Witney byelection: Labour and Lib Dems hope to cash in on Tory divisions
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Version 0 of 1. For a party defending a 25,000 majority, the Conservatives are keeping a very low profile in Thursday’s Witney byelection. But then, it is not quite clear which Conservative party is campaigning here: the pro-European, socially liberal party of David Cameron, or the inward-looking, xenophobic small-c conservative Brexiteering party of Theresa May. When Cameron resigned as Witney’s MP – only a few weeks after insisting he planned to stay at least until 2020 – he muttered about not wanting to get in his successor’s way. The immediate speculation was that he was furious that his successor wanted to bring back grammar schools. But there are plenty of grounds for supposing that there is a much more fundamental rift between himself and May. He told friends that he didn’t want to be another Ted Heath, the party leader deposed in 1975 who sat on the Tory backbenches for 20 years – the embodiment of opposition to Margaret Thatcher. Former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, campaigning in Witney last week, said he thought Cameron would be “mortified” by the way his successor trashed his record. Cameron himself has been conspicuously absent from the field of battle since he triggered the contest in September. Until this weekend. On Saturday, he and May, ignoring the convention that prime ministers don’t campaign in byelections, descended on the constituency. The pair were duly pictured leafletting together, with the fresh-faced candidate Robert Courts between them. Jeremy Corbyn was in Witney on Saturday too, and on Tuesday the Lib Dem leader, Tim Farron, is paying his fourth visit to the Oxfordshire town even though – in his 15 years as Witney’s MP – Cameron quadrupled his majority and ended up with 60% of the vote. “He was very good at taking up local issues,” a Lib Dem admitted on Witney High Street. Yet Labour and Lib Dems agree that the Tory vote is soft. I watched a woman approach a Tory canvasser for a leaflet, and hand it back angrily when she learned that Courts was a Brexiteer. In June, Witney was that rare thing, a rural remain constituency, voting 54% to 46% to stay in the European Union. The constituency is a good test of the Lib Dem pitch to be the voice of the remainers. The party has done well in the past: in 2005, the last time the candidate, Liz Leffman, stood, she came second, with 23% of the vote. At the 2001 general election, the first that Cameron fought, Labour and Lib Dems between them polled more votes than the man who became prime minister. There is a solid non-Tory vote here. The question is whether the Lib Dems can persuade enough people to prioritise Brexit over the cuts that many voters blame them for. As well as Farron, Clegg and Paddy Ashdown have both been campaigning as if the seat is winnable. Ashdown talks of the great Lib Dem assault on Tory majorities in the late 1980s and early 90s. To win Witney, Leffman needs a swing of 27%, on a par with the best of those days. This seems about as likely as snow on polling day. But she is buoyant. “There’s a huge momentum building for me, especially since the Tory party conference, even among leavers. They didn’t like Theresa May’s speech. I meet people who say they voted out so that parliament could be sovereign – not to take a hard line on immigrants and leave the single market.” There is anger about Brexit. But even in west Oxfordshire’s prosperous Cotswold villages and largely well-heeled market towns there is much, much more anger about the cuts. Voters are furious that one of the GP surgeries, the privately contracted Deer Park in Witney, is closing after no other private provider made a viable bid. The entire family of a GP from another Witney surgery, Dr Oliver Boland, is out on the stump for the Labour candidate. “Virgin Care [which ran Deer Park] proved no more efficient than our NHS surgeries,” he said. “GP funding is down to 8% of the NHS budget. It is so shortsighted. It will just cost hospitals more.” It is not only GP surgeries. Voters are anxious about downgraded local hospitals in Chipping Norton, reduced services in Witney and the local maternity unit, just outside the constituency, which has lost its obstetrician. The nearest major hospital, the John Radcliffe in Oxford, can take an hour or more by car when traffic on the notorious A40 is bad. Buses are slow and unreliable, and more rural services are being cut. That is fertile territory for Labour. The candidate, Duncan Enright, is a well-known local councillor who came second in 2015, when the Lib Dems trailed in fourth, behind Ukip. But this is not Corbyn territory, and Enright was among 600 councillors who called for him to resign after the Brexit vote. On Saturday morning, Corbyn’s visit was crowded but not packed. While some fans eagerly queued for half an hour for selfies with the leader, others who had come from from Oxford to help felt they were wasting time that would be better spent out on the doorstep. “Corbyn brings some people in and he drives some people away,” said one canvasser, but the most common refrain on the doorstep was “Labour? Not while Jeremy Corbyn’s leader.” Enright is tactful. “Our membership [of the Witney CLP] was always quite good, around 500. But now it’s 1,200 and yes, they come and work for us in about the same proportion as the original members.” Enright may be less optimistic than Leffman (or perhaps more realistic) but he claims Labour campaigning, particularly round May’s proposal to bring back grammar schools, which he argues will destroy the whole local secondary school ecology, is bringing support from all the other parties. “We’ve had an ex-Lib Dem councillor, and Greens; even Bob Hayward, who was chairman of [David Cameron’s] Chipping Norton branch of the local Tory party, has defected to us.” As for the referendum result, Enright thinks the constituency has accepted it. “The majority will go with the decision and go for the next thing – the best Brexit possible,” he said. Three months after the EU referendum, politics is still in a state of bewilderment. The result, when it comes early on Friday, will be judged by whether May’s abrasive approach to Brexit is endorsed. Corbyn needs to stay second to prove that he’s not the electoral liability that his critics fear he is. And the Lib Dems need to come second to show they’re a party in recovery. Witney, they hope, is a stepping stone to Richmond, where, if Heathrow gets a third runway, Zac Goldsmith will force a byelection. And it’s not so long since there was a Lib Dem MP there. |