to who the St Albans’ Parliamentary candidate was going to be. This was eventually resolved when I was asked to take on the role again – which I did – but there was a significant delay in getting my access to the Reform UK central database and emails.
“Consequently, I missed receiving a number of email requests for media articles, requests to attend hustings events and school mock elections. I was disadvantaged by this to some extent but the eventual delivery of Royal Mail leaflets, as well as localised St Albans leaflets being delivered in key wards, helped to offset this.
“But I have no regrets at all about putting myself forward as a candidate. My principal objective was to get the Tories out of government – and this came about, I am very pleased to say.”
Despite these setbacks, he said he is satisfied with Reform’s outcomes in St Albans and Harpenden and Berkhamsted.
“I believe Reform UK and its electoral supporters performed well, such that in each constituency we exceeded the 5 per cent share of the vote required to save the Parliamentary deposit of £500.
“From our perspective, this was a good start and one that can be built upon for the Hertfordshire County Council divisional elections in May 2025.
“For now I think we all need some time for a break after having had to contend with the May local elections and the unexpected General Election.”
John says he will retain an interest in local, regional, national and international politics, but is likely to take on more of strategic planning and organising role rather than running for MP again.
He concludes by mentioning what he considered the funniest moment of the General Election: “It had to be the May 22 announcement in Downing Street by PM Sunak, being drenched in the rain, with music playing in the background.
“Then when he visited The Titanic Centre in Northern Ireland, it began a series of missteps and miscalculations by him, not helped by the mass media newspaper headlines saying ‘Things Can Only Get Wetter’!”
Stewart Satterly, who campaigned for the Social Democratic Party in St Albans, said he was not surprised by the result: “St Albans was already a safe Liberal Democrat seat before the election and is even more so now: There was a complete collapse in the Conservative vote across the country which was also apparent in St Albans.
“You put that together with the presence of a sitting MP who is a high-profile politician nationally, popular locally and had a large and well-organised army of local activists behind her and the result is a massive increase in majority leaving all the rest of us in the wake.”
But he isn’t despondent, and will be spending the next few weeks writing up his notes for a ‘lessons learned’ debrief that the regional SDP party will be holding with an eye on the next elections.
He said: “I think that I should have devoted more time in promotion of my campaign and the SDP on social media. It’s an area that I tend to avoid but it’s a fact of life now (for good or bad).People tend to get more information from it than mainstream media so next time I will have to prioritise this.
“I think that people tend to equate presence with ‘online presence’ but I attended three hustings events, was out leafleting personally and tried to answer most emails sent to me by voters. It’s also hard to gain attend as a candidate for a smaller party when all attention is focused on the ‘big five’.”
Personal circumstances permitting, he hopes to return as a candidate in future local elections, adding: “It was a bit of an eye-opener and also hard work as well but I enjoyed raising the SDP’s profile and hopefully this will contribute to our growth.”
Meanwhile, Harpenden and Berkhamsted Conservative candidate Nigel Gardner said he realised the writing was on the wall when the exit polls came out at just after 10pm on polling day.
“It was clear on a national level that the polls were broadly right, but what they slightly underestimated was how low Labour’s share of the vote was going to be.
“Locally, when we polled just before Christmas, we had about 15,000 votes, and that was of course before Nigel Farage came in, and we came in at around 16,500. So there’s some evidence that either some Conservatives came home from Reform or they responded to some of our campaigning.”
He said the other candidates who fought for the seat were a wonderful bunch who made him laugh a lot: “Mark Hatton from the SDP made me smile when he told the joke at hustings about being an anaesthetist and having sent half the room to sleep before and he hoped he was not going to send them to sleep that day.
“Then the Reform candidate who went to the skate park to show it was unsafe, got on his skateboard, fell over and ended up in Luton and Dunstable! I have a lot of admiration for those people who stand without the backing of a big party!”
Nigel also thanked his campaign team for their hard work over the past few weeks: “I was very lucky, I had an amazing team.
“It’s much more easy to gather a group of volunteers around you when things are going well. And it’s easy when you’re campaigning against something. But it’s much harder, and you’re much more lucky, if when things are quite rough, you have such a sort of valiant bunch of cheerleaders and supporters and workers.
“It also wasn’t easy for them. Don’t forget that a lot of these people had lost their council seats, but they still turned out, and pounded the pavements, and did everything else that was necessary.
“If your party’s riding a wave of popularity volunteers flock to help. But you really see the character and the strength and determination of volunteers when you’re on a downer and they still come out.”
Labour candidates Zara Payne and Sophia Adams Bhatti, and Harpenden Reform candidate Saba Poursaeedi did not respond to requests for comment.
