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A pay rise for MPs – and a really big one for Sir Oliver DowdenHow much money is it appropriate for an MP to earn while he continues to sit in the House of Commons? How much of his time can he reasonably devote to outside work? Does it matter that this MP is spending half of his time working for financial companies and more than a week per month working for a foreign firm?

We don’t have good answers to these questions. It’s all permitted under the rules and the MP in question, The Right Hon. Sir Oliver Dowden KCE CBE, scrupulously declares everything. What do you think? Leave a comment.

Sir Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate realityWe were reminded to return to the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, almost a year after our last visit, by the news that MPs are to receive one of their regular big pay increases. UK MPs, we learn, are “dealing with higher levels of complex casework, and abuse and intimidation” so they must have a pay rise. A pay rise of 3.5% plus a 1.5% ‘benchmarking adjustment’, in fact, bringing the base salary for an MP to £98,599 per year, starting in April (by the end of this Parliament they’ll be earning £110,000/year).

Of course there are some MPs who’ll barely notice. Sir Oliver Dowden KCB CBE, for instance, whose annual income is currently running at about £420,000 per year (including that boosted MP’s salary, less than a quarter of his annual income).

Most of Sir Oliver’s income, these days, comes from three sources:

| Employer | Business | Days/month | Monthly salary | | Francisco Partners Management | American investment firm | 7 | £11,667 | | Pierce Protocols | Art market | 2 | £10,000 | | Caxton Associates | Hedge fund | 1 | £5,000 | | 10 | £26,667 |

In all three cases, Sir Oliver’s function is described in vague terms as ‘advisory’. He’s paid for varying amounts of advice: for Francisco Partners, a San Francisco-based tech investment firm, it’s currently seven days per month. For Pierce Protocols, a London-based art services firm that runs an art investment marketplace under the Heni.com brand, it’s two days per month and for Caxton Associates it’s one – adding up to a total of ten working days per month.

We know Sir Oliver to be a very hard-working MP, certainly not one to shirk his duties as a member of Parliament, but should his constituents be concerned that he’s now essentially a part-timer?

• The UK Parliament is famous for the usefulness and accessibility of its web site. It’s a paragon of transparency and accessibility, admired around the world. They win awards for it. For some reason this doesn’t apply to the Register of Members’ Financial Interests which, unaccountably, is still presented as a Byzantine maze of PDFs, with no way to organise or compare information. It’s all manual. Funny that.
• More about Caxton Associates – an interesting firm that was also closely involved in the short-lived premiership of Liz Truss in this earlier post.
• Here are part one and part two of the Oliver Dowden Sketchy Behaviour Monitor. Bookmark Sir Oliver’s entry in the register of members’ interests and his page at They Work for You. Here’s all of our Oliver Dowden coverage on one page and if you use an RSS reader you can subscribe to this feed. We tweet this stuff and you’ll also find us in the Fediverse – search Mastodon for ‘Radlett Wire’.

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What just happened?Well, having said in the previous post that there can’t possibly be anything more boring than a county council election we are ready to revise our position – just a little. In that post we said: “…a swing to Reform large enough to displace the Tories in Hertfordshire would be a real political earthquake.”

Well, that earthquake happened. The Tories have been displaced and will be replaced in County Hall not by Reform but by a coalition that must now be assembled and will presumably include the largest party – the Liberal Democrats – plus the Greens and Labour. On the face of it a leadership coalition will need to include all three otherwise it won’t be big enough to overcome a possible alliance of Conservative and Reform councillors (whether that particular coalition of frenemies would even be possible is another matter).

Results from the BBCIt’s not the first time an election has resulted in ‘no overall control’ here but, since the County Council was set up in 1974, this is only the second time the Conservatives have been out of the leadership coalition.

Here in the Watling division, there’s been substantially less drama: Caroline Clapper is still your county councillor. Her majority has been reduced but she’s still very comfortably in place.

Results from WikipediaReform’s performance here in the Watling division is a real challenge to the historic balance and puts the party comfortably in second place. Here’s the history:

Data from our big spreadsheet of this area’s voting historyYou’ll see an essentially continuous growth in the Tory share since the origin of the council in the 1970s, with a handful of dips along the way. You’ll see a very steep decline in the Labour vote since a 1993 high point which reflects the trend across the whole UK in that period: Labour has essentially retreated into the big cities, leaving the Tories to dominate rural England and the small towns (with various local exceptions, usually run by the LibDems).

Down near the bottom of the chart you’ll also see a handful of coloured blobs. The pale blue one to the right is last week’s Reform performance and, interestingly, the purple one in 2013 is UKIP, scoring a share here in Watling of 16.5%, essentially the same as Reform’s share last week – a reminder that UKIP’s rise in England, although it ultimately fizzled out, felt pretty climactic too, back then.

Reform’s 14 seats on the council pretty much reflects the average across the English councils included in the election – and the three-way division in percentage terms – the three largest parties on 26%, 26%, 24% – essentially explains the problem presented to the big parties by Reform’s arrival.

Results for the main parties in Hertfordshire. Data from Hertfordshire County CouncilThe picture is obviously much more dramatic at the county level than at the level of our own division, Watling, where Tory control is still essentially total. In the chart you’ll see the Liberal Democrats surge past the Tories for the first time in the County Council’s history, leaving Labour in the dust (and the Greens catching up with Labour). Reform bounces to 14% of the vote, better than for any populist party in the county’s history but some way behind the party’s average across all the areas where elections took place.

Data from our big spreadsheet of this area’s voting historyWhat looked, until last week, like one of the Toriest places in England, now looks like a much more mixed environment, an effect seen across all the authorities in which elections took place. This is likely to be particularly bad for the Conservatives, of course – Reform’s target electorate is essentially theirs and they will now have to fight it out over one end of the political spectrum – we can’t escape the conclusion that the arrival of three-, four- or five-party politics in Britain is going to change things for everyone – even in Radlett. We’re not in Kansas any more.

• You can get all this data from a number of excellent online sources, these days, of course, including the BBC’s local election pages; the County’s own results pages (which are much better than they used to be) and Wikipedia, which is, as you’d expect, the absolutely definitive source for election data across the country – and across time. However, there is only one place on the whole Internet where you’ll find all voting data – going back to the origins of the constituencies, divisions and wards involved – for Radlett, and that’s Radlett Wire’s own big election spreadsheet, which is free to use and download as you want.
• Other really good sources during this election period in Hertfordshire have been the always excellent Your Harlow online local paper (and Harlow isn’t in Hertfordshire); Bishop’s Stortford’s Independent; Chris Day, a reporter covering politics in Hertfordshire for Reach who is part of the BBC-funded local democracy reporting scheme and the Watford Observer, plugging away in an increasingly difficult local media market.

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Honestly, is there anything more boring?We’re struggling to think of anything. County Council elections have none of the obvious glamour of the national contest, the stakes are lower and – let’s face it – nobody knows what they do (quick, make a list of five things that your county council is responsible for! No Googling! See?).

Click here to go straight to the bit about Radlett, the Watling electoral division and Caroline Clapper, our councillor.

Who are the candidates we can vote for here in Radlett?

| Candidate | Party | | --- | --- | | Gus Channer | FE college teacher, ex-military, lives in Radlett | Reform | | Caroline Clapper | Incumbent, professional politician | Con | | Stuart Howard | Chartered accountant, lives in Radlett | LibDem | | Satvinder Singh Juss | Academic, barrister, lives in Radlett | Labour | | Cheryl Stungo | Croxley Green parish and Three Rivers borough Councillor | Green |

Candidates in Watling division, Hertfordshire County Council, 1 May 2025But, this time around, there is expected to be some drama. Drama, of course, provided by yellow-corduroy man of the people Nigel Farage: principle bringer of chaos in British politics for almost twenty years. So we won’t just ignore this contest as we usually do (seriously, we’ve been previewing elections here for over ten years and we’ve never done a county council election).

So here’s a short overview of the contest, starting with the national picture and then zooming in to Hertfordshire and to the Watling division in which we live.

What are we voting for?Elections are taking place in 14 county councils, eight unitary authorities and one metropolitan district (also the people of the Isles of Scilly are voting – but they have their own, very odd system). Nine councils currently busy with ‘unitarisation‘ programmes have been allowed to put their elections back a year. Here in Radlett (in the Watling electoral division – they’re not called ‘wards’ in county elections) we’re voting to send one county councillor to Hertford to represent us: nothing else. We’re not voting for borough or parish councillors (and there’s no unitary mayor in our area so that’s not relevant). More about all that below.

Reform rampant?Of the 25 county and unitary councils holding elections, 16 have a Conservative majority and, of the six where there is no overall majority, three have Conservative leaders and three Liberal Democrats. Labour controls only one. Consequently, although the headlines on 2 May will probably be all about Reform’s surge, the actual electoral damage will be suffered almost exclusively by the Conservatives. Nigel Farage is still going around disingenuously predicting 200 seats for his party but the polling tells another story. This fancy MRP poll, conducted by Electoral Calculus for the Telegraph, suggests 697 seats for Reform, which is more than then expect for the Tories. Ouch.

The postponement of elections in nine areas may or may not have the side benefit of letting incumbent parties in those authorities off the hook with regard to the swing to Reform – but it’s quite possible they’ve just deferred the inevitable and that electorates will punish them when the elections do happen. The Electoral Calculus poll supports this idea and puts Reform comfortably ahead of the Tories in the councils where elections have been postponed. The government and the authorities who’ve opted for postponement claim only the most innocent, bureaucratic motives but, let’s face it, electors are pissed off that they’re not getting their chance to vote this year and are unlikely to have forgetten in a year’s time.

Looking further ahead – to the next general election – liberal, anti-polarisation think tank More In Common, using a similar MRP statistical method, suggests essentially a three-way tie between Labour, the Conservatives and Reform, with Reform narrowly winning. Dramatically, in their projection, in 285 Parliamentary seats the winner would secure less than a third of the vote – finally demolishing the protective wall provided for the main parties by the first-past-the-post system. Double ouch.

And here?In Hertfordshire, after the last local elections in 2021, things looked like this:

Data from the BBCIn the four years since that vote the kind of drift that you see between elections has caused four councillors (one Conservative, two Liberal Democrats and one Labour) to drop their party affiliation and become independents. One Tory switched to Reform last month and will cheekily be standing for that party next week. Another complicating factor for the Tories here is that almost a third of their councillors are standing down this time around, including some cabinet members.

Obviously, a swing to Reform large enough to displace the Tories in Hertfordshire would be a real political earthquake but it’s worth noting that the Tories in the county currently have fewer seats than at any time since 2001 (there have been boundary changes since then but they’re not significant). Likewise Labour, which in 1993 actually took 30 council seats in Hertfordshire (three more than the Tories at that election) has been reduced in recent years to a pretty pathetic six councillors. With Liberal Democrats and Greens also expecting a surge at this election, both major parties are more vulnerable than they’ve ever been in Hertfordshire.

Watling alongWe don’t know much about where our readers come from. Our web hosting company gives us some confusing data that suggests that about a third of you are in China (if you are one of our Chinese readers, please leave a comment. We’d honestly love to know what you’re doing here).

But, in the meantime, we’re going to assume you live and vote in the Watling electoral division in Hertfordshire. It’s a pretty big area, stretching all the way from the London border in Edgware to the edge of St Albans and taking in the whole of Radlett, Aldenham, Letchmore Heath, Elstree and a chunk of Borehamwood (we’re also excited in a childish way to note that Watling has its own airport).

Map from MySociety’s MapIt serviceEach council electoral division returns one candidate elected by the first-past-the-post system. Since 2009 Watling has been electing Conservative Caroline Clapper. And we mean really electing. Her vote share at the last election in 2021 was 75%. She polled six times more votes than her nearest rival, from Labour. This is the kind of impregnable voteshare that Conservatives enjoy all over the home counties, of course but you’ll notice one important absence from this table of results from the 2021 election: Reform UK. Is Caroline Clapper losing any sleep to a Reform challenge now that they’re on the ballot here in Watling? No she’s not. But is her party, at the county and the national level? Yes they are.

2021 results from Hertfordshire County CouncilClapper is a popular and effective councillor. She’s visible and involved and anyone who’s ever had cause to ask her to help with a local issue will confirm that she works hard and takes her job seriously. She’s a cabinet member with an interest in education and chairs the council’s Education, Libraries & Lifelong Learning Cabinet Panel. She’s also a Hertsmere councillor and was a member of the cabinet there until Labour took over in 2023. She’s been a parish councillor in the past too. She lives in Bushey and is married to Michael, a mortgage broker and former vape entrepreneur. They have three children.

Then there’s the moneyCouncillors in Britain are not typically paid for the job but do claim ‘allowances’ and they can be pretty generous, in fact a senior councillor’s allowances will usually add up to something resembling an ordinary wage. There’s nothing secret about this, of course, but we’ve always thought it ought to be better known that a councillor can essentially make a living from representing you locally. Should they actually be paid a wage for this pretty onerous job? We think you could make a pretty good argument for professionalising local politics – for turning it into an actual job. Is this likely to happen any time soon? No. So, in the meantime, councillors will continue to vote themselves generous allowances to make up for it.

Adding together Caroline Clapper’s allowances from Hertfordshire (£36,159 in 2024-25) and Hertsmere (£8022.28 – most recent published numbers are for the year 2023-24) brings her income to a pretty tidy total of £44,181.28, substantially more than the average wage in the UK and higher even than the average for relatively prosperous Hertfordshire (and this represents a drop in income for our county councillor – if her party had retained control of Hertsmere in 2023 – and Clapper her cabinet post – she’d have made more than £55,000 from here work as a councillor in the most recent year). But she is a busy woman and has other roles – she’s a non-executive director of council-owned Elstree Studios, for instance, where her Hertfordshire and Hertsmere colleague Morris Bright is chairman (for this she was paid £1,194 in the year to April 2024).

She’s an ambitious politician. She probably thinks she’s paid her local political dues and we suspect she won’t be stuck at this level for much longer. She stood for Parliament in 2024, coming fourth – behind Reform and the Workers Party of Britain – against Labour’s winner Liam Byrne in Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North.

A total of 14 parties have put up candidates in Hertfordshire and there are five standing in the Watling division: Caroline Clapper for the Tories, Gus Channer for Reform, Stuart Howard for the LibDems, Satvinder Singh Juss for Labour and Cheryl Stungo for the Greens. Clapper is by far the most experienced politician on that list. Her Reform opponent is a college teacher and a former Royal Engineer who apparently got into trouble with his employer for taking a sick day and then showing up to a Reform media event with Nigel Farage. Oops. This is his first election – we assume he’ll be wiser next time.

Although we’re pretty sure she’s expecting to be put under some pressure from the Reform insurgency next week we’re certain that Caroline Clapper will still be county councillor for the Watling division on Friday.

• What we do around here mainly is whinge about our Parliamentary representative Oliver Dowden. Bookmark this page for our coverage of your MP or follow this RSS feed.
• We’ve also recently developed an interest in an enormous proposed development in Hertsmere – the DC01UK data centre that will, it is claimed, be Europe’s largest and will be built in South Mimms, if the developers and Hertsmere Borough Council have their way. Bookmark this page for our various deep dives into the project.
• This post about the history of elections in Hertsmere is about as close to definitive as you’ll get – all the elections, all the results, all the candidates. We keep this freely-accessible spreadsheet of election results up-to-date too.

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In which we ask what happens to an MP’s priorities when three quarters of his income comes from his second (and third) jobs? Show him the money!UPDATE: 20 April 2025: Sir Oliver’s new favourite football team San Diego FC got absolutely clattered 3-0 at Charlotte, finishing with ten men after some VAR drama. And it was a very long flight home for the San Diego boys. Not quite as long as Sir Oliver’s back in March, though, obviously. Watch the match highlights.

As we’ve explained before, once an MP is out of government, they can do pretty much whatever they want to earn money. There’s a body, set up and funded by Parliament, called the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA), that tells ministers what they may and may not do on leaving office but it essentially boils down to “wait for a few months…”. ACOBA has no way of stopping a former minister or senior civil servant from taking up a new role but has been known to write a stern letter (see the cases of Sue Gray, who actually did what they told her to do, and Boris Johnson, who didn’t).

Sir Oliver Dowden has now left ministerial office twice – once while in government and once because of last year’s general election defeat. On each occasion he did the right thing, asked ACOBA for advice and was told to wait three months before taking up his new roles. You won’t be surprised to learn that, in both cases, he waited exactly three months before starting his new jobs.

Dowden is nothing if not loyal and it turns out that the work he’s taken up this time around is with the same employers as last time around (we wrote about them back then). He’s back with ‘global macro hedge fund’ Caxton Associates (intriguingly, the people who funded Liz Truss’s petulant insurgency) and with art broker Pierce Protocols (doing business under the name Heni Leviathan which seems sort of appropriate when you consider the modern Tory Party’s commitment to reducing the nation to a state of nature).

Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate realityThere’s more money involved this time, though. Dowden has spent almost his entire Parliamentary career getting by on his MP’s salary plus – once appointed in 2018 – the larger ministerial salary (there was about a month of outside work while he was briefly out of the cabinet in 2022) but now that he’s free to do so he’s dialing up the dough.

Again, it seems important to note that Dowden’s behaviour here is not exceptional: in the 2019 Parliament over 90% of income from second jobs went to Tory MPs – some of whom have been known to pull down nearly a million pounds per year from one second job or £2.5M in one Parliament or, in the case of the acknowledged master of the art of the second job, Boris Johnson, a million pounds from multiple jobs in one month. Sir Oliver’s income, so far, barely touches the sides.

His most recent declaration says that he’s now pulling down a total of £20,000 per month from the above sources (£10,000 from each). That’s 2.5x his MP’s salary and, added up, brings Dowden’s total declared income to £331,346 per year. At the top we wondered, in the sub-head, what happens to an MP’s priorities when this kind of money starts to flow into the bank account, making the sums coming from the day job look a bit silly. Well, of course, we don’t know. And we definitely don’t know what effect all this new money is going to have on Sir Oliver Dowden in particular. We do know that he’s been a professional and diligent representative for his Hertsmere electors for almost ten years – making speeches next to bins without complaint.

So, in a sense, what we’ve got now, with Sir Oliver out of office and finally bring in the big money, is a kind of experiment: what happens when you give an elected representative a boost to his earnings equivalent to 2.5 times his basic salary and 6.5x the average wage in the UK? Is it possible that all that wedge will have no effect at all? Is it even slightly plausible that his priorities will not shift? That he won’t find himself thinking more favourably of his main employer and acting in their interests or in the interests, more broadly, of the business they’re in?

While in his ministerial role in the last Tory government Dowden was earning around £150,000 per year (and he’ll have received a severance payment of £16,876 on leaving that job last year). There must be a measure of relief for Sir Oliver in finally being able to join the high earners’ club. For his whole political career he’s been surrounded by the super-rich. The generation of Tory MPs he’s a member of is one of the wealthiest in history and he was usually in a tiny minority of non-millionaires in the cabinets in which he sat. The fact that, as a diligent bagman, he often wound up on Sunday morning TV defending the indefensible behaviour of his millionaire colleagues must have been especially galling.

San Diego FC 0-0 St Louis CityBut let’s get to the most intriguing declaration in Sir Oliver’s latest update to the register. It’s not the most valuable – it’s a trip to a football match – but this football match wasn’t down at Meadow Park in sunny Borehamwood. It was at the Snapdragon Stadium in sunny San Diego, 5,500 miles further West, on 1 March. We assume Dowden travelled with his family. At least it’s difficult to imagine how he could have spent £9,217.79 on flights and £1,851.27 on accommodation on his own (plus £462.81 for transfers and £617.12 for match tickets and hospitality). This is another benefit of being out of government: you can stock up on freebies without the kind of examination that government ministers get when they go to the football.

This particular football match was the inaugural home match of a club called San Diego FC. American ~~football~~ soccer is weird. We don’t pretend to understand all this but the club is an ‘extension team‘ that just won a place in the MLS (Major League Soccer) by demonstrating that it has the necessary financial backing. This backing – $500M of it – comes from the man who flew Sir Oliver out for the match, Sir Mohamed Mansour, a British-Egyptian billionaire who was a treasurer of the Conservative Party until his resignation last year. Mansour’s business Mantrac got a bit of grief for continuing to supply earth moving equipment to oil companies in Russian after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and was forced to announce that they’d stop: “We are working through the appropriate next steps for the business.” Who wants to bet a tenner you can still by a bulldozer from Mohamed Mansour in Russia now?

Interestingly, in the same month that Mansour said he’d stop selling diggers to Russians, May 2023, he gave the Conservative party £5M and was subsequently knighted by Rishi Sunak. He used to be known as ‘Mansour Chevrolet’ back in Egypt because his dad made the family’s fortune by representing Western brands in the region. Sir Mohamed was Egyptian transport minister between 2005 and 2009, but had to resign his post after taking responsibility for a disastrous train crash.

To be honest, none of this really explains why you’d want to fly a Tory Party backbencher 11,000 miles for a football match. We wondered if Dowden could have appointed Mansour to his treasurer role while he was Co-Chairman of the party but Dowden was no longer in that role when Mansour came in. Any ideas?

• More about ACOBA and the register of members’ interests in this 2022 post and here’s a very good ACOBA explainer from the Institute for Government.
• Sir Oliver is still on the front benches – he currently shadows the Deputy Prime Minister – but shadow ministerial roles don’t attract any of the customary limits on outside activity and only the leader of the opposition gets any kind of additional payment for the role. The ministerial code doesn’t apply to shadow ministers.
• In principle, the current government opposes the whole idea of second jobs. Before the general election Keir Starmer enthusiatically supported legislation to limit MPs’ second jobs – his manifesto proposes “…an immediate ban on MPs from taking up paid advisory or consultancy roles,” which would obviously put the kybosh on Sir Oliver’s two main gigs. Things have gone a bit quiet since then, though, and we find this a bit puzzling: banning second jobs looks like a political slam-dunk for Labour. It would affect almost exclusively Conservative MPs; it would present a real practical problem for the big earners and a big political problem for the Tory front bench; and it’s been shown to be immensely popular with the electorate. Is there a tactical concern here that a wave of big Conservative resignations might produce some inconvenient by-election results and a few more ReformUK MPs on the opposition benches? Quite possibly.
• Mohamed Mansour wrote about his ambitions for his new football club for a local San Diego paper in March. Next for San Diego is Charlotte FC away. We assume new fan Oliver Dowden will be watching on Apple TV+.
• The administration of the Conservative Party is a complex matter and we’re not experts but it seems important to note that Mansour was never actually the capital-t Treasurer of the party (which explains why he’s not on this list), only ever a lower-case treasurer of the party. The Conservative Party acquires treasurers of this kind in a pretty spontaneous way and each will have a specific responsibility, depending on their wealth or their network. Mansour’s was to raise money to fight the 2024 general election. This presumably explains why he disappeared sharpish right after that historic defeat.
• We read that Nadhim “Tax Error” Zahawi asked Mansour to fund a bid for the Telegraph last year but that he swerved that one. Very wise.
• Back when he was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Dowden oversaw the Cabinet Office’s 22-person Propriety and Ethics team. Just saying.
• We think it might be worth looking a bit more closely at the two businesses currently providing about 75% of Sir Oliver’s income between them – Caxton Associates and Pierce Protocols. Watch this space.
• From the Politico politics blog, five MPs who really couldn’t muster even a single fuck about the advice of ACOBA.
• Here’s part one of the Oliver Dowden Sketchy Behaviour Monitor which, to be honest, is even less interesting than part two. Bookmark Sir Oliver’s entry in the register of members’ interests and his page at They Work for You. Here’s all of our Oliver Dowden coverage on one page and if you use an RSS reader you can subscribe to this feed. We tweet this stuff and you’ll also find us in the Fediverse – search Mastodon for ‘Radlett Wire’.

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It’s a few months since we learnt that Europe’s biggest data centre might be built here in Hertsmere – what could stop it from happening?

In part three of our DC01UK deep dive we’ll look at the various obstacles that must be overcome before it goes live on the Internet in 2030 (some updated information about AI chips and Donald Trump’s sanctions on China added to this post on 8 May 2025).

It might fall at the first hurdle. The scheme has outline planning permission from Hertsmere Borough Council so the developers must get their ducks in a row and submit a final plan. If we’re honest, though, this doesn’t look like a major concern: the council has given the project its enthusiastic backing and the UK government has cleared the way by adding data centres to the list of developments that can be defined as nationally significant infrastructure projects, alongside energy, transport, water, waste water, and waste projects (Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has even mentioned DC01UK in a speech). Unless something else goes wrong, the project is probably guaranteed to happen. So what else could go wrong?

The neighbours might object. As with any big development – especially one planned for land that is 100% in the green belt – local people are upset about DC01UK and have begun a campaign. Sadly for the locals, though, this scheme is going to be very hard to stop. As we said in an earlier post, this is the kind of land Angela Rayner calls ‘grey belt’ and even the green belt lobby seems to have given up. Our MP has met with the local campaigners but it doesn’t sound like he was able to give them much hope: “I encourage residents to submit their own views on the matter directly to the council,” he says. The fact that the developers plan to leave half the land as green open space and have promised substantial enhancements to the local environment will not help the opposition’s cause.

The demand might not be there. The trigger for DC01UK – and hundreds of projects like it all over the world – was the massive surge in demand for data centre capacity that we wote about in our first post, almost entirely the product of the AI and machine learning revolution – apparently an unstoppable and unarguable fact of the modern world. But the launch, only two months ago, of a new large language model (LLM), from a Chinese firm called Deepseek, suggests the direction for AI might not be quite as ‘up and to the right’ as had been hoped by investors. Deepseek wasn’t supposed to be possible. Biden era sanctions (including a three-tier provision called the AI diffusion rule that was meant to come into force on 15 May) limited the sale of the most powerful versions of the specialist chips needed to train and run serious LLMs to Chinese firms.

NVidia developed a special, less powerful version of its primary AI chip, the H100, in response to these limitations. The shock was that Deepseek was trained on these deliberately-limited chips. That a group of brilliant computer scientists was able to coax top-tier AI performance from second-tier hardware suggests that this might not be the brute-force business we thought it was to begin with. And since we wrote this paragraph the Trump administration first announced and then withdrew plans to limit further the kind of chips that manufacturers like NVidia can export to China; then went further and announced that the AI diffusion rule will not now be enforced at all and that individual, bilateral deals will be done for the export of specialist chips.

The Deepseek engineers made such resourceful use of the hobbled chips’ capacity that they were able to get around the punitive sanctions regime and keep China in the AI game. And, more to the point, if one Chinese firm can make more efficient use of AI hardware then the American giants, then so can anyone. Suddenly the AI game doesn’t look so one-sided and the soaring demand for newer and faster hardware doesn’t look so nailed-on. If more really can be done with less, then maybe the world doesn’t need the vast additional computing and data centre capacity that’s now being built. So do we think that the spreadsheets that justified DC01UK’s grand plans have been dragged to the trash? No, we don’t. The underlying growth in demand for the kind of cloud services that run in data centres like this one is unabated – and most of it has no need of LLMs – but has the gloss come off the AI data centre business? Just a bit. We’d like to have been a fly on the wall in a post-Deepseek DC01UK planning meeting that’s for sure.

An even more dramatic shift in the AI balance of power could result from the fact that Chinese manufacturer Huawei (the subject of much political hysteria here and elsewhere a few years ago) has just begun shipping test versions of its own AI chips, thought to be at least as powerful as the NVidia kit and, obviously, not subject to sanctions. China might be about to become a full-fledged AI superpower on its own terms. Will this development alter the investment priorities of the users or UK data centres? Who knows.

It’s the water stupid. In our previous post we wrote about the extraordinary demands that a data centre on this scale makes of resources like electricity (to power the servers) and water (for cooling). The power is, apparently, already sorted. The water, though, may not be so straightforward. Our region, the East of England, is already classified as ‘severely water stressed‘ and environmental groups calculate possible daily shortages of up to 800,000 litres by 2050. We’ve calculated that DC01UK alone will need 250 million litres per year (660,000 litres per day) to keep its servers cool. Where will this vast quantity of water come from? In fairness to the developers they may be considering an approach to DC01UK that doesn’t need any water at all – at least not after the initial top-up. It’s possible to build a server farm with a ‘closed’ cooling system that recycles the cooling water used – condensing it after it’s evaporated and pumping it back through the system (Microsoft is testing this approach). It’s not easy, though, and you need to engineer your data centre from the ground up to take advantage of this approach, pumping water right through the computers to cool the chips directly. There are even more advanced solutions – like the one from Google’s parent company Alphabet that will site a direct air capture facility next door to your data centre, producing CO2 to be stored forever underground and clean water that can be used to cool the servers. Magic. But very expensive. And a relatively small firm like DC01UK probably doesn’t want to be adding cost to a low-margin business like a data centre if they don’t have to. Where will the new data centre get its water? And, as shortages bite, will DC01UK just dry up all together?

The money. Obviously. The companies behind DC01UK are not the final operators and won’t be funding the project. Can they guarantee the billions of pounds necessary to get a fitted-out, ready-to-launch DC01UK to market in 2030? Of course not. So this comes down to who is actually providing the money and to the absolute forest of unknowns – global recession, soaring borrowing costs in the UK, a tech crash that crushes demand – that might bring the thing to a grinding halt and leave that nice dog-walking field in South Mimms just as it is now.

Then there’s Donald Trump. This one’s tricky. Will a new worldwide trade framework be a good thing or a bad thing for a UK data centre? We don’t think anyone knows right now and there are many contradictory factors. We think, though, that this global re-arrangement could actually be a good thing for DC01UK – and for firms like it outside the USA. Services – like those provided by DC01UK to big corporations – are not covered by the new American tariffs. That has to be a good thing in itself: the biggest national customer for data centre services is the United States by about a mile and worldwide data centres will be able to continue selling their capacity to American firms on the current terms. Since the physical location of a data centre is important – you want your servers to be close to your customers to reduce latency – local facilities like DC01UK will continue to be important.

The hardware that goes into data centres is, as you’d expect, mostly made in the far East. NVIDIA’s AI chips, for instance, are made in Taiwan – and US tariffs have been applied there. It is possible that the hike in price for these products in the USA could be beneficial to firms in the rest of the world – if there’s a sudden oversupply of hardware made in China, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan a glut of unsold kit could cause prices to drop here. Fitting out DC01UK could turn out be cheaper than planned. This fear of ‘dumping’ by lower-cost countries is putting the fear of God into UK manufacturers but since no computer hardware is made in Britain, this cannot be a concern. Although it’ll obviously be years before any computers are purchased for DC01UK, it’s just possible that the geopolitical chaos unleashed by Donald Trump will turn out not to be an obstacle at all but, in fact, an advantage.

• The data centre will be built on an 85-acre site, currently agricultural land, in South Mimms.
• Here’s an interesting development from just down the road. A UK company is planning a data centre waste heat network – they’re going to capture the enormous amount of heat generated by data centres in West London and use it to heat homes nearby. The scheme will produce 95GWh of heat annually in its first phase, beginning in 2028. Although they’re not connected developments, there’s a plan to build somewhere between a couple of hundred and several thousand new homes on green belt land close to DC01UK. Wouldn’t it interesting if they could be heated using the waste heat from the data centre?
• Bookmark this page to keep up with our updates on DC01UK. If you’re one of those weirdos who still uses an RSS reader, follow our feed or this Google news alert (RSS explained). We’ll almost certainly be tweeting about this of course. Email DC01UK@radlettwire.co.uk.
• Links, references and background we’re saving as we cover this story. And here are our DC01UK bookmarks on Pinboard.

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Previously on Radlett Wire: two local firms have secured outline planning permission to build Europe’s biggest data centre right here in Hertsmere. We don’t know much more than that. For instance we don’t know who the final client is or who will use the facility once it’s live. Likewise, we have only the most basic information about the facility itself. If you know more than we do about any of this or if you have anything you’d like us to know about the development, leave a comment under this post or email DC01UK@radlettwire.co.uk.

So, in this, the second post in our DC01UK deep dive, we’ll look at what we don’t know and what we should be keeping an eye on as this development proceeds. In the next post we’ll look at the bigger trends – in business, geopolitics and in AI – that might stop it from happening all together. Later we’ll look at the reaction of the affected communities: the people of Potters Bar and the settlements around it who will have to put up with this huge construction project and its long-term operation.

Seven key measuresThe data centre business is a mature one. The first dedicated facilities built specially to host computer servers in Britain actually precede the Internet – built mainly for businesses in the City of London – and are now almost forty years old. The industry, over the years, has developed a pretty complete set of standards and measurements (mostly simple ratios) that are used to compare facilities and to judge efficiency. As the development progresses we can use these ratios to work out whether DC01UK is doing a conscientious, thoughtful job or just chucking up a big dumb data barn. As neighbours and Hertsmere electors we think we have a right to hope that this development is clean, efficient and up-to-date – especially as the project appears to be a fait accompli in planning terms (National and local government have signed off on it and expect it to go ahead). At the moment, though, we’re going to have to rely on a fair amount of guesswork because they’ve told us hardly anything (next to each measure we’ve put an indication of how much we know now, in italics – hopefully this will change as the development proceeds).

1. Electricity
   PUE (power usage effectiveness) basic information
   This is the biggie, obviously. Data centres draw more electricity than almost any other kind of industrial facility and they’re the fastest-growing power draw on the grid right now, almost everywhere. Recent developments (crypto and now AI) have accelerated this growth. The only useful datapoint we’ve got from DC01UK so far relates to electricity use and it’s a helpful one because we can use it to calculate some of the others. The original announcement from Hertsmere council says that the National Grid has reserved a 400MVA substation for the facility. That translates quite precisely into a peak power draw of 360MW. St Albans, for comparison (population 150,000), draws about a third of that – 135MW. DC01UK is going to be huge.
2. Water
   WUE (water usage effectiveness) unknown
   Data centres get very hot (put your hand round the back of your computer and feel the heat it’s putting out – now multiply that by millions) and they’re cooled these days using a mxture of conventional air-conditioning and water pumped through the servers. Although no figures for water use have been published we can use the electricity figure to calculate that if it’s built to current cooling standards DC01UK will need about 250 million litres per year. That’s about 660,000 litres per day, a vast multiple of the water needed by the agricultural land it will be built on, to state the obvious. Eastern England is one of the most water-stressed parts of Britain and already experiences shortages in dry spells. ‘Zero-water’ data centre cooling systems exist – they recycle cooling water instead of just allowing it to evaporate. Can we expect a system like this from DC01UK?
3. CO2
   CUE (carbon usage effectiveness) unknown
   This is a measure of how much CO2 is emitted per unit of IT energy consumed in the data centre. The lower the CUE the better the environmental performance. This is another factor for which we have no figures at all. The developers will have to calculate this number and they may already have done so. A CUE of 0.0 is possible but only if 100% renewable electricity is used. In a developed economy a figure of 0.2 is more likely. In the UK where there’s no coal in the energy mix but where there’s still a lot of gas, the number is likely to be between 0.1 and 0.2. It’s going to be fascinating to see DC01UK’s figures once they’re public.
4. Energy reuse
   ERE (energy reuse effectiveness) unknown
   This one’s closely related to the CO2 figure above and to the heat figure below. If energy is used efficiently and not wasted – if heat from CPU cooling is reused elsewhere in the building, for instance – the CUE will come down. 1.0 is the worst here; it means all the energy that’s not used is wasted. A number lower than that indicates greater efficiency.
5. Renewable energy
   REF (renewable energy factor) unknown
   In Britain in 2025 (and certainly in 2030 when DC01UK is meant to be finished) there’s no reason why electricity for a single facility like this one shouldn’t be from 100% renewable sources. Likewise there’s no reason why electricity, once generated, shouldn’t be stored – either on-site or elsewhere – to improve efficiency and reduce cost. It’s another unknown but perhaps the presence of a green energy business in the DC01UK partnership might help here.
6. Heat
   HRE (heat reuse effectiveness) unknown
   In Britain we tend to heat our homes individually, using gas boilers. Elsewhere, especially in Europe, buildings or whole districts are heated from a single source. So, it’s probably a bit unrealistic to expect that the spare heat produced by DC01UK be used to heat homes in South Mimms and Potters Bar. It’ll probably just be vented to the air. Heat reuse effectiveness (HRE) is a simple percentage – what proportion of the heat generated is re-used? The most efficient industrial heat sources in the world, including some data centres, achieve HREs of above 50% – less than half of waste heat is thrown away. Unless the DC01UK developers have a surprise in store for us – perhaps a groundbreaking plan to heat local housing or greenhouses – then we expect this to be a very low number: somewhere between 1 and 5%.
7. Land
   LUE (land use efficiency) basic information
   This is another calculation that’s fairly easy to do, so we can make a decent guess at how efficiently this data centre will use the land allocated to it. Dividing the published figures for the power draw of the DC01UK data centre (360MW) by its area (93,000 sqare metres) and assuming a 75% usage rate gives us just below 3 kW/m², a measure which puts it in the high efficiency category for all buildings but somewhere in the middle for a data centre. It will be fascinating to learn just how ambitious the developers intend to be. There’s an irony in the fact that the best possible way to cool a huge computing facility like DC01UK would be, well, to build it somewhere else, somewhere really cold to be specific – somewhere like Northern Norway or Alaska. Cooling is then effectively free – you just find a way to let the cold air from outside in (and once you’ve warmed it up you make sure you’re not just venting it back to the outside but using it to heat the housing estate or the university next door). And it doesn’t need to be in the arctic – simply moving your datacentre seven or eight degrees North – say from Potters Bar to Stockholm – would reduce the cooling costs of a 360MW data cantre by 100,000–150,000 MWh per year.

A data centre is a very 21st Century beast. Once it’s built, most people won’t know it’s there and it’ll hum away on the horizon, behind its careful landscaping, relatively inoffensively. And since all of its critical inputs and outputs will be travelling over fibre-optic and copper cables buried in the ground there’ll be no queue of 40-foot trucks, no rail siding, no enormous car park. But we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that DC01UK is going to have no impact. Its need for electricity alone will be vast – amounting to almost 1% of the whole country’s demand for power (this is our estimate – we’ve calculated an annual draw for DC01UK of 2.37TWh at a relatively conservative 75% utilisation and the UK’s demand in 2023 was 266TWh).

A data centre is the ultimate globalised business. Once it’s switched on billions of transactions will take place every day in that inconspicuous high-tech shed next to the M25, connecting people, businesses and machines in every corner of the world.

• In a difficult period for the world economy, data centres are one of the few growth areas so a bit of Googling will yield plenty of freely-available data and background information, from governments, NGOs and consultancies:
  Energy trends in the UK (PDF) – Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
  Energy Consumption in Data Centres and Broadband Communication Networks in the EU (PDF) – European Commission.
  Data Centres and Data Transmission Networks – International Energy Agency.
  UK Government Sustainable ICT – a UK government blog – a few years old but some useful background on the issues.
  The energy conundrum – a report from Savills, a property consultancy.
• When placing a data centre, it’s not just the average temperature that matters. Humidity is also important. The drier the climate the easier it is to cool the facility using evaporative cooling. This explains why enormous data centres can still be viable even when built in extremely hot locations like the high desert of Arizona. You won’t need us to tell you that the climate in South Mimms will not permit much evaporative cooling.
• The DC01UK web site is full of data but, understandably, none of it is about the environmental impact or the resource demands. It’s all about the contribution the facility will make to the local economy.
• Bookmark this page to keep up with our updates on DC01UK. If you’re one of those weirdos who still uses an RSS reader, follow our feed or this Google news alert (RSS explained). We’ll almost certainly be tweeting about this of course. Email DC01UK@radlettwire.co.uk.
• Links, references and background we’re saving as we cover this story.

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Well, possibly. Data centres are the cotton mills and steel foundries of our day. Vast, industrial-scale facilities that are right at the heart of the fourth industrial revolution. And one might be built right here, next to the motorway in South Mimms.

One of those visualisations that developers churn out. More here.We’ll admit to a certain childish excitement about this. Mysterious developers want to build Europe’s largest data centre right here in Hertsmere. The developer applied for planning permission in September of last year and last week the council granted outline permission for the development. We suspect they’re as excited as we are, although there’s some doubt as to how involved Hertsmere can now be, given the special status of this development. We’ll be keeping an eye on this project and we’ll provide as much detail as we can as it progresses but, to begin with, here’s what we know so far:

Are you serious? On the green belt? The data centre, if built, will be on green belt land to the East of South Mimms services, right next to the M25. The developers are in luck, though: this is exactly the kind of relatively-unloved green belt that the government has recently been calling ‘grey belt‘. You might expect a plan to build on 85 acres of agricultural land in a district that has a history of green belt belligerence to produce an angry reaction (like the one that held up the Radlett Railfreight terminal for years) but when even Peter Waine, chair of the Hertfordshire branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, speaking to the BBC, can’t muster more than: “It may not be the most wonderful and beautiful green belt but it is green belt…” Here at Radlett Wire, at the other end of Hertsmere, we get the strong feeling this particular chunk of green belt may not be long for this world.

Inside the red outlineIt’s going to be huge. The claim, in the news stories and press releases, that DC01UK will be the largest data centre in Europe looks narrowly defensible – but we’d be surprised if it’s still the case once it’s actually finished. Europe’s largest running data centre is presently in Portugal. It covers about 800,000 square feet and the proposed South Mimms operation is aiming for two million square feet – although it will be built in phases. But there’s another project, in Newport, Wales, that’s also aiming for two million and, anyway, the critical measurement – especially for the local community – is probably not square feet. Planners and architects use a measure they call gross external area (GEA), which is more useful. It’s the total area of a building, including all floors, measured from the outside. It’s the critical measurement used for rating, council tax and planning. DC01UK’s GEA is 187,000 square metres, slightly more than the 185,000 square metres (2,000,000 square feet) that will be devoted to computers. And as we’ll explain, there are other important numbers – relating to water and electricity use and to pollution – that we should understand and keep an eye on.

But size isn’t everything. If completed (big question!) – and if not eclipsed by other projects along the way – this puts DC01UK just inside the top ten biggest data centres in the world, but it’s an extremely volatile market, and brutal and connected directly to the financial performance of the companies that use these facilities. Data centre capacity is a commodity – like bauxite or wheat. The biggest firms (Google, Amazon…) build and run their own but most data centre capacity is bought and sold by intermediaries or brokers. A business that needs servers for a new app is concerned only with cost; margins must be hair-thin, effiency constantly improving. So, honestly, how this plays out, between now and the proposed opening date in 2030 is anybody’s guess. Whatever happens, as you’d expect, this enormous facility is already well-and-truly dwarfed by the biggest. A single Chinese data centre, operated by China Telecom, is already over five times bigger than DC01UK and sits on a campus called the Inner Mongolia Information Park in Hohhot, China alongside several other enormous facilities (truly visible from space). Also, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the seventh largest data centre in the world is buried in the side of a mountain in Utah and is operated by the United States National Security Agency. It’s safe to say that, although you’ve never heard of it, it knows a fair amount about you.

Another one of those visualisations.Who will own the data centre? Guess what: we don’t know. We know a bit about the company set up to see it through planning, DC01UK, but nothing about the facility’s final user nor even its ultimate owner. This project is, according to Computer Weekly, a joint venture with local house-builder Griggs and Chiltern Green Energy, neither of which – I hope they won’t mind me saying – are what you’d call giants of the information age. The Register, a UK tech news web site, says it will ultimately be used by one of the ‘hyperscalers’ (industry jargon for the handful of tech giants in a position to make use of such a huge facility) but that the usual suspects – Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta – all declined to comment. This is not surprising. The big firms are typically secretive about their data centres: these are, to state the obvious, business-critical, round-the-clock facilities and ‘uptime‘ must be protected at all costs. Amazon, in particular, treats its data centres as if they were national security assets and goes to great lengths to hide them. There’s only one project described on DC01UK’s web site and there’s no ‘about us’ page. We expect it’ll be some time before we know who the final client is.

There’s some history in this area. DC01UK was incorporated in 2022 and was originally called Hilfield Battery Storage so we assume it’s connected with the application to build a battery storage farm on Hilfield Farm in Aldenham, rejected last year after a public inquiry. One thing is clear: the deal-making has begun. Vast facilities like DC01UK don’t just show up in districts like ours – they’re incentivised to do so. Tax breaks, subsidies, promises about transport, housing and infrastructure, cut-throat competition between regions – all will play a part in this project. We don’t know enough about any of this yet – and the actors are secretive, but we suspect there will be people in Hertsmere who already know substantially more than us – we’d love to hear from you in the comments!

What’s so exciting about data centres? Aren’t they just big, dumb warehouses for information? Data centres have been a big deal for a long time, since the first of the really huge online businesses began to build their own all around the world. But the pressure to provide new data centre capacity has recently exploded (last year Goldman Sachs estimated a 160% increase in demand). It’s become a very big story in the business and technology press and now it’s crossed over into the mainstream media and social media – and it’s all because of artificial intelligence (AI). AI needs an enormous amount of computing power – both in training new models and in running queries against them once they’re live. Typing a query into ChatGPT will usually use at least ten times more computing power – and thus electricity – than a Google search. And the industry really didn’t see this coming. It’s really only a couple of years since it dawned on the tech firms and on their investors that they were going to need many times more computing power than previously projected. So the rush is on.

Governments and local authorities have noticed this massive new opportunity and are rushing at it. Three weeks ago Keir Starmer launched his AI action plan, which he says will ‘deliver a decade of national renewal’. We should probably also acknowledge the boldness of Hertsmere here. Council leader (and head of something called the Hertfordshire Growth Board) Jeremy Newmark has obviously moved quickly. Apart from the obvious explosive dynamism of the AI industry he’ll be aware that, here in Britain, the government has committed to a completely new and much more aggressive orientation on economic growth – and to change planning procedures to speed up development. More specifically, data centres have been reclassified as critical national infrastructure and will have special status when it comes to planning inquiries. In fact, developments recognised as nationally significant infrastructure projects have had special status since the then Labour government created the status in 2008. In this regime, the local authority is not the lead planning authority – just a ‘statutory consultee’. DC01UK may already be on the fast track.

But could anything hold it up? Short answer: yes. And it probably won’t be planning. Even in the couple of weeks since we learnt about the project, the terms of the explosion in data centre capacity have changed completely. Less than a week before Hertsmere’s DC01UK announcement a new Chinese-built AI model called Deepseek R1 was launched. To say that it caused an epic freak-out at every level of the AI ecology would not be an overstatement. The freak-out centred on the fact that this new software was almost as efficient as the leading American models although it had been built on simpler technology – and much more cheaply. It was a huge shock, challenging the fundamentals of the emerging industry. As it dawned on the company’s competitors that a rich and useful AI model could be built using a fraction of the resources, that their assumptions about the progress of the technology could be all wrong, share prices tumbled, projects were cancelled or paused, projections and forecasts altered. So, could this global chaos change the trajectory of the South Mimms project? Cause it to be cancelled or scaled back? It really could. At Hertsmere Council everyone will have their fingers crossed.

In the next post, more about the crazy business of powering (and cooling) a modern data centre.

• For comparison, the largest warehouse in the UK – belonging to Amazon.com, natch – also covers around two million square feet. The O2 covers 1,126,270 square feet.
• It took the addition of the magical term ‘AI’ to give all this stuff the kind of political salience it needed. When Technology Secretary Peter Kyle announced the change in status for data centres in September the most exciting application he could come up with for these gigantic buildings was storage: “…from photos taken on smartphones to patients’ NHS records and sensitive financial investment information.” Boring! In the few months since then, the AI brainworm has fully infected everyone involved. When Rachel Reeves announced her big ‘growth reset’ in January it was all AI, all the time.
• Amazon’s policy of secrecy about the location of their data centres even extends to their own staff. According to Peter Judge in Data Center Dynamics: “Only those within Amazon who have a legitimate business need to have such information know the actual location of these data centers…”
• There’s another huge data centre under construction in Hertfordshire – Google is building the company’s first UK facility in Waltham Cross. Incidentally, the existence of this project may suggest that Google is unlikely to be DC01UK’s ultimate customer.
• Everyone involved with this project is obviously moving quickly. If the government’s promises about removing barriers to growth are real, this project could almost be a kind of benchmark. The completion date in the press release is a bit unimpressive, though. 2030? Elon Musk claims to have built his new Colossus AI data centre in 19 days (although he did basically just stuff 100,000 NVidia GPUs into an old washing machine factory).
• Bookmark this page to keep up with our updates on DC01UK. If you’re one of those weirdos who still uses an RSS reader, follow our feed or this Google news alert (RSS explained). We’ll almost certainly be tweeting about this of course.
• Links, references and background we’re saving as we cover this story.

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There might be a by-election in Hertsmere in the new year. Reform UK is the first to have noticedBoom. First out the gate. Reform UK is distributing leaflets in Hertsmere in anticipation of a by-election in the new year. Candidate Darren Selkus’s letter to electors says:

If the rumours prove true and Oliver Dowden is granted a peerage in the New Year Honours, it would trigger a by-election right here in Hertsmere. With Labour still in power and the Conservatives in opposition, this presents a unique opportunity for a free vote – a vote for real change, a vote for Reform.

We haven’t heard the rumours Selkus cites, but we have been speculating for a while that Dowden might not relish the prospect of a whole electoral term in opposition.

So, it’s relevant that the Tories have spent the last 14 years packing the red benches; enobling, well, practically anyone, as far as we can tell. The long list of peers they’ve advanced includes the millionaire PPE entrepreneur, the son of a former KGB agent (spending his dad’s money freely in London and in Umbria), the mysterious ‘adviser’ no one can remember and the ‘chief of staff’ who worked for Liz Truss for less than a month. They’ve done this at a greater rate than any government in modern history (we’ve just learnt that these are called malverisation appointments). And it’s not just peers: Conservative governments since 2010 have given ten times more knighthoods and damehoods to MPs in 14 years than Labour did in 13. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to call this out-of-control patronage. They have no shame.

Peer explosionSo will Sir Oliver – who scored his knighthood in the final hours of the Sunak government (and picked it up this week at Windsor Castle) – move along the corridor to the Lords in the new year? We’re not so sure. He’s still a young man and the private sector must beckon (although, of course, he might not have much choice in the matter and there’s nothing to stop a peer of the realm from moonlighting at, say, a Mayfair hedge fund).

The operatorWe’re quite impressed by military veteran Darren Selkus. He’s an operator. His communication with electors is savvy (and he says that, if elected, he’ll give his MP’s salary to charity, something that at least one of the party’s new MPs is already doing). He suspects he can increase Reform’s vote share at a by-election because voters have greater freedom when they know they’re not selecting the next government (in his letter he calls it a ‘free vote’).

Vote share won by parties of the populist right in Hertsmere since 1983We know this to be true in by-elections – turnout is lower and minority parties can gain share. It’s an intriguing equation. Can an insurgent party have an impact in a home counties seat like ours, between general elections, when the Tories are so firmly embedded? At the July election Selkus won 6,584 votes (just short of 14% of the vote) – more than UKIP at their 2015 high-point and the largest vote for the populist right in the history of the constituency. He must be absolutely beside himself at the prospect of closing the gap at the right-hand end of the chart a bit.

CheersHis party’s leader is, by a mile, the most successful British politician of the 21st Century. His relaxed manner, his defiance of silly parliamentary norms and his sure-footed disregard for electoral law have secured for his party a solid and pretty defensible 15% of the national vote. It remains to be seen if a shamelessly, almost defiantly, upper-class character like Farage can get past this percentage while striding around the country in those mustard-yellow cords, though.

More to the point, while the whole hierarchy of his party is drawn from approximately the same gene pool – especially the various braying suits we see on the TV – it’s hard to imagine a breakthrough with the other 85%. Reform is not AfD or FdI or even the Trump GOP. The party’s platform is significantly deeper than it was when it emerged from the Brexit Party but it’s an uninspiring package. There is no exciting radical agenda, no iconoclastic intellectual figurehead, no assault on corporate power in Reform’s future. It’s frankly odd that, having engineered the most consequential constitutional change in recent British history, Farage and his party have no apparent plan to make use of the huge boost to sovereignty produced by Brexit beyond hardening the borders. Their only consolation must be the fact that the two main parties are apparently out of ideas too.

The risk is that the party will exhaust its potential because it’s impossible for this generation of leaders, formed in the anti-immigration and anti-EU campaigns of previous decades, to imagine a modern, emancipatory populist platform (Farage remains obsessed, for instance, with privatising the NHS – not what you’d call a rallying cry for the masses). Still, there’s so much potential for the bigger parties to screw this up that you really never can tell…

The playersWe know that Reform aspires to the status of a start-up and the party’s response to the possibility of Dowden’s removal to the Lords is appropriately agile. The established parties probably haven’t even noticed yet. And they’ll almost certainly have to go through another selection process before they can start sending out leaflets. Reform has first-mover advantage.

Labour, when it comes to it, would do well to go with their general election candidate: personable and popular Josh Tapper. His campaign in July was effective and his vote share was among the highest for Labour in the constituency’s history.

To be honest, the Liberals might as well not bother: their 2024 vote share in Hertsmere was close to the party’s 2017 low point (when the candidate was too busy to do any campaigning). To have fallen to fourth place behind Reform in the year of the party’s great revival is just embarrassing.

Shapps in RadlettFor the Conservatives, as we keep saying, a by-election in such a peachy seat – one of the safest in Britain – would present an opportunity to bring back one of the big beasts who lost their seats in July. We have no special insight here but surely Grant Shapps must be in with a chance? We would certainly relish having the colourful former web marketing executive and hilariously implausible defence secretary to write about here.

The Greens are bound to show up but their candidate John Humphries (a veteran of two previous general elections in Hertsmere) polled about a third of Selkus’s figure here in July and, although Humphries might also see a by-election boost, the party has essentially disappeared since the election, apparently having no clue what to do with four actual MPs during an actual climate crisis, so we’re not expecting much.

• Here’s our detailed post about the results of the 2024 general election in Hertsmere.
• Farage has told the press that Reform UK will soon no longer be a private limited company and will even adopt a formal constitution, under which the members could, in theory, remove a leader. We won’t hold our breath.
• This spreadsheet is the only place you’ll find results for every general election in Hertsmere since the constituency was created in 1983, plus council elections, PCC elections and groovy charts. It’s yours to download and use.
• Of course, if the rumours that Elon Musk plans to funnel $100M into Reform via the UK subsidiary of his social media business are true then this might alter the party’s prospects a bit.
• We can’t find anyone offering odds on Shapps’ return to Parliament in Hertsmere but we’d probably put a few quid on it if we could. He’s a local boy, he’s obviously still keen (he’s constantly popping up as ‘former defence minister’ and ‘former transport minister’ in the media and he is keeping his web site up to date).
• The image of London in that Reform leaflet is one of those really shonky AI-generated ones that were doing the rounds on social media earlier this year. Another practical, cost-saving move from Reform – no need to pay for an illustrator!
• Speaking of leaflets, whenever you receive an election leaflet through the door you could do posterity a favour and upload it to electionleaflets.org.

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When we started blogging about Radlett, in the very distant past, Oliver Dowden wasn’t even a thing yet. He’d recently returned to the Tory Party HQ from a period at a vast, global PR company. And it wasn’t just any PR company. It was one of those vampiric outfits that would rather do the dirty, morally complicated – and highly-remunerative – work of laundering the misdeeds of dictatorships and cults than get stuck into promoting a new breakfast cereal.

Sir Oliver’s employer, Hill and Knowlton, famously represented the American tobacco lobby as long ago as the 1950s, helping to muddy the waters as the evidence for the health effects of their products accumulated. It hasn’t got much better since then. The firm has topped the table of firms representing murderous regimes (Indonesia, China, Kuwait and so on…) for decades and used a catalogue of disreputable techniques to help the US government sell the invasion of Iraq to middle America. The story of the firm’s complicated entanglement with the Scientologists and Eli Lilly – the Prozac people – is worthy of a movie (Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Al Pacino – that kind of vibe). We imagine the only reason there hasn’t been one is that the producers would have to get past Hill and Knowlton and the Scientologists to get it made.

We have no idea which accounts Sir Oliver worked on when he was with the firm (and the Scientologists were long gone) but we suspect this period must have been formative for a political operator like him. We also suspect that what he learnt there has informed his own conduct in later years. We’ve lamented in the past just how irritatingly squeaky-clean he’s been during his Parliamentary career. Staying out of trouble and cleaning up after less temperate colleagues and superiors has become his signature move. Search through Sir Oliver’s appearances on the Sunday morning programmes and you’ll find essentially a long string of competent defenses of the indefensible.

Dowden doesn’t make stupid gaffes or originate mendacious laws but he’s exemplary at putting things straight after others have. We feel sure that whoever takes over in November will find a use for the ultimate bagman, although we’re not convinced an operator of Sir Oliver’s calibre will be able to tolerate a minimum of five years of crisis management from the opposition benches. As a politician he’s never known anything other than government and we’d be surprised if he isn’t pretty soon bored with the mundane constituency stuff – he’s certainly already fielding calls from the other side of the revolving door.

Thank you, Sir OliverHere at Radlett Wire, we have a lot to thank our MP for. It was his election that revived our interest in this blog in the first place. We’d been writing about the Christmas Lights and the Rod Stewart tribute act at the theatre and the new pet spa up at Battler’s Green farm for a few years and we were honestly bored to death. When diligent-but-boring, five-terms MP James Clappison was brutally despatched to make way for David Cameron’s most trusted SPAD we were kind of excited.

We changed the theme of the blog sharpish and we’ve been keeping an eye on Oliver Dowden ever since. And, to be honest, the people of Radlett seem to be a bit less interested in him than they were in the Christmas lights (did we tell you Anthony Joshua switched them on once?). Our numbers fell of a cliff when we made the change and they’ve never really recovered. If we had a single commercial thought in our heads we’d have gone back to the tribute acts and dropped Sir Oliver all together.

And we find this instructive, of course. We’ve learnt that ordinary electors are definitely much more interested in constituency matters than they are in the goings-on in Parliament. This is universal, of course. For most people the fact that their MP is a Machiavellian schemer in SW1 is utterly irrelevant – boring, in fact. It’s much more important that this MP is visibly working to stop the hideous green belt development that’s going to block out the light or ready to stand up for a constituent against the council. That kind of thing.

Things pick up around here at election time. People seem to like our detailed posts about the candidates and the campaigns and the election results posts are always popular – and this is the stuff that keeps producing traffic long after the election. We assume these posts become a kind of reference – and they continue to show up in Google search results so they must be of some value. This is why we try to make sure our posts are:

• Packed with useful information – the more the better. This will make for long (sometimes slightly boring?) posts, but this is important work so that’s cool.
• Absolutely objective and scrupulously accurate. We have our opinions but they don’t influence the facts. We never share unverified stories or gossip. Our spreadsheet of historic election results, for instance, is the only place you’ll find the whole history of Hertsmere elections in one place.
• All about the politics. We’re not interested in the private lives of the politicians we talk about, only their public conduct and their official roles.
• Comprehensively sourced – with links to every resource we make use of. And we’ll link to sources of every complexion – from the Telegraph to the Morning Star, via the Guardian, the Office of National Statistics and – of course – Wikipedia.
• Up-to-date. We’ll go back to older posts and add new information. Our voting in Hertsmere post has been updated multiple times since first published and currently provides the most comprehensive guide to the history and politics of the constituency you’ll find anywhere.
• Sarcastic. Always sarcastic. Sorry.

The fact that the local press has largely stopped covering Parliamentary and constituency politics between elections is another reason we want to carry on covering the activites of our MP. There ought to be somewhere that puts on record, all in one place and with a critical eye, the business of a single constituency MP. They’re important people, our representatives – and have been for hundreds of years – since long before ordinary people were able to vote for them. We shouldn’t let them operate unobserved.

So, Sir Oliver’s list of sketchy behaviour is not a long one. And what’s on it is, let’s face it, not the most damning. Hardly a morning’s work for a Boris Johnson or a Nadhim Zahawi. But we’ve been keeping track of it, so here’s a list, with links to our original coverage.

| Behaviour | When? | Details | | Sums totaling £82,741.09 for his office | 2017-2022 | Dowden election date betting scandal interview situation | | £8,398 from a hedge fund | 2022 | Has Oliver Dowden finally joined the club? | | £5,000 from an art services company | 2022 | ibid |

Fairly minor infamies

• What you’ll notice about the dates associated with the last two items on this list is that took place while Sir Oliver was out of office and on the back benches. The rules are less onerous when you’re not a minister. They don’t apply to shadow ministers either so expect a bit of a boost to Sir Oliver’s income from these outside sources now that he’s in opposition.
• You should also bookmark Sir Oliver’s entry in the register of members’ interests on the House of Commons web site. You’ll notice a fair number of gifts, mostly seats at the opera and at sporting events. No trainers, though.
• There’s a function within the British civil service called The Government Digital Service that’s won praise around the world for its work in making government information easily accessible. As a result, information published by the UK government, Parliament and other public bodies is mostly presented in very user-friendly and open ways. Not all of it, though. If you’ve ever searched it, you’ll have noticed that the Parliamentary register of interests is presented in an essentially un-searchable form with no analysis or comparison functions (the same goes for the record of MPs’ expenses, for some reason). It’s not in a database and it’s extremely hard to compare one MP with another or one year with another. It’s almost as if it’s been hidden. We can’t think why the MPs would want information about their gifts and outside jobs to be quite so awkward and inaccessible. The brilliant people at MySociety have recenly begun to publish the members’ interests data in various useful formats, though. There’s a spreadsheet you can download.

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We really should have put some money on this.As we said in our last post, the keeping-an-eye-on-Sir-Oliver-Dowden business has really fallen off a cliff since the election. We’re not complaining. It was bound to happen. And, to be honest, we weren’t expecting him to do anything worth keeping an eye on until after the new Conservative leader is announced in November. Our “Oliver Dowden” Google alert has been so boring of late we were considering cancelling it. But then…

What we definitely weren’t expecting was for Sir Oliver to be caught up in the alleged election gambling scandal. The whole thing looked so not his style. Seriously, can you imagine Sir Oliver “what me, guv?” Dowden gripping his tiny pencil and pushing a betting slip across the counter at Coral’s? “20 quid on 4 July, please.” But here it is, according to Sky he’s been interviewed by the Gambling Commission as part of their investigation into bets placed by Tory insiders on the date of the general election.

Sir Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate realityWe should be clear, the Sky report goes on to say: “a source close to Sir Oliver said the former senior cabinet minister is not and was never under investigation himself,” so, presumably, he was being grilled about whether he saw any other senior Tories coming out of a bookmaker’s clutching a betting slip with their collar turned up in the days running up to 22 May.

Here’s hoping for more mildly disreputable stuff from Sir Oliver. Up until now the absolute shadiest behaviour we’ve been able to find from our squeaky clean MP is making use of a notorious legal loophole to accept £82,741.09 for his office from an ‘unincorporated association’ that apparently has no address, no members, no directors, no web site and has never published any accounts – called the South Hertfordshire Business Club, between 2017 and 2022.

• We suspect this to be Sir Oliver’s first appearance in the gaming trade press too, so that’s a bonus, publicity-wise.
• And what’s this about ‘a source close to Sir Oliver’? Once you’re out of government your team of flunkies and loyal spokespeople evaporates in an instant. When Sky reporter Jon Craig says ‘a source close to Sir Oliver’ he means ‘Sir Oliver’.
• The Tory rump in Parliament must be almost hysterical with glee at the revelations from the government benches about Taylor Swift tickets, Hugo Boss trainers, the loan of a house to do homework in and so on. But it’s worth remembering that even the squeakiest of MPs will sometimes find themselves accepting a large payment from a hedge fund. Sir Oliver was one of ten Tory MPs who took paid jobs with party donors during 2022, including, for some reason, a very well-paid engagement (£700 per hour!) with Caxton Associates, the hedge fund that bankrolled Liz Truss’s bold experiment with reality.
• As a (very) small business operating in the South Hertfordshire area we would be interested in availing ourselves of the services of the South Hertfordshire Business Club but we haven’t been able to locate a membership form. If you know more about the club, who runs it and how we might join, do leave a comment.

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Look, we know we should have expected this, but we’re experiencing a bit of a post-election comedown.There’s plenty of action in Parliament, of course, and it’s kind of mind-blowing to hear the man in the big hat reading out a list of broadly social-democratic laws, even if some of them are a bit arbitrary and possibly even cynical.

But in our favourite bit of politics: the parliamentary and government career of our MP, Sir Oliver Dowden, things have gone very quiet indeed. Let’s have a little look.

Runners and riders and fallers at the first fenceLast week we reported that Dowden was supporting Victoria Atkins for Conservative Party leader but he’s actually not said a word about that since Christmas so we suspect he’ll have moved his alliegance by now. He’s an important figure in the party, though, just behind the big beasts, and he always goes early with his endorsement (see this earlier post for more about Dowden’s habit of picking winners) so his opinion matters. Who do you think he’ll support when the time comes?

You can still get 25-1 on Atkins and a ridiculous range of odds on Dowden himself. 12 bookmakers are currently offering a median of 83-1 on the former Deputy Prime Minister and outlier Betfair will currently give you 342-1, which we reckon is crying out for a fiver if you’ve got one lying around.

Bagman foreverOliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate realityOliver Dowden, as we’ve been saying on here for years, has been moving around the fringes of power for his whole political career. We’re not qualified to tell you why he’s not found his way to the top tier yet, although we have our theories. This historic Tory drubbing must represent his best opportunity yet, though. The field is much smaller (there are only 121 of them to choose from now after all), his nine years in parliament and six years in government must now put him somewhere in the top half of the table in term of experience – and many of the genuine big beasts have retired or been ejected.

For most of his less battle-hardened colleagues there’ll be a reluctance to go for the big job while everything’s so sad and broken. Suella Braverman, one of the more credible candidates, has already imploded – and will probably be a Reform MP by the time the conferences come around. The desperate antics on the opposition front bench last week – with two of the leadership frontrunners, er, losing their shit during a very boring ministerial statement – doesn’t bode well. This is going to get nasty. We can understand the attraction of a long caretaker period, even if only to allow everyone to calm down and for the new medication to kick in.

Leadership candidates Badenoch (13-8) and Atkins (25-1) in actionSo a Dowden leadership bid is unlikely. He’s a realist. He knows he’s not charismatic enough, that his network is too thin, that his awkwardness and his reedy estuary voice won’t carry him through a gruelling period in opposition. It’s a very relateable dilemma, shared by so many of us – in our work and in our private lives. But Dowden’s great strength is that he knows his limits and is happy to stick to the second tier, managing situations, solving problems and providing back-rubs for the big beasts.

Our MP has been pretty quiet since he won in Hertsmere (against a 20% swing to Labour). On social media he’s made one appearance, looking a bit untidy, standing by a chainlink fence. Must have been a tough few weeks.

What’s he talking about over there by that fence? The green belt obvs. While he was in the government his room for manoeuvre was limited – he had to be seen to defend the interests of his constituents while sticking to the government’s line on planning reform and development. His solution then – on the Radlett aerodrome development, for instance – was to intervene only when he could identify someone else – like the county council – as the villain. But he’s off the chain now so we can presumably expect him to be much more robust in defence of farmland like the fields on Barnet Lane behind that fence. He might want to iron his shirt.

• The only complete source for Hertsmere election results going back to when the constituency was created is our free spreadsheet, which also includes council and PCC results.
• Our overview of the 2024 general election results in Hertsmere – pretty much the most detailed coverage you’ll find.

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It often seems that we, the electorate, are called upon to exercise our democratic rights mainly to solve problems for the political parties.In 2017 we were called upon to help Theresa May break her Brexit impasse by giving her a big enough Parliamentary majority to push through a deal (nice work, Theresa). In 2019 we were asked to resolve Boris Johnson’s even more intractable Brexit dilemma (nice work, Boris). But what problem was Rishi Sunak asking us to solve for him by calling an election six months before he had to, in the teeth of the lowest population ratings and the worst polling for decades?

We’ve updated our free spreadsheet of results from every general election in Hertsmere all the way back to the first one, in 1983.

It looks like Sunak’s desperate hope was that the electorate rescue him from the Reform insurgency, that Richard Tice wouldn’t have time to organise a national campaign, that Nigel Farage wouldn’t dream of giving up the glamour and the gilded corridors of Trump Tower and that, when forced to choose, unhappy Conservative voters would snap back to the Mother Party and send Reform packing. No such luck.

So who won?The Tories won in Hertsmere with a majority of 7,992 votes, not bad considering the national picture but almost two-thirds smaller than in 2019, when Dowden won by 21,313 (it’s the smallest majority he’s won in four general elections). This much-reduced majority compares pretty well with the other seats where Tories held on too. In fact Hertsmere is now the tenth safest Conservative seat in the UK – up from 43rd before the election (even allowing for the fact that there are now so few of them this is still a big improvement). The average Tory majority at this election was 4,086, which is a number that must put the fear of God into the strategists at CCHQ. The median was 3,572 and the largest in the country was – guess where – Rishi Sunak’s Richmond and Northallerton, where the majority was 12,185.

Lay your betsLet’s get the succession out of the way. Who will take over the dry husk of the Conservative Party? Who will be its Michael Howard? The person to rebuild it after the tsunami? We’d assumed the jockeying for leadership of the soundly defeated Conservative Party – reduced to the smallest number of MPs in its history – was well under way before Thursday’s epic collapse but we were a bit surprised to learn that Dowden might well be supporting outsider Victoria Atkins for leader when the contest comes. The Telegraph got excited about this two days before the election but on actually reading the source of their scoop – an article in The Independent – it seems that Dowden was really just buttering up a guest at a Xmas drinks party back in December. Atkins herself, on hearing Dowden say “…there’s only two people from my generation that I could see leading the Conservative Party: Rishi Sunak or Vicky Atkins…” is recorded as saying only ‘wow’.

We wouldn’t mention this bit of Tory Party gossip here if it weren’t for the fact that Dowden has a record of picking winners. If you’d like to make this a little more interesting you’ll currently get between 10-1 and 25-1 on Victoria Atkins for leader (with favourite Kemi Badenoch on 2-1 or even 6-4). We urge caution while things are so fluid, of course, but we’re wondering about a couple of quid on a wildly implausible come-back for Nadhim “Unsecured Loan” Zahawi at 66-1.

The gang of three – all, remarkably, still in their seatsAnd when we say ‘picking winners’, we mean really pickingthem. Dowden was part of the ‘gang of three’ thrusting young MPs, along with Robert Jenrick and a junior Minister called Rishi Sunak who were first to endorse Boris Johson for leader in June 2019 (look at their happy little faces! Seems so long ago). Anyway, you know how that went.

But canny Dowden was also ‘first to wield the knife‘ when Johnson’s time had come in July 2022 and the letters of resignation started to pour in (do you remember there were so many of them we made a spreadsheet to keep track of them?). We wrote about this back then.

Dowden was then among the very first to join #TeamRishi, although it was an idea whose time hadn’t quite come because we had to get through that weird Liz Truss bit before Sunak could assume power as some sort of saviour. “Unquestionably the best person to beat Labour…” you say?

(although there was a bit of a scare in the small hours, Dowden’s favourite for Tory Party leader Victoria Atkins was re-elected, so it’s still on…).

The votingLabour. Of course, as we should have expected, the result here in Hertsmere was another win for incumbent Oliver Dowden. The swing against him was huge – over 20% – and the swing to Labour pretty good too but nowhere near enough. Josh Tapper’s share of the vote, 28%, is the fourth highest ever polled for Labour in Hertsmere, also the fourth largest number of votes, 13,459. But to win he’d have to have done better than Beth Kelly in 1997, whose 19,230 votes and 38.2% brought her to within 3,000 votes of a win. Even if Reform had not existed and every one of Darren Selkus’s 6,584 votes had gone to Tapper, we’d still have a Tory MP today.

This must have been an absolute rollercoaster for Josh Tapper. When selected by his local party back in March he’d presumably have had very limited expectations, in one of Britain’s safest Tory seats, but as Rishi’s catastrophic campaign ground on and the polls (so many polls!) began to pile up, he must have allowed himself to think the unthinkable once or twice. We recorded some polls here that put Tapper over the line but they were always outliers. It must be heartbreaking for him to watch the many new, young Labour MPs turning up at Parliament over the last few days. Better luck next time, Josh!

Of course, one of the more remarkable things about this Labour landslide is that it is the product of one of the lowest vote shares in recent political history – 34%. Commentators are calling this result ‘wide but shallow‘ or ‘distorted‘. Fraser Nelson in the Spectator calls it a Potemkin landslide, which is clever. Activists, of course, will say things like ‘that’s how politics works’, or ‘a win is a win’ but will be privately conscious of the fact that Starmer won over three million votes fewer than Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and, startlingly, over half a million fewer than Labour in the catastrophic 2019 election. Labour must govern – and quickly make a real impression on the lives of Britons – in the knowledge that Keir Starmer and his party are less popular in numeric terms than the hated predecessor he has expended so much energy to delete from the national memory.

The Liberals. In Hertsmere, Labour remains the only viable opposition. The Liberals fell apart here – again – and there was a 3.2% swing against Emma Matanle. The ruthlessly effective LibDem campaign – which has produced 71 seats nationally – focused on exploiting the ‘efficiency’ of the electoral process by investing everything in winnable seats. It was always going to leave Matanle on the outside. In the 1980s the party was the second-largest in the constituency. Matanle’s vote was less than a third of her party’s best performance here in 1983. It will be a long road back.

This list of Liberal and LibDem candidates, incidentally, includes Zerbanoo Gifford, the only Zoroastrian (we think) ever to have stood for election in Hertsmere; Laurence Brass, founder of an important Jewish-Palestinian peace settlement who is still serving as a Hertfordshire country councillor almost forty years on and Sophie Bowler, the LibDem candidate who won some press coverage in 2015 for being ‘too busy to do any campaigning‘ and consequently won the smallest number of votes for her party in the history of the constituency.Reform’s performance in Hertsmere was, in national terms, not remarkable. An outer-London suburb was never going to be a good prospect for the party so their investment here was probably small. Darren Selkus was essentially on his own (at least he was actually visible) and the fact that he was able to bring in 6,584 votes – more even than UKIP at their 2015 high-point (and, remarkably, more than UKIP’s entire national vote at this election) – probably bodes well if he wants to stand again (he stood for the Brexit Party in Epping Forest in 2019 too). His vote here was the largest for a populist party in the history of the constituency (easily enough to get his deposit back). The party took lumps out of the Tory vote this time round but all the parties are conscious that Reform UK will be the primary source of chaos in UK politics for some time yet – and the party really won’t want to stop at humiliating the Tories. Like UKIP before it, the party’s presence in the political landscape is going to focus minds and all parties will be thinking hard about how to make sure Reform can’t come for them in subsequent elections.

From Darren Selkus’s Twitter accountDuring the campaign Selkus promised to give the whole of his MP’s salary to charity, which suggests that his business – which sells wood veneers – is probably doing well. He’ll be able to give it 100% of his focus again now.

The Greens must be wondering what they have to do to have an impact in British politics. If any party should be disrupting UK politics from the margins then surely it ought to be the party of the climate crisis and of protecting the environment? But no, once again, the disruptive force – here as across Europe – is a reactionary populist party. A party, in fact, that explicitly opposes Net Zero and advances a kind of ‘la-la-la-not-listening’ approach to global warming. Reform UK Chairman Richard Tice explains that, because the UK’s economy is small, cutting emissions here would “make zero difference to climate change”, so we should focus on adaptation (taller sea walls, flood-resistant crops and so on) rather than participating in the worldwide energy transition.

The Green Party put up a candidate in every seat in England and Wales this time and now has four MPs, one fewer than Reform – a big breakthrough. In Hertsmere, John Humphries, a veteran campaigner who stood here in 2019, continued the party’s steady growth in share. Where the party took seats this time they came from the major parties but it will be a long time before the Greens represent a threat to the Tories here.

One of the party’s challenges is that, once elected, Green MPs will be subject to the same local political pressures as everyone else. They’ve started as they mean to go on: this Telegraph story is from two days after the election:

Would a Hertsmere Green MP be brave enough to support the construction of a thousand PassivHaus homes on the green belt? Or a solar farm on farmland in the constituency?

The Independents. The other group that’s really boomed in the 2024 general election is the broad church of candidates with no party affiliation. We counted 487 candidates in the general election with the word ‘independent’ in their party name, the largest number ever in a UK election – most constituencies in Britain had five or six candidates. Six Independents were elected to Parliament this time. One of them was Jeremy Corbyn. Four of them were so-called ‘Gaza candidates’, standing against Labour in seats that have larger Muslim populations. Hertsmere’s Independent is Ray Bolster. Bolster kept us guessing by remaining entirely invisible for the first five weeks of the campaign – no web site, no social media, no leaflets. But in the few days before the poll he put his head above the parapet and put out a leaflet. We learnt that Bolster is a local man, an RAF veteran and a life-long peacenik. His 536 votes doesn’t look at all bad when you consider how elusive he was during the campaign.

No concerns about age hereThe only other Independent in the history of Hertsmere was Ronald Parkinson, who stood as an Independent Communist in 1983 and polled a remarkable 1,116 votes (although the fact that he had the same surname as the winning Tory may have contributed to this total).

• Detailed results for Hertsmere from the BBC (with nice charts) or from Wikipedia (with a simpler table of results).
• We’ve updated our spreadsheet of results from every general election in Hertsmere all the way back to the first one, in 1983 (you’ll also find council and PCC results).
• Since Oliver Dowden remains our MP we can continue keeping an eye on him. Follow the #DowdenLog tag here.

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It’s chaos at Reform HQ but that’s how they like it…A man with a contractReform UK is a pretty shabby insurgency. Neither a high-gloss, updated 20th Century dinosaur like Le Pen’s National Rally, nor a dark, ideological machine like Alternative for Germany. But maybe we shouldn’t expect a slick operation here, maybe it’s not very British to expect a challenger from the far right to be anything other than scrappy and a bit lairy.

The man in the photo with all the American flags is Newt Gingrich – not a British politician, of course, but pugnacious Speaker of the US House of Representatives during the 1994 Congressional mid-terms, a veteran conservative political operator who wrote the Republican party’s programme for that election, an enormously influential document that many credit as the beginning of the populist turn, the epic shift in American politics that ultimately produced you know who.

Darren Selkus, army veteran and business owner, is Hertsmere’s Gingrich. Read about him on the Reform web site.

Gingrich’s document was no mere manifesto, no mere platform. It was a contract. A Contract with America. The idea was that instead of promoting a dry programme of dry legislation to be fought out vote by arduous vote through the congressional system once in power, the party would lay out an ambitious reworking of the system itself. Gingrich was a political visionary who saw an opportunity to put the Republican party back at the heart of things. In this he wasn’t so much a proto-Trump as Trump’s inverse – he wanted to shift the power in American politics back from the presidency to a radicalised congress.

His contract was more than the usual shopping list of policies carefully weighted for viability; it was a series of linked measures that would, together, overturn decades of post-war liberal orthodoxy – economic, social, diplomatic, everything. It begins with eight pledges – reforms to the congressional system aimed at cementing a conservative model of governance indefinitely. It’s a fascinating document, not least because it self-consciously marked the end of folksy, optimistic, forward-looking Reagan conservatism and the beginning of the darker variety the whole world is now familiar with – George W Bush’s messianic militarism, Trump’s ‘American carnage‘.

Britain’s Gingrich?Gingrich was working as an insurgent inside one of the two governing parties, of course, an operator since the 1960s. Trump began as an outsider but entered the Republican party and hollowed it out brutally. It’s his party now. Farage has not yet achieved a position inside the Tory Party but he’s been influencing the shape and direction of the party pretty directly for twenty years now. He’s a kind of parasitic shadow leader, directing the mighty, 300 year-old Conservative Party, pint in hand, from the saloon bar. It’s only a few years since Farage looked like he was finished. Boris Johnson had cannily replaced him as populist folk hero, Brexit was finally done and the man himself seemed to be more interested in American politics. But his influence endures. And we suspect he’s not finished with the Tory party yet, whether he’s elected in Clacton or not.

The Gingrich contract must have come to mind for many on Monday when Nigel Farage launched Reform’s ‘Contract With You‘. This contract isn’t quite as ambitious – and it’s likely to be a lot less influential (we suspect it was written in a bit of a hurry – count the typos).

Reform’s document steers clear of grand claims. It’s essentially a pretty focused list of policies designed as a response to a probable Labour government. Farage is positioning his party as the effective opposition in the coming Parliament. His assumption is that the Tories, no matter how many seats they finally win, will be so diminished, so intellectually exhausted that they’ll have little to offer while the party is laboriously rebuilt. That Reform, even from a base of a handful of seats, will dominate on the critical issues. And they might be right (they’ll need to win a few seats, though).

Beginning on the very first page we’re into a sequence of commitments that are carefully weighted to offer a challenge to the likely governing party without being in any way deliverable. Finding £50 Billion of savings in the civil service, a sum equal to the whole defence budget, seems implausible to say the least, for instance. Taking back £35 Billion per year from the commercial banks without causing mini-budget levels of market chaos likewise.

Pledges pledges pledgesYou will find the obligatory numbered pledges at the beginning, though – obviously an indispensable element of any contemporary manifesto. These numbered pledges, for some reason, all begin with a kind of John Lennon flourish: 1) Imagine Smart Immigration, Not Mass Immigration; 2) Imagine No More Small Boats in the Channel; 3) Imagine No NHS Waiting Lists; 4) Imagine Good Wages for a Hard Day’s Work; 5) Imagine Affordable, Stable Energy Bills.

In this rather boring package, the only place where the language soars a little is in the final policy section, headed ‘Reform is needed to defend and promote British culture, identity and values’, where we find the more inflammatory bits – the random mention of sharia law, reforming the BBC, dumping equalities legislation and so on.

Comedy cost savingsAnd then at the very end you’ll find a parody income table that reads like the kind of Dragon’s Den forecast that would gets Deborah Meaden pulling a face – various conveniently round numbers totted up in a table so that party spokesmen can claim it’s ‘fully-costed’. We’ll look a bit more closely at Reform’s policy proposals in a later post.

So why a contract?Back in the nineties, the Contract With America wasn’t quite the ideological bulldozer Gingrich hoped it would be – it was essentially cut to ribbons in congress – by hostile conservatives from within his own party as well as by Clinton’s Democrats – reduced to a pretty thin set of compromised measures, most of which failed to pass. Gingrich went from sole proprietor of congressional conservatism to “who?” in a few years. But his aggression, his unwavering rejection of the bi-partisan conventions of congress and his disrespect for his party’s elders have all influenced American politics to the present day.

Another man with a contractSo, back to the UK general election of 2024. Why would a party leader want to attach this ‘contract’ idea to his policy programme?

It stands out from the crowd. The contract language quite cleverly opens up some distance from the other parties’ documents. It’s the only set of promises in play that’s not a manifesto, not a dreary document like all the other dreary documents. At his launch, Farage said: “today is not a manifesto launch. If I say to you ‘manifesto’, your immediate word-association is ‘lie’…”

Contracts are for consumers. The idea of a contract is actually a pretty good expression of our relationship with contemporary politics. Electors in the third decade of the 21st Century are not expected to engage with politics – as activists or organised workers or even as enthusiastic private citizens. We’re expected only to consume politics, to rate its quality via occasional elections and sometimes to switch brands, in the same way we switch gas providers or mobile phones. Meanwhile, political movements are over, replaced by narrowly-focused campaign groups. Incidentally, this explains why we feel so disempowered and disconnected from politics, why so many people say “they’re all the same…” – the politicians like it that way.

Businesses love contracts. Reform UK is a business. It’s the image they’re looking for. Tice and Farage and Habib have enthusiastically embraced the ‘start-up’ idea. Journos and critics noticed ages ago that Reform UK is not a conventionally incorporated political party. Columnists and social media geniuses thought the revelation that the party is just an ordinary limited company would be an absolutely killer gotcha. “Look, it’s not a political party, it’s a scam!” Of course it made no difference at all. Nobody cares. Limited companies are famously easy to set up in Britain. It costs £50 and takes less than 24 hours. The fact that the simplest and most robust organisational form for this new force in British politics was actually an off-the-shelf company really does suit the project. A disruptive, entrepreneurial enterprise like Reform probably ought to be a business and not a fusty old not-for-profit.

Chaos suits ReformReform UK wasn’t ready for the election when Sunak announced it but that’s fine – it’s a start-up – the rag-tag Reform team mobilised resources with the ‘fuck you’ energy of a tech entrepeneur. ‘Move fast and break things’ could almost be their slogan. Hiring and then quickly firing candidates as they’re exposed as racists and lunatics is all part of the energy of an insurgent party. When opponents get excited about the chaos inside the Reform operation they’re profoundly missing the point. That’s how they like it – and, let’s face it, voters seem to like it too.

What’s in this contract?Next time we’ll look at the content of Reform UK Ltd’s ‘Contract With You‘ and possibly at the policies of their unlikely collaborators, the SDP…

• This episode of Politico’s weekly podcast, about Nigel Farage’s return to the party he founded, is fascinating.
• Reform’s arrangement with a vetting software company is the other contract in the news this week.
• Farage and Gingrich have met, at least once, at the 2016 Republican National Convention.
• We published a thread summarising the history of Reform and its precursor parties – the Referendum Party, UKIP and the BNP – last week.
• Part one of our guide to the parties in Hertsmere for the general election covers Reform and all the other fringe parties.

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Fear is backWhy does Rishi Sunak want us to prepare for war? Why does Oliver Dowden want us to fill the cupboard under the stairs with tins of beans and bottled water? And what’s any of this got to do with a concrete shed in the middle of Radlett?If you walk up Gills Hill towards the park you’ll pass a lovely bit of green called Scrubbitts Wood and if you look over the gate at the North East corner you’ll see a concrete structure that looks like an old garage or possibly an air-raid shelter. Everybody used to call it ‘the air-raid shelter’, in fact, but recently a handy sign has gone up by the gate explaining that it’s actually a World War Two ‘Report and Control Centre’.

It’s a communications node in the wartime civil defence system. There was probably a telephone line, quite possibly female volunteer despatch riders. It’s not easy to understand why you’d put such an important bit of infrastructure in Radlett but there it is, defying the passage of time, right in the middle of the village.

Structures like this were put up all over Britain during the war, and were part of a huge – and hugely-effective – collective effort to protect Britain during what was unarguably the country’s greatest crisis for over a hundred years. Civil defence during the war was a bureacratic-voluntary hybrid, of the kind Britain is famed for. It’s how we roll, how the whole Empire was run.

The cold warAfter the war, of course, began another war. And a modernised, atomic-age version of the wartime civil defence structure came into being. One of its functions was to put the fear of God into us about nuclear armageddon. If you grew up in this period you’ll remember the public information films at the cinema and terrifying fictional visions like Threads and When the Wind Blows. Some of us are still haunted by the Protect and Survive booklets you could pick up in doctor’s surgeries and libraries right up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The end of historyAmiable B-movie schlub saves worldBut then amiable B-movie schlub Ronald Reagan implausibly won the cold war. The communist gerontocracy basically died. The long Soviet experiment collapsed. Things changed, of course, and there was that odd decade during which everybody felt they could breathe again. The booklets were pulped, they scrapped the sirens and Tony Blair’s New Labour won the biggest electoral landslide in modern British history. American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously wrote a book called ‘The End of History and the Last Man‘, published in 1992, in which he proposed that the end of the cold war and the benign economic climate signalled a definitive end to the chaos and conflict of the twentieth century. Liberal democracy had won the battle of the ideologies and would become the unquestioned norm everywhere and forever. Oops. This dreamy mood lasted about ten minutes and was finally finished off by 9/11.

War without endAmericansAnd we entered the era of the War on Terror (capital ‘W’, capital ‘T’). The Americans recruited a ‘coalition of the willing‘ (you might not remember this but you were definitely in it) and moved onto a war footing, invading Afghanistan and then Iraq. One of those wars became the longest in American history. Deaths in all of the post-9/11 wars, the wars we can classify as connected with the War on Terror, now amount to several million (including hundreds of British servicemen and women and thousands of Americans).

The USA is, in fact, legally and politically, still at war. A law passed in 2001, giving the President essentially unconstrained power to make war against enemies, real and perceived, is still in force, discussed periodically in the US Congress ever since but never repealed. Of course, here in Britain we just do as we’re told, so we’re effectively still at war too. The absence of a written constitution makes it much easier for UK governments to tag along with the Americans (as Tony Blair said to George Bush “I will be with you, whatever…”).

A century of emergenciesThe happy optimists of the last decade of the last century could hardly have anticipated the drama of the first quarter of this one. A sequence of regional and world financial crises (including the biggest one since the great depression), dozens of popular uprisings brutally put down across the world, a hundred-year pandemic, a major European war, the populist turn; all overlaid on the building turmoil of the climate crisis. None of this was in the plan.

And the response of the major powers – including here in Britain – has been, in almost every case, to dial up the anxiety, to legislate, to militarise and to take a variety of increasingly authoritarian actions. Social and economic elites – even liberal and left-wing elites – almost everywhere turned to repression and away from democracy or other forms of popular deliberation.

In an emergency, all bets are off. A government may require us to stay indoors, allow us to protest but without being a nuisance or impose long prison sentences for non-violent action. Ancient rights are suspended and recently-acquired rights are reclassified and unwound. And we can expect more of this as the multi-dimensional crisis intensifies.

But hold on, what’s this got to do with tins of beans?Well, Oliver Dowden, in his role as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, is in charge of resilience (in addition to a long list of other tasks, including ‘civil contingencies’, the COBRA committee and that portrait of the King…). Resilience in this case doesn’t mean bouncing back when your boss gives you a bollocking. It’s more about preparing for climate change, terrorism and war. Dowden’s brief includes flooding, heatwaves, cybercrime, sabotage by state actors and, for some reason, he’s chosen this moment to amp it all up, to dial up the anxiety and ask us to start hoarding pasta and toilet paper again.

Hardly anyone noticed this but in the morning on the day of Rishi Sunak’s surprise election announcement (do you remember it? It was raining) Oliver Dowden announced something else – he announced an inexplicable new web site and a campaign to persuade us all to prepare for disaster. The web site is called ‘Get Prepared for Emergencies’ and it’s a slightly uncanny throw-back to those cold war public information booklets. There are many exclamation marks and a guide to preparing for the worst. You’ll learn how many bottles of water you should buy (three litres per person, per day, FYI), how to prepare your house for a flood and what to keep in the boot in case you need to leave home in a hurry. There’s a checklist to download.

Geopolitical dreadAnd this all came about a fortnight after the Prime Minister’s oddly dystopian speech warning us about, well, everything. He spoke, at his lectern, of the threat from “…gender activists hijacking children’s sex education…”, “Iranian proxies firing on British ships in the Red Sea…”, “countries like Russia weaponising immigration for their own ends…”, “criminal gangs finding new routes across European borders.” Read the speech, it’s all there: artificial intelligence, trans ideology, small boats, cancel culture, Putin’s ambitions and… nuclear anihilation.” Sunak’s painting a picture here and it’s not a happy one. It doesn’t actually mention alien invasion but we suspect it’s on a checklist somewhere.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Conservatives have decided their last chance against the inevitability of defeat in July is to weaponise dread, to trigger the entire voting-age population, to reduce us to a kind of quivering electoral jelly, waiting for the catastrophe and hoping against hope that Rishi can rescue us. The logic is that this dread will cause us to cling to the Tories when it comes to placing an X in the box, that we cannot imagine a better way out of this miserable, grinding, 14-year nightmare than to vote for the people who made it.

There’s a kind of contemporary horror movie-vibe to all this. These hollow men in suits, standing at lecterns, informing us in bloodless terms that our freedoms are to be suspended and that our larders and cellars must be filled in case of catastrophe. It’s grim.

Signing the pledgeMeanwhile, Labour, of course, in closely shadowing the Conservative policy offer, must carefully match the beligerance and dread Rishi’s bringing. Yesterday Keir Starmer made it clear that he’s not just going to retain Britain’s nuclear deterrent but double down (in fact the party’s calling it a ‘nuclear triple-lock’, which is catchy). Starmer’s promise is not new. In fact it’s consistent with the stance of all UK governments since 1962. In that year Harold Macmillan and JFK signed the Nassau Agreement, permanently cementing Britain’s dependence on the US military-industrial machine. To vary this relationship would be costly and almost certainly diplomatically impossible. Every Prime Minister since then has acknowledged the geopolitical realities of the North Atlantic compact and signed on.

Under this and most of the subsequent agreements the British nuclear deterrent is essentially a North European branch operation of the vast American one. You don’t need to be a peacenik to feel uncomfortable with this relationship, with the fact that important parts of the UK nuclear weapons system literally belong to the United States government, that Britain’s 58 warheads are considered part of a larger US-controlled pool of weapons, that targeting, maintenance and other aspects of deployment are decided by American generals and that although it might be technically possible for a British submarine captain to launch a Trident missile independently, it would be unthinkable in practical terms and could actually be stopped by a US government with a mind to do so. According to one academic, the UK’s nuclear arsenal doesn’t meet ‘the 1940 requirement‘, meaning it could not be used in a situation when the country stood alone as it did at the beginning of the second world war.

No UK government has ever had the courage to challenge this and the economics of operating an advanced nuclear weapons system – with cold-war levels of preparedness – independently of the USA is so scary that this is very unlikely to change. It’s almost certain that even if a unilateralist government were to come to power (as it nearly did in 2017, remember) it would quickly acknowledge the realities and renew the deal. This unequal relationship is a deeply entrenched aspect of the Atlantic hierarchy. It’s essentially impossible to imagine altering it, let alone abandoning it.

Fear wins againCaptain Dowden is ready for actionOliver Dowden’s stock of tinned food, Sunak’s dead-eyed scare tactics and the UK’s unvarying committment to the nuclear status quo are all aspects of the same, rigid security orthodoxy and the same increasingly hysterical emergency politics that govern our lives in the developed economies. Fear is a political currency – and when politicians deliberately and cynically mobilise our anxieties it’s a sign of their fragility. It’s undemocratic and regressive and we’re probably stuck with it.

• More about that civil defence structure in Radlett from the Radlett Museum.
• This detailed and rather chilling analysis of Britain’s dependence on the US for our nuclear deterrent is not from some pacifist loons but from the House of Commons Select Committee on Defence.
• Adam Tooze’s great big books about the financial crisis and about the pandemic response are really thrilling accounts of the two biggest 21st-century global crises (so far).
• This article, from the Politico web site, details Britain’s deep entanglement with the US defence establishment.

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Everything you need to knowOliver Dowden addresses the crowd after his 2017 victory in Hertsmere.The time has come. The election has been called and is in the diary for Thursday 4 July. You presently have no MP. Nobody does. There are now only candidates. Oliver Dowden, although he is still Deputy Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, has carefully changed his social media bios to reflect this.

We now know the names of all the people standing in Hertsmere. There’s still a week before the deadline for submitting a nomination (4pm on 7 June), though, so it’s not impossible that we’ll see more coming forward. Remember, Georgia Elliott-Smith from Gina Miller’s True & Fair Party said she was going to stand in Hertsmere but has since disappeared. Might she come back? We’re holding out for a surprise come-back for the levitating Natural Law Party.

Who are the Hertsmere candidates?

| Candidate | Party | | --- | --- | | Oliver Dowden | Incumbent and Deputy PM | Con | | John Humphries | Green | | Emma Matanle | Briefing writer and councillor | Lib Dem | | Darren Selkus | Army veteran and business owner | Reform | | Josh Tapper | Civil servant and Goggleboxer | Labour |

General Election 2024, the candidates in Hertsmere, in alphabetical orderThe incumbentThe pretendersThere’s some detail about all of these candidates in the party guides we’ve already published – click the links in the table. Only John Humphries, the Green Party candidate, is a bit of a mystery. He’s not a stranger, though. He stood for the party here in 2019 and three times as a Green candidate in various local council elections – although unsuccessfully.

The parties and the history. As a loyal reader of Radlett Wire you’ll be aware of our four-part guide to all the parties standing in Hertsmere: part one, the fringe parties (including Reform and the Greens); part two, the Lib Dems; part three. Labour; part four, the Conservatives. You’ll also have read our definitive history of the Hertsmere constituency, which goes back all the way to our very first MP, in 1983, disgraced Thatcher ally Cecil Parkinson.

Your new constituency. Like many constituencies in Britain, Hertsmere is a different shape for this election. In fact, it’s smaller, both geographically and in population terms. The purpose of the boundary changes was principally to bring the ‘electorate quota’ – the number of voters living in each constituency – to between 69,724 and 77,062 voters. Population change over the decades had caused some, mostly urban, constituencies to get much bigger than that and some, mostly rural, constituencies much smaller. The changes are thought to have strengthened the Conservative Party’s electoral advantage in Britain, but not by much – and certainly not by the enormous amount that was originally feared. The overall number of constituencies hasn’t changed.

Boundary changesThe effect in Hertsmere is not drastic – one Bushey ward has moved out of the constituency and one Hatfield ward in. The overall effect will be to reduce the voting-age population of the Parliamentary constituency by about 7%. Pollsters and news outlets have had the considerable headache of reflecting the new populations in their data. For instance, the Electoral Calculus projection we’ve been sharing here regularly is for the new constituency boundaries.

Voting in Radlett, whatever the election, is run by Hertsmere Council. They run the count and provide the polling places. The returning officer works for the council (when Sunderland and Newcastle race to get their results out first it’s a battle between two councils). Hertsmere will publish a list of polling places closer to the date of the election but it’s safe to assume the Radlett ones will be at Phillimore Hall, the Radlett Centre and the United Synagogue as usual.

Registering to vote. You’ve got until midnight on 18 June to get your name on the register. Once you’re registered you can apply for a postal vote but you’ll have to do it by the end of the following day, 19 June. If you think you won’t be able to get to the polling station on the day you can send someone to vote for you – a proxy vote. You’ve got until 5pm on 26 June to apply (and, if everything goes pear-shaped, you can set up an emergency proxy at any time up till 5pm on polling day).

Fun fact. You’ve still got time to stand for election yourself. You’ll need ten people to nominate you and £500, though.

Voter ID is now required for all UK elections. The Conservative government thought this would give them an electoral advantage, since young voters and poorer urban populations are less likely to have good ID, but Jacob Rees-Mogg thinks it’s backfired. Here’s a list of permitted forms of ID. Check it carefully because you may find you don’t have the right kind. It helps to be old. For instance, senior railcards and 60+ Oyster cards are okay but not young persons’ railcards or student ID. You don’t need to take the polling card you’ll be sent in the post. If you’ve got no valid ID you’ve got until 5pm on 26 June to apply for a voter authority certificate (you don’t need ID to get one, which seems like a bit of a loophole, but you will need to know your National Insurance number).

• More about contituency boundary changes.
• You won’t find this election results data, going back to 1983, anywhere else. It’s in a spreadsheet so you can download it and, you know, analyse it or whatever.

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The Conservative PartyLot of lectern action latelyThis is it. The big one. The last of our four guides to the parties standing in Hertsmere at the next general election, whenever that is. We’ve done the fringe parties, the Liberals and Labour so now it’s time to tackle the incumbents, the 800-pound gorillas of Hertsmere politics, the Conservative Party, winners in Hertsmere since the constituency was created, for the 1983 general election – the ‘Falklands election’. The Tories have never even come close to losing here, not even in 1997, when Labour won the largest number of Parliamentary seats in history and squeezed the margin in Hertsmere to six percent.

Cecil Parkinson (next to Thatcher), once MP for Herstmere and – in a competive field – probably the biggest heel in Conservative Party historyThe history of the Tories in Hertsmere is essentially the history of the contituency so you’ll want to read our electoral history of Hertsmere, which covers the whole period since 1983 and its three MPs – including the ignominious departure of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite Cecil Parkinson in 1983 and of his successor James Clappison, despatched by fast-track SPAD Oliver Dowden in 2015.

You might think that Hertsmere is one of those home counties contituencies that’s been approximately Tory since the battle of Hastings, or the end of the ice age. And you wouldn’t be wrong. A single county-wide constituency was first created over seven hundred years ago, in 1294 and it persisted until 1885. The Hertfordshire constituency returned – for most of that period – three MPs. Before the franchise was expanded in the late 19th Century the electorate was tiny – In 1868, about 9,000 men in Hertfordshire (landowners, principally) could vote. The first time they got a chance to vote for a candidate identified as a Tory was in 1727. He was a Jacobite noble called Charles Caesar, who was also Treasurer of the Navy. Between then and the seat’s final abolition in 1885 Tories dominated, with the occasional period of Whig control. Between then and 1983 Radlett has bounced around between the constituencies of Watford, South West Hertfordshire and South Hertfordshire.

The oddsIn a sea of disastrous polling data from the Sunak period, we’ve seen only one projection that suggests the Tories could lose in Hertsmere – and it’s a doozy. It’s the February 2023 MRP poll from the highly-reliable polling company Electoral Calculus. It gives Labour 509 seats and the Conservative Party 45. In this scenario the Tories aren’t even the official opposition. LOL.

OuchWe know that even the slightly less extreme polling that’s been done since then has been causing panic bordering on hysteria in corridors and bars and meeting rooms in the SW1 area. Such an enormous swing is obviously unlikely and the most recent MRP polling gives Dowden a 1997-sized lead here in Hertsmere. That would bring Labour’s candidate Josh Tapper to within 3,000 votes of Oliver Dowden. We’ve noted before that Tapper must be praying the Gogglebox factor can get him a bit closer.

Vote shares in Hertsmere since 1983, showing swings to Labour in 1997 and 2017Crown, church and landThey don’t call the Conservative Party the most successful political party in the world for nothing. This 300 year-old institution, which began life in the ferment after the English Civil War, is so wired into the constitution of middle England – especially rural and landowning England – that it seems almost to be part of the landscape.

The party’s various re-inventions, especially in the period since the industrial revolution, have seen it identified with business (previously the domain of the Whigs/Liberals), with the urban middle class and, more recently, with working class voters, for whom the Tories came to stand for ambition, home ownership and the prospect of a better life for their children.

The fact that this last electoral coalition – the one assembled by Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s that has seen the party running the country for 32 of the last 45 years – seems finally to be collapsing, in the wake of 15 years of flat wages, growing inequality and diminishing expectations – would, for any ordinary party, presumably mean the end. For the Tories it almost certainly means another re-invention – the Conservative Party is evidently indestructible and will still be with us on the other side of whatever apocalypse awaits us. Like cockroaches and the plague.

Our present Prime Minister – according to a polling firm one of the least popular party leaders in history – has made several increasingly desperate attempts at his own re-invention in the last year or two and, in his most recent effort, is trying to position his party as the ‘national security party’ or the party of geopolitical dread. It’s too early to say whether this relaunch will stick, of course, although the bookies aren’t convinced. At Radlett Wire we have a simple rule of thumb: when the Prime Minister puts a lectern outside Number 10 and makes a speech about nuclear annihilation it’s probably not his country’s security he’s worried about but his own.

The candidateOliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate realityWe remain, as we have essentially since his election in 2015, deeply impressed by Oliver Dowden. He’s an intriguing figure. Not charismatic, not possessed of any apparent vision or of a distinctive political identity, nor even of deep roots in the Tory party. He is, in his party’s terms, an outsider, but his tenacity and his political instincts have kept him in or near the action since his first election – through one of the most turbulent periods in his party’s (and the Parliament’s) history. He’s a pragmatist – entering politics via David Cameron’s upbeat, socially-liberal, modernising regime, when CCHQ was like the marketing department of a Plc, he had no difficulty subsquently lodging himself in the government of each successor Prime Minister. Only Liz Truss could find no use for him.

As we said in an earlier post here, when the s**t hits the fan he’s always ready:

For a second-tier politician, Dowden’s always been pretty close to the action (once a Number 10 staffer, always a Number 10 staffer). He was first to endorse Johnson to replace Theresa May but also first to resign as Johnson’s final crisis began. Joining #TeamRishi was another low-key masterstroke for our operator, although his return to the front bench was delayed by that weird 49-day Liz Truss thing, during which Dowden was very much on the outside…

How does Hertsmere vote? Radlett Wire

Captain Dowden of the Winter of Discontent TaskforceWe’ve sometimes called Dowden a bagman here. We don’t mean this disdainfully. The bagman is vital to a successful political party. Some politicians are far too grand for this kind of thing but Dowden is always quite happy, as the moment requires, to get his hands dirty, to dispose of a body, to endorse even the silliest talking points – privet hedges, woke roadsigns, hoarding stolen artefacts – scolding Netflix and calling for Gary Lineker‘s dismissal on the regular. He’ll step up in defense of the indefensible on the Sunday morning programmes without complaint and he’ll take on the emptiest, gestural nonsense with gusto. For a while during the wave of industrial unrest of 2022 and 2023 he was put in charge of Rishi Sunak’s ‘Winter of Discontent taskforce’. We amused ourselves here trying to find any further trace of activity from the taskforce. None materialised. It was never more than an announcement – the kind of entirely hollow politics you need a strong stomach to pursue with enthusiasm. Dowden has a strong stomach.

Classic teflonDowden is as close to clean hands as you’ll get in the contemporary Conservative party, so-far unblemished by scandal. And even when he really ought to have got into trouble he’s somehow squeaked through, untouched. It was Dowden who appointed Boris Johnson’s friend and loan-arranger to be Chair of the BBC. Dowden who was in charge of propriety and ethics when the party was accused of covering up a rape. He’s never been close to the big money but he was one of ten Tory MPs who took paid jobs with party donors during 2022 and for some reason accepted a payment from the hedge fund that bankrolled Liz Truss’s experiment with credibility too.

Local heroDowden comes from up the road and went to a school a lot of Hertsmere kids attend. He knows the area and has been a diligent constituency representative. In our experience, he (almost always) answers letters from constituents (your mileage may vary). He’s never, as far as we know, phoned an elderly constituent in the middle of the night asking for money to give to ‘bad people’ and we’re pretty sure he doesn’t own a property portfolio. He’s always ready to make a speech about a car park next to a bin. For all this, as his constituents, we should be grateful.

There will be constituents who question his absolute committment to local concerns, though. The rail freight terminal on the old Radlett aerodrome land is one of those giant projects that will always present a problem for a government minister. He very much wants to be identified with the electors who are going to have an enormous warehouse blocking out their view or a busy new access road keeping them awake.

It’s a delicate business, though. Dowden has felt able to participate in the dispute but has reserved his full-throated criticism for the actions of the local authority, Hertfordshire County Council in this case, who say they were obliged to sell the land for the development. It’s always much easier for an MP to criticise the council than to criticise his own government or a major business that may well be a party donor.

We feel for Dowden on this. He doesn’t want to be seen too vocally opposing a development that will bring work to the area at a time when everyone’s fulminating about the sclerotic planning system. The sheer scale of the development and its likely impact on the households affected makes it hard to ignore for a local MP, though.

He’s readyDowden has been reselected by his local party (they do this sort of thing informally in the Conservative Party) but, as far as we know, he hasn’t actually lodged his nomination papers with the local authority so there’s still a slim chance he’ll run for the hills. We doubt it, though.

As a government minister he’ll evidently be able to draw on significant resources from his party during his campaign but Hertsmere is such a safe seat that it’s unlikely we’ll see many of the top brass here during the campaign. If he’s lucky he’ll be able to call on his friends at South Hertfordshire Business Club again, though. This is a club with no web site, no staff, no premises, no accounts and, apparently, no members (looks like it might share an address with the St Albans Conservative Association, though). According to the Electoral Commission the club gave £82,741.09 to Dowden’s office between 2017 and 2022, making use of a loophole that allows ‘unincorporated associations’ to give up to £25,000 per year to a political party or campaign without saying where the money comes from. Dowden’s not the only MP using this method of accessing anonymous money. There are a number of these secretive organisations, with names like The Portcullis Club and the Magna Carta Club (that one’s given £150,000 to Michael Gove since 2009). Interestingly, they seem to exist only to give money to Conservative politicians and campaigns. Details of the Dowden donations in this spreadsheet.

• Dowden suffers from a very contemporary political problem. He’s from a nominally working-class background but he speaks and acts quite posh. The same problem afflicts Keir Starmer. But the iron rule is that neither will ever, no matter how much they protest, be accepted as working class. They both really ought to give up trying.
• Oliver Dowden has had a few goes at the despatch box depping for the boss lately. We can’t say we’ve ever managed to get through a whole session. It’s too much. Watching him labour awkwardly through his scripted jokes is far too painful, like the nasty bit in a nature documentary about seals and killer whales.
• It turns out that the dreadful Parkinson affair has not yet, over forty years on, been forgotten. A new documentary is in the works.
• Here’s our big spreadsheet with all the Hertsmere election results going back to 1983 – the only place you’ll find all this information in one place (and we recently added Hertfordshire PCC results going back to 2012 for extra excitement).
• We group together all our Oliver Dowden posts with the #DowdenLog tag and you can subscribe to these posts in an RSS reader if that’s your thing.
• You can keep up with what Oliver Dowden does in Parliament at TheyWorkForYou and you can set up an email alert too.
• We’re on Twitter/X and Facebook and you can follow this blog in the fediverse. Search for @blog@radlettwire.co.uk in your fediverse client (e.g. Mastodon)

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Nothing. Sorry.Here’s our guide to the whole history of elections in Hertsmere and part three of our preview of the 2024 (or 2025) general election.

Hertfordshire PCC winner Jonathan Ash-Edwards signing something at the count, which apparently took place in a helicopter (or a hot-air balloon?)The nearest actual elections on Thursday were down the road in London (Khan re-elected with an increased vote share) and up the A1 in North Herts (Labour win). It felt a bit sad to be left out of such a consequential election. I don’t know what it was like in your house over the last few days but in ours we were glued to the news channels and the news feeds.

And we honestly can’t learn much from the results, widely accepted as having been a catastrophe for the Conservative government (and, if anything, actually a bit more catastrophic than the worst predictions), about the situation here in Hertsmere.

Professor Sir John Curtice, wide awake at 05:52Psephologists think it is valid to project general election results from previous elections, so you’ll find forecasts based on these results in the media. Sir John Curtice, the Strathclyde academic who haunts the TV studios for the whole duration of every election and seems to need no sleep, came up with this projection for the BBC. It obviously gives Labour a big majority in vote share.

Professor Curtice’s projected national shareBut this gives us a pretty unhelpful idea of how things will go, not least because it doesn’t map to actual Parliamentary seats. Others have had a go at working that out. Sky News, for instance, has a projection that suggests Labour will win the election but without an overall majority.

Sky News UK general election projection from 6 May 2024This has been seized upon by Tory spokespeople, including the Prime Minister. It obviously holds out the promise of another ‘SNP-Labour coalition‘ scare campaign. The idea of a Groundhog Day general election campaign fought on this basis is too depressing for words, of course. We may reconsider that plan to move to a monastery.

Here in Hertsmere things obviously look just like they did before the election, except for the important detail that we now have a new Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner. Jonathan Ash-Edwards won by a good majority, Sean Prendergast came second for the Liberals. Again, it’s hard to get much from this data, mainly because the turnout will have been much lower than it was last time – somewhere in the twenties, once it’s been calculated – because hardly anyone votes in PCC elections. We’ve added a sheet for the PCC elections to our big spreadsheet of polling data for Hertsmere – very much the only place in the world where you’ll find all of this data in one place. Tell your friends.

Results for 2024 PCC elections in HertfordshireThe projection we depend on here at Radlett Wire is the one from Electoral Calculus. Their most recent data, updated a few days before the council elections, gives the Tories approximately the same essentially unassailable lead here in Hertsmere – although their chance of winning has fallen from 71% to 61% across about two months. Labour candidate Josh Tapper has his work cut out.

Electoral Calculus projection for general election in Hertsmere, 27 April 2024Enough politics. Back to watching the rain through the window on this lovely bank holiday Monday.

• There are two serious electoral models in the UK at the moment. We’re not talking about opinion polls or polls-of-polls (like Electoral Calculus) or guesses from wise columnists or wild social media assertions. We mean academic projects that use actual election results to calculate likely outcomes of future elections. There’s Professor John Curtice’s projected national share, which he does for the BBC and the one from Nuffield College, Oxford profs Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher. The political parties will also have their own elaborate projections, but they keep those to themselves.
• Why aren’t all the council elections on the same day?
• The BBC has all the council, Mayoral and PCC election results and you’ll find the full national results for the PCC elections on Wikipedia.

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LabourThe TappersPart one of this general election preview is about the fringe parties (including Reform) and part two about the Lib Dems. Part three, about the Conservatives, is next.

Look, we promise we’re not going to go on and on about this but the recently-selected Labour party candidate for Hertsmere, Josh Tapper, USED TO BE ON GOGGLEBOX. That’s him, on the right, with (left to right) sister Amy, dad Jonathan and mum Nikki. You will certainly remember the Tapper family – they were on the programme for eleven series, from the very first programme in 2013 until 2018. Tapper’s TV history has certainly brought his candidacy a lot of national publicity – we can’t imagine the selection of a Labour Parliamentary candidate winning much coverage in The Sun without the Gogglebox factor, for instance.

Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate realityRight, that’s it. We’re not going to mention Gogglebox ever again. We’re sure Mr Tapper will be happy to know that. He’ll definitely want us to talk about the fact that he’s one of the youngest Labour candidates in the country (26) and that he’s been put up against no less than Deputy Prime Minister and privet hedge-botherer Oliver Dowden. Dowden has been reselected by his local party but has not yet submitted his nomination papers (so there’s still a slim chance he’ll run for the hills before the election).

After Gogglebox and Yavneh College in Borehamwood, Tapper found himself in Theresa May’s office, via a civil service apprenticeship scheme, and then worked for left-of-centre think-tank Demos. In 2022 he very narrowly missed election to Barnet council, in the Edgwarebury ward. Tapper is also great-great-grandson of the founder of legendary and late-lamented Aldgate kosher eatery Bloom’s which many will remember fondly (although not for the food).

Now for the politicsSo, Tapper is the eleventh Labour candidate in the history of the Hertsmere constituency, since it was created in 1983. He will be hoping profoundly, of course, that he’s not the eleventh loser and he’s probably in with a better chance here than anyone since Beth Kelly, in 1997, who lost by 3,000 votes. That, of course, was the year of Tony Blair’s landslide, when Labour won the largest number of Parliamentary seats for a single party in British Parliamentary history – 418 (more than twice the party’s total at the last general election in 2019).

Sensible projections for vote share at the next election put Labour comfortably in government, of course, but they don’t quite put a Labour candidate into Parliament for Hertsmere. Electoral Calculus, which is the one we usually rely on here, still gives the Tories a comfortable 64% chance of winning in Hertsmere but their likely majority is very much in 1997 territory, which must be exciting for Tapper and his campaign.

Electoral Calculus projection for Hertsmere general election vote shareHertsmere Labour candidates over the years:
Josh Tapper (2024/25) – civil servant, former Goggleboxer
Holly Kal-Weiss (2019) – special needs teacher.
Fiona Smith (2017) – ex-military, fund-raiser.
Richard Butler (2015) – Councillor in Hertsmere and Hertfordshire.
Sam Russell (2010)
Kelly Tebb (2005)
Hilary Broderick (2001)
Beth Kelly (1997) – NHS manager and one-time Borehamwood councillor, endorsed Josh Tapper for Hertsmere in 2024.
David Souter (1992)
Frank Ward (1987) – went on to stand for UKIP in 2015.
Ian Reed (1983)

Tapper’s mountainVote share in Hertsmere since 1983 (data)The historic chart makes the challenge for Tapper clear. Even the precipitous fall in support that the Tories have experienced since 2019 – essentially unparalleled in British electoral history – is unlikely to put Josh Tapper into Parliament at the next general election. The grey bar in the chart shows the result in Hertsmere if YouGov’s January MRP projection is correct. It puts Labour about 3,000 votes from a majority – spookily close to that 1997 result. Labour’s bump in support in Hertsmere puts the party at roughly where it was in 2017, when the swing to Labour was the largest in decades and Theresa May got a nasty shock. Nationally, as well as in Hertsmere, the challenge for Labour this time is that the lost Tory votes will be shared between Labour, the resurgent Lib Dems, the insurgent Reform Party and, in some places, the Greens.

Many are already calling the next UK general election ‘the Gaza election’ and it seems certain that the war will be a doorstep issue in Hertsmere, a constituency with a high proportion of Jewish households. Our MP, as a Cabinet Office Minister, has been asked to address the issue on many occasions since 7 October. We’ll admit to having no idea what the impact on voting will be or how Tapper will respond, though.

Since we made the chart there’s been another YouGov MRP poll and it puts Labour even further ahead nationally, with over 400 seats, but it doesn’t move the result in Hertsmere so Tapper evidently still has a mountain to climb.

Of course, Labour will be hoping that Josh Tapper – a charismatic local boy and a TV star – has what it takes to claw back those 3,000 votes. It must be thrilling for him and for local Labour supporters to contemplate that narrowing national gap. If anyone can, we reckon Josh Tapper can.

• Wikipedia has a list of all the Parliamentary candidates declared so far. Tapper is listed but we’re not 100% sure he’s submitted his official nomination papers and paid his deposit yet.
• We’ve updated our guide to elections in Hertsmere, going all the way back to the very first election here, in 1983, and we’ve put all the voting data into a spreadsheet.
• Money will be a concern – for Tapper and for all candidates in Hertsmere. Going up against a government minister in a safe seat like Hertsmere is not cheap. And we know that Oliver Dowden has access to big money for his campaigns, not just via his party but also via business donors. An ‘unincorporated association‘ called the South Hertfordshire Business Club, for instance. A club with no web site, no staff, no premises, no accounts and, apparently, no members (it shares an address with the St Albans Conservative Association, though), according to the Electoral Commission, gave £82,741.09 to Hertsmere Tories between 2017 and 2022. Details in this spreadsheet. Does Josh Tapper have access to that kind of money for his campaign?
• The MRP technique used by YouGov is significantly more accurate than ordinary polling but not infallible. YouGov’s 2017 poll came very close, predicting the hung Parliament and some of the outlier results, but 2019’s was less accurate, underestimating the size of Johnson’s majority.

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Calm down, it’s a really boring one.Party control of the authorities electing PCCs in May (Institute of Government) On Thursday 2 May there are local elections in many parts of England. It honestly seems a bit unfair that just down the road in London they’ve got all the excitement of a Mayoral election. In fact, there are elections in about a third of English councils (107 out of 317), also in 14 unitary authorities, 28 metropolitan boroughs and 34 district councils (details from the Institute for Government). Not here, though. Sorry.

But we do get to vote for something, right?Here in Radlett we get to vote for a Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC). Absolutely the most boring election possible, right? Few people bother to vote in Police Commissioner elections. At the last PCC election in Hertfordshire, in 2021, the turnout was a fairly respectable 37%, a bit more than half the turnout at the 2019 general election in Hertsmere (70.6%), but that was because the election was on the same day as local authority elections. Turnout will be much lower this time. We can’t believe we’re even typing this. It’s so boring.

The whole idea of a Police and Crime Commissioner is a very recent one – the first ones were elected in 2012. The Conservative government (this is the same government whose legislators are currently sending dick pics to strangers and allegedly getting dogs drunk) said that they wanted to put local policing under democratic control but most people think they wanted to introduce explicitly political PCCs because it would give them an advantage. And they weren’t wrong. In 2021 (a year late because of the pandemic), 76.9% of Police Commissioners elected in England and Wales were Conservatives. The model, of course, is the American system, where many more local officials are elected – from dog catchers to District Attorneys to Chiefs of Police. What’s less clear is how useful they’ve been here in England and Wales. We think it would be safe to say that the jury’s still out.

What does a Police and Crime Commissioner actually do?From the The Association of Police and Crime Commissioners Police and Crime Commissioners are responsible for all of policing in their constabulary areas (in some areas they’re also responsible for the fire service). Crucially they appoint the Chief Constable and hold them to account once in role. In this they’re a bit like the Chairs of other public bodies. The Chair of a school’s governing body, for instance, appoints the headteacher but doesn’t run the school. PCCs don’t make policing decisions. They have a budget and can fund smaller initiatives but they can’t set policy. They’ll usually have a fairly substantial team of civil servants working for them and there’ll be a communications function – explaining what they do to the electors. Sometimes they intervene to discipline the Chief Constable and sometimes this goes horribly wrong. Some police chiefs think PCCs can be arbitrary and domineering and they’re probably not wrong. There’s nothing in the rules to stop an elected Police Commissioner from firing the Chief Constable just to make it look like they’re doing something – especially if there’s an election coming.

In 2022 (we expect there’ll have been a bit of an increase since then), the salary of Hertfordshire’s PCC was £78,400 plus expenses (mainly for travel, by the look of it). This is approximately mid-table for PCCs – some are paid substantially more, some less. The PCC’s deputy Lewis Cocking is paid £33,460. Chief Executive Chris Brace makes £112,350 (plus a car allowance) and there are eight more staff paid more than £58,200. It’s not clear from the accounts how many others work in the Hertfordshire PCC’s office. Details from the Herts PCC web site.

We suspect we’d all be a bit more interested in the business of the Police and Crime Commissioners if there was any evidence that they had improved anything. The Local Government Association, reporting in 2020, says the evidence is uncertain. The PCCs themselves, understandably enough, think they’re doing a great job and, in their 2021 report (PDF) list many positive actions – for instance the Beacon Fraud Hub set up here in Hertfordshire in 2019 that helps fraud victims retrieve money from crims – over a million pounds by the time of the report. We’ve been searching for independent evidence of the usefulness of PCCs. So far no luck. If you know of any, please share it in a comment. Perhaps they just need a few more years.

What the PCCs do seem to have done is given the governance of policing a slightly higher profile. Police Authorities, the somewhat bureaucratic institutions they replaced, had some formal independence but also had a reputation for being ineffective talking shops and most people didn’t even know they existed. Even more boring. In 2016, only 8% of electors could name their PCC, though, and it seems likely that a clear majority of people still wouldn’t be able to. Can you?

Interestingly, Police and Crime Commissioners used to be elected by a kind of proportional representation called the supplementary vote (SV) system, where voters could choose a first and second choice vote. This has been scrapped and you’ll now just pick a single candidate, as you do in ordinary elections.

Who’s who?David Lloyd, outgoing Hertfordshire Police CommissionerHertfordshire’s current Police and Crime Commissioner, former financial adviser David Lloyd, is one of the longest serving in the country. He’s been in the role since the very first election in 2012. But he’s off to a research job at Birmingham University. The Tory candidate for the role on 2 May will be Jonathan Ash-Edwards, a former council leader. He’ll certainly win. There are also candidates from the Greens, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Here are your candidates, in alphabetical order. Try not to get too excited.

Your candidatesAll the candidates have their own web sites, of course, but the most comprehensive source of information about their various platforms is the official government leaflet.

Leaning on a wall a specialityJonathan Ash-Edwards, ConservativeTo be honest, we suspect you could probably have guessed what Jonathan is promising without looking. Let’s look at the headlines: more police, safer streets, lower tax, prevent crime, provide responsive policing, support victims, keep Herts safe and listen to you. Classic combination of vague and unachievable. Lower tax, for instance. If you have any idea how a Police and Crime Commissioner can influence tax rates you should explain in a comment. We particularly like ‘prevent crime’, though. Go Jonathan! Read the whole lot in the official leaflet.

That’s not a real hankie is it?Matt Fisher, Green PartyMatt doesn’t have a policy platform at all, as far as we can tell, but he does have the best tie/handkerchief combo by about a mile. Read his biography in the leaflet.

Only non-bald candidateTom Plater, LabourTom offers: “…a real plan to tackle crime in our neighbourhoods, by smashing drug crime, combating violence against Women & Girls and reducing anti-social behaviour. We will do this by taking real action. If elected I will put more bobbies on the beat, who know our local communities inside out, with their policing led by the intelligence they gather. I will work with domestic abuse charities to put their workers into 999 call centres to work alongside our brilliant call centre handlers. I will review and improve vetting practises across Hertfordshire Constabulary.“

Again, without wishing to be too cynical, we’re impressed by Tom’s ambition to ‘smash drug crime’, from his nice office in Hertford. More in the leaflet.

Apparently in a fieldSean Prendergast, Liberal DemocratsIf anything, Sean‘s platform is even more ambitious than the others. His priorities are to increase visible community and neighbourhood policing, stop violence against women and girls, solve burglary and vehicle crime and to tackle and prevent antisocial behaviour. We might scoff at the idea that Mister Prendergast will be able to ‘solve vehicle crime’ during his time in office but he’s the most credible challenger to the Conservative candidate. He’s a former Police Community Support Office and PCC candidates from his party have come closest to beating the Tories in Hertfordshire in previous elections. The switch from the supplementary vote (SV) system might reduce his chances of winning, though. Read the leaflet for the detail.

• The official leaflet seems to be the best source of detail about the individual candidates.
• The candidates’ web pages: Jonathan Ash-Edwards, Matt Fisher, Tom Plater, Sean Prendergast.
• Don’t forget your voter ID. You won’t be allowed to vote without it.

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The Liberal DemocratsTick tockPart one of this guide to the general election in Hertsmere, about the fringe parties, is here.

Okay, now it’s getting interesting. The next general election is still an unknown number of months away. It can’t be later than 28 January 2025, though, and the Prime Minister says he assumes it’ll be in the second half of this year. For some reason he’s explicitly ruled out 2 May 2024. Here in the Hertsmere constituency candidates are coming out of the woodwork (although only two have got as far as submitting their papers). We understand that Oliver Dowden, our MP, will stand again. Or at least that his constituency party has re-selected him – but there’s nothing official yet.

Darren Selkus, Reform Party candidateLast year we published the first in a series of general election guides, introducing the fringe parties (taking in all the wannabes and also-rans and going all the way back to the independent Communists and the Natural Law Party). Darren Selkus, army veteran and CEO of an East London wood veneer company, who made it into the national press when he stood for the party’s earlier incarnation, the Brexit Party, in Essex in 2019, had already announced (on Twitter/X obvs) that he’s standing for the Reform Party (not so fringe these days) and he’s actually submitted his papers.

The Liberals chose their candidate last year and she is now also officially on the ballot. Two candidates have come forward for selection by Labour – one who used to be in the army and one who used to be on Gogglebox. Labour Party members in Hertsmere will be choosing their candidate at a meeting on 19 March (more about Labour in the next part of this four-part guide).

In other newsIn May 2023 we learnt that Georgia Elliott-Smith, a sustainability consultant, was going to stand in Hertsmere for Gina Miller’s True & Fair Party, founded in 2021. Miller was going to be coming to Hertsmere to launch a campaign in June. We’re pretty sure this didn’t happen. Elliott-Smith’s candidacy was never formalised and she’s not listed on the True & Fair Party’s web site. Her LinkedIn makes no mention of True & Fair. Oh dear.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time but, in the space of a few years, the whole Miller project has gone from slightly ridiculous but quite influential to slightly ridiculous and, well, irrelevant. Gina Miller has said that there’ll be nine True & Fair candidates in the general election and the party is obviously still active but we’re going to go out on a limb and say the list of five candidates on the party’s web site might shrink a bit further as the election approaches.

Nothing from the Greens yet. They’ve put up candidates at the last two general elections and, before that, in 2010. One might argue that standing in Hertsmere would be a pointless exercise for a party so unlikely to win but they’ve announced they’ll be standing in every seat in England and Wales in the general election – a critical rite of passage for a party with national ambitions.

So, in this post, we’ll cover the Liberal Democrats. Next it’ll be Labour (the selection battle will be out of the way by then) and then, finally, we’ll consider the candidacy of the incumbent, Oliver Dowden, and the history of the Tories in Hertsmere (the blue line along the top of the graph).

A tale of woeEvery general election in Hertsmere since the constituency was created.The Liberals in Hertsmere could have been contenders. In the first two elections of the constituency’s history – before they’d absorbed the SDP and were still just Liberals – the party was the second-largest in Hertsmere. It can’t be coincidental that the party’s decline here began at the following election – 1992. Liberal Democrat vote share here fell from the mid-twenties into the teens for the period until 2015 and then, precipitously, again, to between five and six percent in 2015 and 2017. Sophie Bowler, who stood in 2015, managed to secure the party’s lowest vote ever in the constituency and fourth place behind UKIP, although this might have had something to do with the fact that she was just too busy to do any campaigning. The party’s national collapse in this period, which came after the catastrophic coalition period, was the largest recorded since 1931 (and that was the Liberals too). In 2019 the party recovered somewhat and candidate Stephen Barrett, business manager in a local school, recorded a 12.6% share.

Hertsmere Liberal candidates over the years:
Stephen Barrett (2019) – secondary school business manager.
Joe Jordan (2017) – software engineer.
Sophie Bowler (2015) – compliance officer at a financial firm
Anthony Rowlands (2010)
Jonathan Davies (2005)
Paul Thompson (2001)
Ann Gray (1997)
Laurence Brass (1987) – now a Hertfordshire County Councillor.
Zerbanoo Gifford (1983 and 1992) – human rights campaigner.

We’re pretty sure that only one of these candidates has their own Wikipedia entry and that’s Zerbanoo Gifford, a veteran human rights campaigner.

Return to influence?So, in the history of the Hertsmere Parliamentary constituency, the Liberal Democrats have gone from contender to influential third party to basically irrelevant and – they must be hoping – back to some measure of influence. The only way is up. Of 13 Parliamentary by-election gains since 2019, four have been for the Lib-Dems (against seven for Labour, one for the Tories and one for George Galloway’s Workers Party). This pattern is likely to repeat in the next GE. The Electoral Calculus average of opinion polls suggests the Lib-Dems could win 40 or more seats nationally – five or six times the party’s 2019 low of eight seats, although their projection for Hertsmere is not quite so positive for the party and puts Reform substantially ahead of the Liberals.

Electoral Calculus projects that the Liberal vote in Hertsmere will fall by over 40% and gives the party a 0% chance of winning. Ouch.So one of the LibDems’ new seats won’t be Hertsmere, but a good share of the vote here would put them back in a position to influence the outcome. The Liberal candidate thinks she’s the natural recipient of tactical votes. With Reform also surging there’s even a small chance that the Conservative vote will be squeezed enough to give Labour a go here. But when we say a small chance we meana very, very small chance. We’ve only seen one – very extreme – projection of a Tory collapse that gives Labour Hertsmere (remember, even in the 1997 Labour landslide Hertsmere stayed firmly Tory – you can see how close they came in the graph above). Electoral Calculus gives the Tories a 71% chance of a win in Hertsmere, even with the party at 18% in the polls.

The candidateEmma Matanle, Liberal Democrat candidate for HertsmereEmma Matanle was chosen as candidate for Hertsmere in March of last year. She’s very much a contemporary Liberal politician. Back when the Liberals were the party of free trade, individual liberty and progress, Liberal Parliamentary candidates used to be businessmen or sometimes University lecturers, Methodist firebrands, even the occasional working class radical. The party of freethinkers still attracts the odd outsider and eccentric (also the occasional certifiable loon) – and we love them for it – but it’s essentially now a bog-standard, and honestly rather charmless, party of the technocratic political centre, a category that’s been under a lot of pressure thanks to the populist turn worldwide but which survives in Britain thanks, mainly, to first-past-the-post voting.

Matanle’s LinkedIn (it’s a requirement for a contemporary politician to have an up-to-date LinkedIn profile) says that she’s currently writing briefings for the Local Government Information Unit, a membership body that does research for local authorities in the UK and elsewhere. We’re not 100% sure what writing briefings involves but it sounds like excellent preparation for 21st Century politics.

Conservative MPs are still, typically, entrepreneurs, lawyers, stock brokers, bankers and landowners (also hedge fund managers, of course). Further to the left they mostly now come from NGOs, charities, consultancies and think-tanks. In Labour it still occasionally happens that a working-class candidate makes it all the way to the Commons but in the Liberal Democrats this never happens. The party is essentially an entirely middle-class and professional entity.

That’s not to say that they won’t occasionally win in working-class seats – they’ll do so in the South West of England – but the membership is now all middle class and the elected politicians are from what is often now called the Professional Managerial Class – the credentialled elite who basically run all of our institutions. For a mainstream political party this is not necessarily a bad thing. The middle class might be skint but it’s still a large and influential group. A party that only appeals to this group – to the interests of school teachers, middle managers and small business-owners – can and will win elections, especially in the more prosperous South of England, although probably not in Hertsmere.

Our Liberal Parliamentary candidate, Emma Matanle, is from this new heartland. She’s spent time at the UN and at Chatham House (a hawkish international relations think-tank). She’s a qualified lawyer and a councillor in St Albans, volunteers for the Scouts and stood for Parliament once before, in South West Bedfordshire in 2019, polling a very respectable 10.2% of the vote, reflecting the same post-coalition recovery in the Liberal Democrat vote seen nationally in that general election.

• We’ve recently updated our history of general elections in Hertsmere and there’s a spreadsheet with all the polling data.
• There’s a list of declared candidates for the next general election on Wikipedia. And here are the instructions for nominating yourself if you feel like standing – you’ll need £500, an agent and some sponsors.
• At the next general election, our constituency will actually be a bit smaller than it currently is. Boundary changes have moved one Bushey ward out of the constituency and one Hatfield ward in. The overall effect will be to reduce the population of Hertsmere by about 7%. The Electoral Calculus projections in this post take into account the changes.
• Where MPs go after they’ve left Parliament is obviously as important as where they come from. We wrote about Oliver Dowden and the revolving door a while ago.
• Is it just us or is the ampersand in the middle of True & Fair really irritating?

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Right at the base of our democracy is the idea of representation. We send our MPs to Westminster to vote on our behalf. How they vote is our business.Of course, once they get to Westminster they usually become ridiculous figures – and they quite soon join one of the two available categories. They’re either pompous, wounded egomaniacs or grasping, bitter kleptomaniacs. This seems harsh but there are really hardly any exceptions. The number of MPs who make it through even their first term without some kind of psychic damage is tiny. Our electoral system favours dweebs and maniacs. The system shrugs off the normies – they’re gone after their first term – back to accountancy or running a charity with a disease in its name. These are the sane ones.

Anyway, here at Radlett Wire we’ve been keeping an eye on our MP – The Rt Hon Oliver Dowden CBE, MP for Hertsmere – since he was elected in May 2015, displacing his predecessor James Clappison in one of those cold-blooded political assassinations the Tory Party is uniquely good at. It’s not clear yet to which category Dowden belongs. It sometimes takes decades for this to become obvious. We’ll keep you informed. Here’s how we keep up with him.

Oliver Dowden addresses the crowds after winning in 2017 by a majority of 16,951 Start here. Veteran social enterprise They Work For You maintains the best database of your MP’s voting record as well as a useful summary of their position on the most important issues. Over the years, the site has quietly become an integral part of the British electoral machine. MPs who initially resented it because it makes emailing your MP too easy have now adjusted to the flow of communications and take it for granted. You can sign up to get an email alert every time your MP does something interesting in Parliament.

Asbestos, rotting cables, leaking pipes.Go to* the source*. Parliament may be falling down but its digital systems are a genuine wonder – and a model for Parliaments and assemblies around the world. It’s easy to call up your MP’s speeches in the house, questions for the Prime Minister, contributions to select committees, the works. You can also watch Parliamentary debates live while in session, debates in Westminster Hall and there’s an archive of video from committee sessions going back to 2007.

Set up a Google alert. The absolute backbone of lazy Internet research. There must be a billion live alerts running worldwide. Search for what you’re interested in, turn it into an email alert, set the frequency and level of detail. Simple. Our daily alert for ‘Oliver Dowden‘ is vital to this blog and regularly produces unexpected gems. For instance, Dowden, in his role as a senior Cabinet Office Minister, is responsible for enforcing the rules on foreign investments in UK businesses. The system was set up to impede the Chinese takeover of swathes of British industry – mainly because this is a big policy priority for our American allies. It’s a total mess, of course, and entirely ineffective, so Dowden is now planning an embarrassing u-turn but we’d have known nothing about any of it without our trusty Google alert.

Captain DowdenPay attention to what they say. Dowden’s web site is pretty good. You can sign up for his ‘end of term report’ and read his columns for various local freesheets. None of this is very interesting, of course – in fact it’s almost the definition of paralysingly boring – but it’ll give you a sense of your MP’s priorities.

Socia media remains vital. Politicians are still active on X (formerly known as Twitter) and on Facebook. Some of the more adventurous have built audiences on Instagram and TikTok (do you remember Matt Hancock’s smartphone app, inventively called ‘Matt Hancock’, dating from back when he was just a figure of fun, before he became a Shakespearean farce?). You’ll often find politicians publishing statements, resignation letters and endorsements on social media without publishing them anywhere else. The platforms have become a proxy for a press office and the nearest we’ve got to an archive. During the Pincher affair we recorded over 70 resignation letters published on Twitter alone.

Subscribe. Most web sites still offer their content in a vintage format that many consider to be the last non-evil thing on the Internet. It’s called RSS and it allows to you add a feed to a simple reader app on your mobile or your computer and automatically get updates whenever new content is added. We’ve got one here at Radlett Wire and we’ve even got a niche feed for our MP. Add one or both to your RSS reader for ultimate convenience. RSS is still used extensively by journalists and researchers. It’s kind of a trade secret. Don’t tell anyone.

• Our favourite RSS reader, now that Google Reader has gone, is a Mac app called Reeder. There are plenty of others – for all platforms.

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There’s an election coming. We can feel the electricity in the air.This is not Oliver Dowden, it’s the King in a sailor’s uniform. That’ll be £8 Million.We haven’t posted here for seven months. We took a break and meanwhile, you may have noticed, the world got even more dark and weird. But Rishi Sunak says his ‘working assumption’ is that we’ll have a general election in the second half of this year so the politics is about to get a bit more interesting (and then there’s the polling). Maybe it’s time to start blogging again.

So what’s our MP actually been up to?In the intervening period, Oliver Dowden, who was appointed Deputy Prime Minister by Rishi Sunak after Dominic Raab resigned in April of last year (there was another bullying scandal. We know, it’s really hard to keep up). Dowden remains Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Secretary of State in the Cabinet Office and has continued to excel as a bagman, flitting from studio to studio, mopping up after everyone from Peter Bone to Boris Johnson to Suella Braverman (remember her?) to Michel Mone to the boss himself and picking up salient issues as they hit the inbox – strikes, Artificial Intelligence (for designing bioweapons and for getting rid of surplus civil servants) and Chinese takeovers of UK businesses, for instance. He’s got bit parts in the Covid Inquiry and in the Post Office scandal, of course (we could include definitely not covering up for a rapist in the Conservative Party, asking Netflix to tell everyone The Crown is made-up, casually snubbing the Greek Prime Minister and more-or-less constantly complaining about Gary Lineker but honestly this list is getting a bit long).

We don’t want to be too dismissive. Dowden did collide with a few big issues along the way – he addressed the UN about Ukraine, spoke for the government on the Gaza protests and called a Cobra meeting about the terror threat. The fact that Oliver Dowden actually ran the country for a few days during the Summer holidays may or may not fill you with dread.

Untouched by scandalNone of this is what you’d call inspiring is it? But this constant focus on the political nitty-gritty and selflessly stepping up to defend the indefensible when asked to has obviously served Dowden well. No detectable scandal (that 25 grand payment barely gets him into the top 50 MPs), no public shaming, he’s not been asked to leave via the back door of Number 10 once yet. Classic teflon.

The boss is backA departure for the agesIt must be, er, bewildering (Upsetting? Galling?) for Oliver Dowden to see his first political boss David Cameron, who departed the scene like a thief in the night (humming) in 2016, actually re-entering government via the back door, though. In a just world Dowden would have eclipsed his sensei by now but, tragically, he finds himself down the table from the old Etonian again. It must be maddening, especially as Cameron didn’t even have to go to the trouble of getting elected this time – he just strolled into the House of Lords and picked up his ermine (and his £104,360 per year salary).

Perfectly normalSo, let’s get to that portrait of the King. Oliver Dowden has chosen a photograph of Charles III wearing the uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet, with the many medals and insignia he has earned in that role, taken in one of his castles. It’s A3-sized and comes in an oak frame1. If you represent a ‘public authority’ you can get one for nothing (you just have to send an email). What you’re required to do with it is not specified – although we assume you’re supposed to hang it on the wall in the lobby, like they do in Azerbaijan. The cost to tax-payers is expected to be £8 Million. And we’re all going to carry on acting like this is a perfectly normal thing for the government of a democracy to do in 2024.

For a Tory MP this is what gets you updating your LinkedIn in January 2024In our next post we’ll look at the recent polling, including last week’s allegedly hyper-accurate MRP poll, commissioned by Lord David Frost and paid for by a shadowy group calling itself The Conservative Britain Alliance (the Electoral Commission wants to know who they are), that’s put the fear of God into Tory MPs and triggered this week’s frenzied (and highly entertaining) festival of recrimination and panic in the corridors and meeting rooms of the House of Commons and CCHQ.

1. Some people have raised concerns about the little camera at the top of the picture frame. We’re pretty sure you can just put a bit of tape or a Post-It Note over it, although we’re not sure if that’s actually allowed. ︎
2. As a Cabinet Office minister, Oliver Dowden remains responsible for the government’s 22-person propriety and ethics team – he’s this guy‘s boss. It’s still not clear what they actually do.
3. We’re urged to recognise Lord Cameron’s selfless devotion to duty. He’s promised not to collect his daily £342 House of Lords attendance allowance while collecting his £104,360 per year ministerial salary, for instance, and he’s had to give up the enormous sums he’s been earning as a consultant and adviser in the private sector. In every year since he resigned he’s claimed the allowance for former Prime Ministers – the Public Duty Costs Allowance (PDCA) – which runs to a maximum of £115,000 per year and it’s not known if he’ll continue to claim it now that he’s a minister. Meanwhile, the Serious Fraud Office hasn’t finished investigating the affairs of his former employer Greensill Capital, where Cameron’s salary was £720,000 per year (he was also given shares in the company and sold them just before it went bust for £3.3M)
4. At Radlett Wire we’re convinced that there’s some value in keeping an eye on the conduct of a local MP – especially in a constituency like ours that’s been dominated by one party since its creation forty years ago. It’s one of the worthwhile things that local blogs all over the country still do. We’ve grouped all the Dowden posts together with the tag #DowdenLog. You can use an RSS reader to subscribe to the blog or just to our gripping Oliver Dowden updates. If you follow Radlett Wire on Twitter/X, on Facebook and now in the Fediverse (search for @blog@radlettwire.co.uk on Mastodon or your favourite ActivtyPub service) we’ll also share every Dowden post there.

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For the Deputy Prime Minister, our MP, it’s time to become part of the story. You’re a successful politician, you’ve played the game, moved with the populist times, you’ve gone to America and come back an anti-woke crusader. You’ve taken on resurgent labour. You’ve celebrated the suburban ideal. You’ve picked your allies carefully. More to… Continue reading Dowden steps up

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Part one, the fringe parties“Fringe? Moi?”Calm down. The general election could be as far away as 28 January 2025. It could be a lot sooner, though. Now that the Fixed Term Parliament Act is no more and Prime Ministers may call elections whenever they want, subject to the maximum term, the element of surprise is back. May 2024 looks good because it would coincide with some local elections. Earlier than that wouldn’t give the Conservatives time to claw back enough of Labour’s polling lead – which has been diminishing across the last few months but still stands at 16% or 200 seats. September 2024 is probably the latest it’ll practically happen. The unknown is how Rishi Sunak is feeling on any given day. Our money is on 2 May 2024.

Candidates have to submit nomination papers if they want to stand but they won’t be asked to do so until after Parliament is dissolved, so you’ve got plenty of time to raise the deposit if you feel like standing. Local parties are already selecting and adopting candidates. Oliver Dowden got the good news from his local party last month (Boris Johnson a month before that).

In Hertsmere, in addition to the incumbent, we now know about one other candidate for the 2024 general election. Darren Selkus, army veteran and CEO of an East London wood veneer company, has announced (on Twitter obvs) that he’s going to stand for election, for the Reform Party, successor to the Brexit Party and offspring of UKIP (Selkus stood for the party in the Hertsmere Borough Council election last week and polled 53 votes). If Mr Selkus does manage to get his papers in to stand in Hertsmere, he’ll be far from the first candidate from the populist right to do so, of course.

This post will be the first of our General Election previews and we’ll use it to discuss the fringe and populist parties that have stood in Hertsmere since it came into being in 1983. In later posts we’ll tell the stories of the bigger parties in the constituency.

The Referendum PartyBuccaneer businessman, James Goldsmith – a man who, while still at Eton, won £250,000 in today’s money on the horses and promptly left school, a man who was a billionaire in the seventies, way before it was cool – started the Referendum Party in 1994, several years after Alan Sked founded the party that would become UKIP, but Goldsmith’s party will be remembered as the originator of the idea of a popular vote on EU membership. While UKIP was still a nerdy ginger group, Sir James was busy sending VHS tapes to five million British households (you’ve probably got one in your loft).

The Referendum Party was the absolute OG eurosceptic party, setting the tone for the two decades of populist tumult that would follow. Goldsmith’s party polled 1,703 votes in Hertsmere in 1997 and in the general election beat UKIP in almost every seat where both stood. The party’s programme looked pretty kooky back then but who’s laughing now? Goldsmith died later in the same year, the party disbanded and, well, the rest is history…

BNPFast forward to the high-water mark for anti-immigration sentiment at the end of Labour’s 13 years in office. Immigration had increased steadily under Labour and a surge in asylum applications caused by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq had put Blair and later Brown on the back foot (there was discussion of withdrawing from the ECHR). Local man Daniel Seabrook polled 1,397 votes for the British National Party in Hertsmere in May 2010, a few months after Nick Griffin, the party’s leader, made his controversial appearance on the BBC’s Question Time. In this period the party held 50 council seats and in 2009 won over a million votes in the EU Parliamentary elections and sent two MEPs, including Griffin, to Strasbourg, where the party joined with other European racist and nationalist parties in the formation of a new group, the Alliance of European National Movements. The BNP had been founded in 1982 by former members of the National Front and has subsequently, at least in electoral terms, disappeared entirely – a measure, let’s face it, of how thoroughly the party’s bitter, hateful worldview has been absorbed by more mainstream parties.

UKIPThe United Kingdom Independence Party, thirty years old this year, is a paradox. A party that, like other parties on this list, has now more-or-less disappeared but can make a reasonable claim to being the most important UK political party of the last twenty years and is responsible, in a pretty direct way, for one of the most consequential changes in modern British history. A party that’s never had more than two Westminster MPs but turned British politics upside-down and routinely polled millions of votes in general elections. A party that, at its peak, had Britain’s fifth largest membership but has now been reduced to a bitter, anti-woke husk that can barely fill a village hall (but supports Hyperloop).

UKIP first stood in Hertsmere in 2010 and, in 2015, candidate Frank Ward, a local councillor who, nearly thirty years earlier, had won almost 20% of the vote for Labour, achieved a pretty decent 6,383 votes, a high-water mark and more than twice the Liberal Democrat vote in that election. Ward’s breakthrough was, of course, part of a national surge that saw the party win 3.8 Million votes, making UKIP comfortably the third largest party in the UK. In the 2014 European Parliament elections, UKIP won more votes than all other UK parties and 24 seats in the Parliament. You know what happened next.

It’s been downhill since then, of course. In 2017 the UKIP vote in Hertsmere was cut to 1,564 and in 2019 the party didn’t stand at all. UKIP limps on, with a policy platform that looks more like the BNP’s than the old UKIP’s, and won a total of zero seats in the local elections (losing 25) last week. The party now has no elected positions anywhere in the UK and is led by one-time Tory Minister Neil “Cash for Questions” Hamilton.

The Brexit Party You’ll remember the Brexit Party, Nigel Farage’s one-policy, post-referendum party, which had a short and checkered history and absolutely smashed it in the last ever UK election for the European Parliament. The party made an awkward, unreciprocated deal with the Conservatives and, as a result, stood down in hundreds of Conservative constituencies for the 2019 GE, including ours. Farage moved on and the Brexit Party became the Reform Party.

The Reform PartyRichard TiceAt last week’s local elections the party that grew out of the Brexit Party “struggled to make headway”, as they say in the media. They wound up with a total of six council seats in England and Wales and, where they stood, they averaged 6% of the vote. In Hertsmere candidates in Potters Bar and Shenley managed a total of 130 votes. Nationally, the party’s founder Nigel Farage has lost interest and President Richard Tice has somewhat sunk from view, although he can be seen on Talk TV fairly regularly.

In Britain, the rigid FPTP electoral system obviously doesn’t favour minority parties and, as a consequence, they tend not to bother developing detailed policy programmes. There’s not much incentive to workshop a forty-page manifesto when you’ll never ever get a chance to implement it.

So it’s interesting that Reform’s policy platform is quite well-developed. It looks a lot like those of some other European populist parties. The economics is interventionist and broadly expansionary, there’s a plan to invest in the NHS and it’s all costed and funded in some detail. As you’d expect there’s a lot of emphasis on tax cuts and energy independence. Immigration comes up but is not the primary concern. Although they’re probably due an update, the party’s four missions don’t look too different from the big parties’ (and no mention of ‘woke’).

So, if the Reform Party stands in Hertsmere, what are their prospects? Well, they don’t look too good. The current government’s policy platform sits squarely on the populists’ lawn – ticking all the boxes, especially the big one labelled ‘small boats’.

The always fascinating Electoral Calculus actually projects a 7.1% share for the Reform Party in Hertsmere, better than for the The Green Party, but still gives the Tories a 67% chance of winning.

Reclaim?There’s another right-wing party we should look at, not least because this party has just done what the others on this list have rarely achieved and acquired for itself an actual MP.

You might say that Laurence Fox’s Reclaim is not quite a party. It may have leapfrogged the electoral process into Parliament but it doesn’t yet have a policy platform. When the party’s leader does get an opportunity to communicate his priorities, it’s essentially 100% anti-vax and anti-woke. If Reform resembles a scaled-down Fidesz or a Brothers of Italy, serious parties of the populist right, with programmes and long-term ambitions, Reclaim resembles a protest group, formed in the tendentious shouting match of social media – and, if we’re honest, more of a vehicle for its charismatic leader than a movement. The ‘leadership’ page lists only one person and that person’s photograph appears three times on the homepage. The manifesto is inchoate. Here’s the whole thing:

The entire policy platform of Laurence Fox’s Reclaim PartyIt’s worth keeping an eye on Reclaim, though, the party has already attracted substantial funding from the usual billionaires and with a Westminster seat we can expect the money to continue to flow. Don’t rule out a rash of Reclaim Parliamentary candidates in 2024.

The GreensIs it fair to put the Green Party on this list, in between the loons and the lefties? Perhaps not. They have managed to get one MP elected – unlike almost everyone else in this post (no, Laurence, Andrew Bridgen does not count) – and they have, to an important degree, set the agenda in metropolitan Britain and in Scotland for some years. They’re like the anti-UKIP – a party of huge emotional and cultural relevance to a big chunk of the electorate but with not the slightest chance of winning a general election.

Of course, with net zero now official policy for all the major parties, the Greens might fear that they’re beginning to look a bit redundant. And now that, out of the blue, trans rights has become a wedge ‘culture wars’ issue for general and national elections, the party’s principled stance on the issue might turn into a serious electoral risk that it’s hard to mitigate, as it has for the SNP.

The Greens first stood in Hertsmere in 2010. Candidate Arjuna Krishna-Das polled 604 votes – not at all bad for a first try (although it was less than half the BNP vote). The candidate disappeared for the next election, though, and in 2015 there was no Green candidate at all in Hertsmere. We looked into it at the time and learnt that Krishna-Das had – confusingly – defected to a ‘counter-jihad’ UKIP spin-off calling itself Liberty GB, an outfit that has now so thoroughly disappeared its own web site has been taken over by spammers.

Since the Green Party returned to the ballot in Hertsmere it’s been all good news. The party added c 50% to its vote in 2017 and nearly doubled that in 2019. Electoral Calculus projects another doubling for the GE, so that must be encouraging. What’s fascinating about the Greens in Britain though, is how urban they are. The party evidently does have rural support but, even in areas like ours, where big chunks of the countryside are threatened by developers, they’re not strongly identified with opposition to building on the green belt and certainly aren’t seen as standing for the big rural or suburban causes.

It’s a confirmation, if needed, that the Green Party is really a party of the young and of the university-educated and not of the people who actually occupy the green bits of the country. Having said that, the party now controls its first council and it’s a pretty rural one.

Communists and socialistsThe fringe parties aren’t always on the right, of course. In 1983, the year the constituency came into being and the year of Margaret Thatcher’s second landslide, a candidate standing as an Independent Communist won 1,116 votes in Hertsmere. We’ve long been puzzled by this fact – that there were, apparently, over a thousand communists in this prosperous part of the Home Counties at around the high point of Thatcherism, but we did eventually notice that the candidate’s name, Ronald Parkinson, was pretty close to the name of the winning Conservative candidate, Minister and confidant of the Prime Minister Cecil Parkinson. Since then we’ve been advising fringe candidates in Hertsmere to change their names.

James Dry stood twice for the Socialist Labour Party in Hertsmere, in 2001 and 2005, polling over 500 votes on his second try. The party, founded and led to this day by one-time miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, stood in 114 Parliamentary constituencies in 2001 but a split in the party that year, over the matter of support for relations with comrades in North Korea (we kid you not), diminished its standing. The party hasn’t put up a candidate since 2010 but continues to campaign for the reopening of the coal mines.

Even further outCutting crimeWe’ve saved our favourite till last. In the early nineties, the worldwide Transcendental Meditation movement saw fit to start a transnational political party, the Natural Law Party. The idea was to apply the principles of TM, including the magical practice of yogic flying, to social and political problems. The party stood in at least 74 countries and even put up a candidate for President of the United States. In Britain the lavishly-funded party stood in every single Parliamentary seat and did so twice. In Hertsmere the party never did better than 373 votes (and we suspect the movement’s connections with Hare Krishna may have contributed to that total). The party’s presence across the country gave it access to TV election advertising and its broadcasts caused much amusement, not to say consternation. In this one, UK party leader Geoffrey Clements claims, for instance, that the yogic flyers had already reduced the crime rate in Liverpool and improved exam results across the whole country (he doesn’t address the fact that, if it’s possible for TM to improve things so much before they’ve been elected, there doesn’t seem to be a good reason to vote for them).

It’s tempting to think that what we need now, at this fractious time, is another political party that can solve deep social problems by the power of thought alone and without going to all the trouble of being elected.

• Our history of elections in Hertsmere covers all the winners, going back to 1983, and this shared spreadsheet has all the data, for general elections and for recent local elections.

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Oliver Dowden is the consummate bagman. A loyal and effective consigliere. Always at the service of the leader, always ready.Oliver “Two Flags” Dowden at a deskWe’ve written here before about Dowden’s progress around the fringes of the Cabinet. This time he’s been asked to add the role of Deputy Prime Minister to the already very long job description of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. For a Prime Minister to appoint a deputy is often a way to reward loyalty or to shore up an uncertain leadership by bringing in an ally. Dowden’s appointment ticks both boxes – he’s been a loyal supporter of Sunak since his resignation from Johnson’s cabinet last Summer and is considered a member of the PM’s inner circle (Dowden was on the doorstep in Bushey this weekend with Sunak’s wife, Britain’s most famous non-dom Akshata Murty).

Deputy Prime Ministers come and go. It’s a job title that’s in the gift of the Prime Minister and can be switched on and off at will (the first one was Clement Attlee during the war) It doesn’t attract a salary (Dowden will still be pulling down the £158,257 he makes for his current roles, though, so don’t worry) and usually has no office. Sometimes a deputy PM can have a more formal role. Nick Clegg, you’ll remember, led his half of the coalition from the Deputy’s office. Thérèse Coffey chaired two committees during her tenure as Deputy to Liz Truss last year (although it’s not recorded that they actually met – she wasn’t there for long). John “Two Jags” Prescott, a very visible (not to say pugilistic) Deputy, chaired nine.

Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate realityIt’s probably safe to assume that Dowden won’t be taking on any committees or formal tasks while in the new job. He’s got plenty to be getting on with in the Cabinet Office – he’s in charge of freaking us all out, for instance. He’s also got a track record for taking on empty or nominal roles as needed. He’s in charge of the government’s anti-woke activity, for instance and, as far as we can tell, his Industrial Action Taskforce, assembled in November last year, has never actually met – or done anything at all, in fact.

As for Dowden’s personal prospects, he must be wondering whether he’ll ever make the jump from the lower tiers into one of the big jobs. So far he’s managed one full-ministerial role: he was Culture Secretary between 2020 and 2021 but he’ll probably now be remembered only as the man who appointed Richard Sharp Chairman of the BBC (new revelations about that in the Sunday Times this weekend). Oops.

OuchAnd the clock is ticking, of course. The polling looks bad. No matter what you think of the competence or authenticity of the Starmer Labour Party, a Tory win in 2024 has to be a long shot. Electoral Calculus, a polling company, calculates a rolling poll-of-polls – an average of all the public opinion polls. As of 22 April 2023 it suggests the Tories might slump from 365 to 113 seats (and a 95% probability of a Labour majority). Their best case prediction is for 244 Conservative seats, which would be better than Labour’s 2019 performance (203 seats) but would still put the Tories in second place.

Double ouchAnd that’s before you even get to the worst case. Electoral Calculus specialises in a clever statistical polling technique called MRP (multi-level regression and post stratification, since you asked) to calculate what are usually thought to be more accurate predictions – pundits and strategists always rush for the MRP projections. They did the last one in February (when the Tories were doing even worse than they are today, to be clear) and it suggests a grand total of 45 Conservative seats. In this scenario, the Tories aren’t even the official opposition and even Oliver Dowden loses his seat. Boom.

So if Dowden is to score one of the Great Offices of State he’ll need another fairly dramatic upset this side of the general election or he’ll need to bide his time. Really bide his time.

• I made use of this terrific explainer about the Deputy Prime Minister role from the Institute for Government.
• The Wikipedia entry for Deputy Prime Minister is fascinating – and goes into the various definitions of the role. Attlee, for instance, was de facto Deputy Prime Minister but never formally appointed. Michael Heseltine was the first to carry the formal title.

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Okay, let’s face it, the local elections are not the most glamorous in the calendar but they are, in some ways, the most relevant to our everyday lives.(this post now updated with the results fron the 4 May local elections)

Turnout in local elections rarely exceeds half that seen for national elections and the big issues are always, of course, reserved for higher authorities but these local elections are about as close as ordinary electors get to the democratic process. There’s a decent chance you’ll know some of your local councillors and, once elected, they do have real power – especially in planning.

So here’s everything you need to know about the 4 May local elections in Hertsmere, including the results for Aldenham Parish Council and for the two Radlett wards in Hertsmere Borough Council.

Did you remember your ID?This was the first election for which Britons were required to produce photo ID. Polling suggested that one in four voters didn’t know they needed ID before the elections and evidence is coming in that turnout was affected in a statistically significant way by the new requirements. Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was in the cabinet at the time the voter ID law was passed, says the new rules were a form of ‘gerrymandering’ (wrong word but we know what he means). This will make it harder to secure continued support for this and the governmemt may have to at least modify the acceptable ID list, which is the focus for unhappiness about this measure.

Which elections?Here in Radlett, we voted in two elections, for Hertsmere Borough Council and for Aldenham Parish Council (there are no Hertfordshire County Council elections until 2025).

The Hertsmere Borough Council areaHertsmere Borough Council consists of 16 wards; in Elstree and Borehamwood, Bushey, Potters Bar, Shenley and Aldenham (which is made up of Radlett and the small settlements of Letchmore Heath and Aldenham). Each ward returns either two or three councillors, for a total of 39. Aldenham is divided into two wards. Most of Radlett’s area, including the bustling downtown area, is in Aldenham East (map) and Aldenham West is mostly rural, stretching out to take in Aldenham, Letchmore Heath and the aerodrome (map). The Borough Council meets at the council offices in Borehamwood. From Radlett we send a total of four councillors to the Borough Council, two from each ward.

AllowancesBorough councillors are not paid for their work but can claim an allowance – and it can be quite substantial. In 2020-21 (the most recent published year), for instance, Morris Bright MBE, leader of Hertsmere Borough Council and friend to the stars, received an allowance of £44,523 for his service to the Borough. Deputy Leader Caroline Clapper received £20,509.23 (details on the Hertsmere web site). You may also know Ms Clapper as Radlett’s County Councillor – she’s a hard-working representative for the Watling ward that takes in the whole of Radlett and Elstree. For that role she received an additional alowance of £22,607.04 in financial year 2022-23 (details on the HCC web site).

All Borough councillors can claim a basic allowance of £6,045 per year and there are additional payments for cabinet responsibilities, travel and so on, so a number of Labour and Liberal councillors will now be seeing a substantial increase in their allowances. The rules are on the Hertsmere web site.

Mayor Chris MyersAs a result of the elections, Hertsmere has a new Mayor – Labour Borough councillor Chris Myers. He and his deputy are of the old-fahioned, chain-bearing, ceremonial variety, though, elected by their fellow councillors, not the thrusting new kind of directly-elected Mayor. Councillor Chris Myers was chosen by other councillors at a meeting last week.

John GrahamPrevious Mayor John Graham was a long-serving Hertsmere Borough councillor from the Aldenham East ward and sat as a representative of Hertsmere Borough Council on Aldenham Parish Council, where he is Vice Chair to new Chair Helen Jones.

The Parish of AldenhamAldenham Parish Council is divided into two wards and they are the same as the Borough Council wards – Aldenham East and Aldenham West. The Parish Council meets in the offices above Radlett library. In the Parish we elect a total of 12 councillors, six for each ward. Eight of these councillors are elected here in the Parish and four are appointed as representatives of Hertsmere Borough Council and Hertfordshire County Council.

The partiesBoth of the councils in which we voted on 4 May are historically controlled by the Conservatives but Hertsmere has, for the first time in over 20 years, changed hands and is thus ‘no overall control’. The Conservatives are still the largest party but power will now be shared by Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Hertsmere now has a Labour leader and a Labour Mayor and Deputy.

The green surge in the local elections, which saw the Green Party’s representation grow by more than any other party in the local elections, did not touch Hertsmere but there are now Green councillors in neighbouring districts. The Green Party is benefiting from its ‘clean hands’ – they’re not touched by the Tories’ catastrophic national performance nor by ambivalence about Starmer’s careful triangulation, so some voters consider them an attractive option.

Hertsmere Borough Council is presently divided like so:

| Party | Seats | | --- | --- | | Conservative | 16 | | Labour (and Cooperative) | 14 | | Liberal Democrat | 9 | | 39 |

Source: WikipediaAll four of the Borough councillors returned from the two Radlett wards are still Conservatives and, let’s face it, will be until the end of time.

After the 2019 elections the picture looked very different:

| Party | Seats | | --- | --- | | Conservative | 29 | | Labour | 7 | | Liberal Democrat | 3 | | 39 |

Source: WikipediaAt the Parish level it’s simpler – all twelve councillors are Conservatives. Other parties do stand (see the lists below) and politics in Hertsmere is active and disputatious but, let’s be real, Radlett is a prosperous Home Counties town and is likely to be Tory forever.

Who was elected?Here are all the candidates elected in the Parish and Borough Council elections on 4 May, starting with Hertsmere Borough Council. Incumbent candidates, re-elected at this election, are shown in bold.

Mark Cherry, developerMark Cherry, who was an Aldenham Parish Councillor and Chair of the Council’s planning committee, stood down. Mister Cherry recently withdrew a planning application for a widely-opposed development of eight homes in the centre of Radlett. Jackie Lefton, Aldenham East Councillor and one-time Chair of the Parish Council, also stood down.

Hertsmere Borough Council, Aldenham East ward, 4 May 2023 (re-elected in bold)

| Candidate | Party | Votes | Elected? | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Denton-Cardew, Ben | Lib Dem | 311 | N | | Goldman, Joshua Jack Nathan | Lab | 179 | N | | Howard, Stuart John | Lib Dem | 300 | N | | Rosehill, Brett Ashley | Con | 853 | Y | | Selby, Lucy | Con | 967 | Y | | Treves Brown, Julian Patrick | Lab | 167 | N |

Source: Hertsmere Borough CouncilHertsmere Borough Council, Aldenham West ward, 4 May 2023 (re-elected in bold)

| Candidate | Party | Votes | Elected? | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Al-Saadoon, Saif Madid | Lib Dem | 214 | N | | Clapper, Caroline Sara | Con | 882 | Y | | Dhadra, Ronan Dash | Lab | 171 | N | | Huff, Sandra Ann | Lab | 200 | N | | Lambert, David Stephen | Con | 752 | Y | | May, Jon | Lib Dem | 186 | N |

Source: Hertsmere Borough CouncilAldenham Parish Council, Aldenham East ward, 4 May 2023 (re-elected in bold)

| Candidate | Party | Votes | Elected? | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Ali, Sahil Singh | Con | 853 | Y | | Benjamin, Sandra Ruth | Con | 922 | Y | | Graham, John | Con | 955 | Y | | Jones, Helen | Con | 901 | Y | | Rosehill, Romy Michelle | Con | 860 | Y | | Samuelson, Estelle | Con | 973 | Y | | Treves Brown, Julian Patrick | Lab | 396 | N |

Source: Hertsmere Borough CouncilAldenham Parish Council, Aldenham West ward, 4 May 2023 (re-elected in bold)

| Candidate | Party | Votes | Elected? | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Butwick, Anthony | Con | 758 | Y | | Diskin, Clare | Con | 753 | Y | | Huff, Sandra Ann | Lab | 363 | N | | Khawaja, Saleem | Con | 646 | Y | | Lambert, David Stephen | Con | 789 | Y | | Nygate, Daniel William | Con | 671 | Y | | Woolf, Carl Elliott | Con | 729 | Y |

Source: Hertsmere Borough CouncilPrevious electionsHere are the results of the 2019 elections, for our Hertsmere Borough Council seats and for Aldenham Parish Council. The councillors with a ‘Yes’ in the ‘Elected?’ were elected and you can learn more about them by clicking on their names.

Hertsmere Borough Council, Aldenham East ward, 2 May 2019

| Candidate | Party | Votes | Elected? | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | AI-Saadoon, Saif Madid | Lib Dem | 204 | N | | Dickson, Sue | Ind | 251 | N | | Graham, John | Con | 1,058 | Y | | Harris, David Johnathan | Lab | 160 | N | | Huff, Sandra Ann | Lab | 143 | N | | Selby, Lucy | Con | 1,097 | Y | | Turnout 40.28% |

Source: Hertsmere Borough CouncilHertsmere Borough Council, Aldenham West ward, 2 May 2019

| Candidate | Party | Votes | Elected? | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Clapper, Caroline Sara | Con | 1,001 | Y | | Kirk, Richard Arthur | Lab | 175 | N | | Lambert, David | Con | 845 | Y | | Maizels, John Henry | Lab | 160 | N | | Watson, Paul | Lib Dem | 197 | N | | Turnout 33.2% |

Source: Hertsmere Borough CouncilAldenham Parish Council, Aldenham East ward, 2 May 2019

| Candidate | Party | Votes | Elected? | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Al-Saadoon, Tariq Saif | Lab | 214 | N | | Bass, Diana Mary | Lab | 208 | N | | de Skuba, Przemek | Con | 865 | Y (resigned January 2021) | | Dogan, Zeynep | Lab | 201 | N | | Harris, David Johnathan | Lab | 244 | N | | Huff, Sandra Ann | Lab | 224 | N | | Jones, Helen | Con | 1,093 | Y | | Khawaja, Saleem | Con | 971 | Y | | Kilhams, Catherine | Con | 1,096 | Y | | Lefton, Jacquelina | Con | 1,109 | Y | | Wickham, Dermot | Con | 1,082 | Y | | Wood, Lee | Ind | 378 | N | | Turnout 39.8% |

Source: Hertsmere Borough CouncilAldenham Parish Council, Aldenham West ward, 2 May 2019

| Candidate | Party | Votes | Elected? | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Cherry, Mark | Con | 816 | Y | | Evans, Ben | Con | 864 | Y | | Kirk, Richard Arthur | Lab | 214 | N | | Lambert, David Stephen | Con | 839 | Y | | Maizels, John Henry | Lab | 210 | N | | Pownall-Harris, Melanie Francesca | Lab | 223 | N | | Walton, Garry Robert | Con | 792 | Y | | Samuelson, Estelle | Con | 831 | Y | | Walton, Garry Robert | Con | 845 | Y | | Turnout 33.6% |

Source: Hertsmere Borough CouncilMeanwhile, would you like a professional Mayor?Hertsmere could have a directly elected Mayor. In fact, any local authority at the District level or above can decide to have a directly-elected Mayor and it could be up to us, the electors.

An OG MayorThe government’s process for switching to an elected Mayor (this only applies in England) involves either a vote by the elected councillors or a referendum which would be held alongside a local election in the Borough. To trigger a referendum 5% of the electorate of the Borough must sign a petition – in Hertsmere that’s currently calculated to be 3,921 people. Don’t hold your breath, though. Elected Mayors are not popular. So far, most referendums held in England have voted ‘no’ and there are only three Borough Councils in England with elected Mayors – Bedford, Copeland and Watford.

Elected Mayors are professional, full-time administrators and the job attracts a salary. Watford’s Mayor is paid £73,607. The logic of switching to this more ‘Presidential’ model is that a professional Mayor, working for the area’s interests, can provide some additional visibility and prestige and advance the big causes. Elected Metro Mayors at the top level – Andy Street, Sadiq Khan, Andy Burnham etc. have brought some coherence to local government and raised the visibility of their cities and regions. It’s not at all certain that this would work at the town or district level, though.

This report from the House of Commons Library is an excellent overview, in case you’re thinking of gathering some signatures.

See alsoElections in Hertsmere – including general elections – are administered by the excellent elections team at Hertsmere Borough Council. They maintain the information web site and make sure that notices of elections, lists of candidates and results are posted online in a timely way. Most of the data in this post comes from their published documents.

Data. We’ve added all the numbers in this post to a public spreadsheet (Google Sheets). It also includes general election results, going back all the way to the first in Hertsmere, held when the constituency was created, in 1983. This data is all obtainable online, of course, but this is really the only place you’ll find it all in one document – feel free to download and use the data if you need it. There’s also a fantasically-useful open source spreadsheet of all the 2023 local election results.

Maps. You can find accurate maps of the Parish, Borough, County and Parliamentary constituencies on the MapIt web site, maintained by MySociety, the excellent not-for-profit that also runs the indispensible They Work For You.

History. Our post about Hertsmere elections covers the whole electoral history of the Parliamentary constituency.

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In the distant future, when archaeologists uncover this blog, buried under about forty feet of Thames silt, they’ll thank us.Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate realityWhat we do is keep a fastidious eye on what our MP gets up to. It’s not personal, he’s a pretty good MP. He pays attention when we write him whingey letters and he makes a decent effort to look after his constituents and their quotidien concerns.

However, Oliver Dowden is a minister in a disastrous government that’s visibly screwed everything up, over a period approaching 13 years. Latest catastrophic highlight: life expectancy in Britain has been flatlining for ten years and is now right at the bottom of the table for the big nations. For the poorest, it’s now falling. It’s worth dwelling on that: in the last ten years (it began long before Covid) our government has managed to reverse over a hundred years of steady improvement in the most basic of wellbeing measures – how long people live.

Anyway, in the last couple of weeks, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster has been pretty busy. Let’s catch up:

He banned TikTok. Okay, he banned it from government-owned devices. This is Dowden with his cybersecurity hat on (you’ll remember, he wears a lot of hats). Yes it’s pointless, yes it’s irrational, but it’s nice to see a government actually acting against a tech corporation instead of wringing their hands in a kind of supine, passive-aggressive way like they usually do.

Like this oneOne may now obtain a portrait of the King, free of charge, paid for by H.M. Government. Hold on, though. Dowden says it’s not for everyone, just for ‘public authorities’. His announcement says the scheme, which will apparently cost £8M, includes councils, courts, schools, police forces and fire and rescue services but we’re not sure if it covers sarcastic local blogs.

Check your phone, it might be Oliver Dowden. On 23 April, the government is going to send everyone in Britain an urgent text message. They’re testing a new, nationwide alert system that some of the papers are obviously calling ‘armageddon alerts’. It will be used in the event of an emergency, like a war or a natural disaster. Given the scale of the collapse in Conservative support nationally we wouldn’t be at all surprised if the first message said ‘VOTE TORY ON 4 MAY’. This is actually an international system that’s been used in some countries for years. It’s built into your mobile and you can turn it off if you’d rather not have Oliver Dowden freaking you out when the balloon goes up. And do you think they chose Shakespeare’s birthday for a reason? If they did they missed a cast-iron opportunity to call it The Grim Alarm (sorry).

Oliver Dowden knew that the BBC was worried about the appointment of Boris Johnson’s pal as Chairman about five months before he gave Richard Sharp the job. He didn’t do anything about it, though. And, of course, it was only nominally Dowden’s decision – it was Boris Johnson’s and it had already been made.

Here in the constituency, we know that our MP opposes the sale of the old airport land for the construction of a rail freight terminal but it’s been his government’s policy to permit the development for over a decade now, so it must be awkward for a Cabinet Office Minister. Daisy Cooper, Liberal Democrat MP for St Albans has been asking questions in Parliament, though. The last time Dowden did so was in 2020.

The former Minister for Culture has developed an interest in choral music. Actually, it’s not the first time. But now he wants the BBC to reverse its recent decision to close the BBC Singers, Britain’s only full-time, professional chamber choir. Dowden’s Conservative government has cut BBC funding by 30% since 2010.

Fifteen extraordinary people have been recognised for bravery. They’re on the Government’s Civilian Gallantry List, issued for the first time since 2021. This is another Oliver Dowden joint. We would, perhaps tendentiously, contrast this list with Liz Truss’s ‘list of shame’ or even Boris Johnson’s ‘list of cronies’ (which, remember, includes his dad).

Dowden is ready for actionStill no news from the industrial action taskforce. It’s almost four months since Captain Dowden was put in charge of Rishi Sunak’s crack anti-strikes platoon. We’ve been combing the news ever since and we’re pretty sure he still hasn’t actually done anything and the strikes keep coming. We’ll keep you posted.

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Oh God, Partygate is back in the news. It’s going to be like the torrid Summer of 2022 all over again.It’s Sue Gray* Oliver Dowden was Sue Gray’s boss until she stepped down last week. * In his role as Cabinet Office Minister responsible for propriety and ethics, Dowden will now investigate Gray’s conduct in taking up her new job at the Labour Party. * Our MP’s probably saying a little prayer of gratitude that he wasn’t in the Cabinet Office during #WhatsAppGate.

There’s great excitement in government this week, especially in the Cabinet Office. There can’t be anything more thrilling for a minister responsible for propriety and ethics than to get stuck into a case that might make life harder for His Majesty’s Oppostion. The Tory press is also excited. Starmer and Labour have been polling a steady 20 points ahead of the Tories so they’ve grabbed at this story with something resembling desperation.

And cases like this don’t come along very often: it was the Conservatives who invented the revolving door, after all. About 90% of MPs’ income from second jobs goes to Tories and the vast majority of submissions to the appointments watchdog are from Tories. They’ve had the game to themselves for a long time.

Of course, the irony is that making a fuss about Starmer’s frankly weird decision to appoint Sue Gray (is it possible that Starmer is not the strategy ninja we thought him to be?) might just function to remind the electorate about partygate and all the other hilarious pratfalls of the Johnson era. And the fact that the other prominent partygate civil servant, Simon “Wine Fridge” Case, is a main character in this story and in the very, very tawdry WhatsApp drama, can’t help. Apparently he’s thinking of resigning.

Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate realityOliver Dowden, as the most senior Cabinet Office Minister, sponsors ACOBA, the advisory committee that will now have to decide how long Sue Gray has to wait before taking up the Labour job. Remember, when Dowden was up before the beak himself last year he was required to wait the absolute minimum of three months before taking a handsome wedge from a hedge fund. They have it in their power, though, to ask Gray to wait up to two years – making her, presumably, useless to Labour.

In practice, though, long waits to take up appointments are rare and many think the committee is essentially an easy touch. Hardly anyone is ever forbidden from taking up a job. It would certainly look awkward if the first time ACOBA puts its foot down properly is over a Labour Party appointment.

• We looked into how ACOBA (the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments) works late last year.
• Back in 2017, when she was required to investigate the conduct of another Tory minister, BBC Radio 4 profiled Sue Gray.

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It’s a tough time to be a refugee – especially when you have no recourse to public funds, when you’re not allowed to work and when the prices of basics are soaringFor some years now we’ve been supporting a local charity called Watford and Three Rivers Refugee Partnership. A small, volunteer-run charity that’s been quietly getting on with looking after some of the most vulnerable people in our area for many years, in the teeth of the government’s hostile environment, punitive Home Office fees and a growing caseload.

The charity provides practical and emotional support, advice and befriending to refugees and asylum seekers, supporting them on their journey to a safe, secure, and settled life in the UK.

The charity has launched an appeal to raise money for essential food and household items, mostly via supermarket vouchers.Most of the people WTRRP works with don’t have leave to remain in the country and most have no recourse to public funds (they can’t claim benefits). They’re not entitled to work and are generally living on less than £40 a week. Buying nutritious food and essential items is almost impossible. They rely on the charity’s support to make sure their families have food, personal hygiene products and basic household items.

Last year the charity switched from providing weekly food boxes to supermarket vouchers. The vouchers are a more practical way to help – they give people more choice when shopping and they can choose more fresh food. There’s also less waste.

The huge increases in the cost of food and essentials have meant that many of the charity’s clients are unable to afford enough. The charity’s befrienders report that many families are struggling to maintain even a basic diet.

The situation has got much worse as electricity and gas prices have risenThe number of families that really need vouchers has increased rapidly. WTRRP supports 131 adults and 144 children with vouchers (close to double the number three years ago). This costs about £5,000 a month.

Peter Howard, WTRRP’s Volunteer Grants Team Manager says:

Every week we see more and more people attend our drop in services who desperately need support. The food vouchers are a small way we make a difference and ensure families can get the basics. But we are small organisation run almost entirely by volunteers. So fundraising is tough – particularly at the moment. We urgently need funds to keep up with the rapidly increasing need. Without support, we simply won’t be able to continue providing these vouchers that we know people really rely on.

The charity aims to raise £1,800 and and they’re about half way there. There’s a fundraising page online now. We’d be thrilled if you’d make a donation, of any size, to help the hardest hit to get by.

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There’s an intriguing detail in Rishi Sunak’s mini-reshuffle*It wasn’t announced at the time and it wasn’t in any of the newspaper coverage but, although he was overlooked for the big ministerial roles, Oliver Dowden has a new job. If you’ve been paying attention to his government web page you’ll already have noticed there’s a slightly mysterious new item at the bottom of his list of responsibilities: National Security and Investment.

The list quietly got a bit longerAnd it turns out that it’s not a minor addition. Sunak chopped up the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, took ‘digital’ out of the culture ministry, set up a new energy security department and moved the Investment Screening Unit, the office that monitors big investments in the UK that might have national security implications, into the Cabinet Office, where it becomes Dowden’s responsibility. The ISU has been in existence for about a year, as an effect of the National Security and Investment Act 2021. The law was originally sponsored by Alok Sharma, then Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. It was the result of the enormous collective freak-out about (mainly) Chinese investments in Western businesses that marked Donald Trump’s term in office and the return of nationalism in international trade.

The UK law was one of those reflex reactions that often follow a shift in American policy. It’s modelled on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, set up by Gerald Ford and beefed up by Donald Trump in 2018. Other countries in the US orbit also tightened rules on Chinese investment in this period (and there’s obviously a strong parallel with the financial and economic sanctions against Russia introduced by many Western nations after the invasion of Ukraine).

In Britain the unit has ‘called in’ over 100 investments and blocked a total of five. Four were Chinese acquisitions in the UK and one Russian. It’s considered to be effective – reports are produced quickly – but not at all transparent. When deals are not actually blocked conditions can be imposed – and they’re sometimes not strictly national security conditions. An American company was allowed to buy a UK satellite communications business on the condition it created jobs here, for instance. Fascinatingly, the Chinese are not necessarily taking these rulings lying down and are using international law to challenge some, including a huge 5G deal thrown out by the Swedish government.

Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate realitySo Oliver Dowden, as the most senior Cabinet Office minister, is now responsible for this unit. And it’s not a nominal role – he becomes the ‘decision maker’ in the unit’s adjudications and could easily find himself testifying before an international tribunal brought by a foreign government. Although most of us didn’t notice the change, the investment industry did. And they’re a bit nervous about it. Corporate law firm Morrison Foerster (known, it says here, as MoFo) says the change “…is likely to result in material disruption to delivery by the ISU in the short term…”

How to tell if you need to refer your investment to the governmentIt’s not obvious why this important job should be tacked onto the end of the long list of things already done in the Cabinet Office but it means that, in addition to ministerial propriety and ethics (Zahawi, Williamson, Raab et al), the strikes taskforce (lol), running the war on woke, organising the coronation, supervising public appointments (e.g. Richard Sharp at the BBC) our MP is now also responsible for stopping the Chinese Communist Party from taking control of UK technology firms.

And that’s before he even gets to his constituency business. Blimey.

• A useful explainer of the National Security and Investment Act 2021 from another international law firm, Norton Rose Fulbright.
• And if you feel you might need to refer an investment to the Investment Screening Unit, there’s a web page for that.
• Just before the reshuffle, the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy select committee (which will presumably now have to change its name to reflect reorganised ministries) launched an inquiry into ‘information sharing by the Investment Security Unit’. So that’s another committee for Dowden to attend.

*It may just be us that find this intriguing.

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Politics is a cruel businessOliver Dowden has been overlooked. Rishi reshuffled but left his fixer out of the mix. Our MP remains Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Woke-Finder General and head of the government’s apparently entirely inactive (possibly fictitious?) Strikes Taskforce but is further than ever from a big job.

Captain Dowden still ready for actionAnd we promise we’ll stop going on about the Strikes Taskforce at some point. You’re bored hearing that it hasn’t done anything yet. We’ve got half a dozen Google alerts running in case it comes back to life with a jolt. You’d think it would be a pretty busy taskforce about now, what with all the strikes, but apparently they’re still in the barracks, waiting for their orders.

Anyway, the new Sunak cabinet is not much to write home about – a slightly panicky re-arrangement of the swivel-eyed end of the cabinet – Donelan, Shapps, Badenoch – and it essentially puts things back as they were in 2016 for business and technology. Some are surprised the Prime Minister didn’t take the opportunity to advance some of the loyalists who helped get this elected, though. It must be nerve-wracking for a second-tier figure like Dowden, scrabbling for relevance among the big beasts, to see members of the same 2015 Parliamentary entry whizzing past him and taking up full cabinet positions – Liz Frazer just leapfrogged into the Culture role that Dowden himself was removed from by Boris Johnson in 2021.

The Tory Party may not have a conscience but it definitely has an id – and he is called Lee Anderson. That Anderson is getting closer to one of Dowden’s other previous jobs – Chairman of the Party – must also be causing dyspepsia in the Dowden household.

Meanwhile, one of Dowden’s decisions from back when he was still Culture Secretary, has come back to haunt him – although he’s been all ‘nothing to do with me, guv‘ since the story broke.

Richard SharpNobody outside London knew anything about Richard Sharp until he was shoved into the role of Chairman of the BBC in 2021. He is, though, evidently a genius. A cast-iron financial savant – and from humble beginnings. His public school was tragically outside the top tier but through sheer grit he managed to get accepted at Oxford and completed a degree in PPE nonetheless. He went on to make hundreds of millions of pounds from moving money around in ways we don’t pretend to understand in the City (this 20-year-old article estimates his wealth at £125M). When Boris Johnson was Mayor of London, Sharp was an adviser.

So it’s bewildering that a man of his calibre would somehow manage to get himself mixed up in Boris Johnson’s personal financial affairs. Apparently, instead of saying “sod off, Boris, I’d rather stick my head in a wasps’ nest.” or just blocking his number, Sharp ignored all the red flags and offered to hook Johnson up with another millionaire who said he’d guarantee a loan for the PM.

The loan, we’re told, came off, and Johnson trousered a flexible sum of up to £800,000 (we don’t know who actually lent him the money, how much he drew down in the end or whether he’s paid any of it back yet).

Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate realityThis is where it gets complicated. At this point, Sharp was on the fast track for the BBC job – Johnson had announced he was the preferred candidate and insiders were saying it was a done deal – so it occured to Sharp that his proximity to the lethal spinning blade of the Prime Minister’s private life might cause him some difficulties when it came to the interview. We assume Oliver Dowden knew nothing about the festival of stupidity and venality going on in secret around him, although he was nominally the appointing minister (and his name is at the bottom of the appointment letter).

Cabinet Secretary Simon CaseSharp decided to involve a civil servant. He chose Simon “Wine Fridge” Case, Cabinet Secretary and head of the civil service. And – guess what – Case said the loan was cool and that Johnson wouldn’t even need to declare it because it was “family business”. That last bit is kind of perplexing because although Blyth and Johnson are related, they’re related in roughly the same way Danny Dyer is related to Edward III. They share a great-great-grandfather and apparently Johnson didn’t even know Blyth until Sharp introduced them.

So, bringing this up to date, Richard Sharp has now been censured by the House of Commons Culture select committee – ‘significant errors of judgement’ is the phrase – for not mentioning the loan in his application for the BBC job. He’s issued a non-apology of the “I’m sorry you’re upset” variety and is now hoping that the other inquiry – by a KC appointed by the independent commissioner for public appointments and one that will carry more weight – is kinder to him.

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Ministers are regularly required to show up and look credible before the various committees of the UK ParliamentDo us a favour, watch this short clip from Oliver Dowden’s appearance before the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee yesterday and see if you can figure out what the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster’s ‘propriety and ethics’ team (22 people, we learn) actually does.

We’ve watched it half a dozen times (for we really do need to get out more) and can honestly say that we still have no idea. Grade-A flannel, almost perfect obfuscation (and much disingenuous use of the “I wouldn’t want to prejudice the ongoing inquiry…” defence).

Oliver Dowden – peak Parliamentary flannelDowden so effectively frustrates the efforts of the committee chair William Wragg and senior member John McDonnell to find out what that 22-person team would actually do in the event of a ‘flag’ being raised about a Minister’s conduct (like, for instance, if the HMRC alerted the previous Prime Minister to an incoming Minister’s off-shore tax arrangements) that they’re driven back to questions about ‘departmental efficiency’ in no time.

We’ve pointed out many times in the past what a good soldier Dowden is. He can be sent into a situation like this, fraught with political peril, and emerge unscathed, brushing down his suit and moving briskly on to the next messy situation.

We continue to think that a loyal consigliere like Dowden is not cut out for a role at the very top of politics but he could easily continue to circle around the leadership – cleaning up after ministerial indiscretions and digging metaphorical graves – indefinitely (or until the revolving door beckons). A survivor.

The rest of Dowden’s testimony to the committee concerned cost cutting in the civil service (yes to that, apparently), the declining happiness of civil servants (yes to that too). They’re miserable, mainly because their salaries have actually gone down in the last 11 years – strikes are planned. Karin Smyth grills the Minister and his Permanent Secretary on civil contingencies (disasters, terrorism etc.). It is claimed that there’s a new approach to risk so the next time the balloon goes up there’ll be less administrative panic.

The Coronation Claims Office comes up – someone has to be responsible for the comicbook anachronism of Crown ceremonial – and it is Oliver Dowden. He has some more flannel about the obligation of the state to fund the upcoming coronation, apparently forgetting that for almost the whole history of the British Monarchy coronations were not state affairs and required no government money.

The department’s annual report and accounts was scrutinised – and in particular a big increase in costs. Chisholm pins most of the extra cost on big events – Cop26 in Glasgow, a G7, the Grenfell Inquiry etc.

Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate realityWe learn that Dowden, on taking up his new role, led an ‘open session’ with civil servants at which he invited them to share their concerns about pay and conditions (just trying to imagine what it was like to attend that open session is making us twitch).

John McDonnell raises some pretty grim data about poverty amongst the lowest-paid civil servants (8% have used a foodbank). Dowden insists that there will be no improvement to this year’s 2% pay increase.

There’s an entertaining vignette illustrating the way the current government’s effort to push back against ‘woke culture’ in the civil service is failing. Ronnie Cowan (SNP) quotes one of Dowden’s predecessors in his role (Jacob Rees-Mogg no less) insisting that all training involving the words ‘diversity, wellness and inclusion’ be cancelled. Permanent Secretary Alex Chisholm responds: “the diversity and inclusion strategy is a core part of what the government does and has indeed been renewed twice by subsequent ministers.” The blob pushes back.

• Useful Cabinet Office explainer from the Institute for Government.
• The digital team inside Parliament is famously good. Their online coverage of Parliamentary debates, committees etc. is really exemplary. An important window on the operation of government and legislature.
• The House of Commons Library has just published a fascinating research briefing about coronation history and ceremonial.

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How do you turn a respectable, if old-fashioned, pillar of the post-war liberal establishment into a weak, discredited organ of the state in two years? Ask Oliver Dowden.Richard Sharp, once Rishi Sunak’s boss, now Chairman of the BBCTo be fair, this isn’t really much to do with our MP, who was at the time Culture Secretary. He just signed the paperwork appointing Tory Party mega-donor Richard Sharp Chairman of the BBC – the choice of BBC Chair is made by the Prime Minister, there’s an ‘appointments panel’ involved and the formal responsibility actually belongs to the monarch.

And this is obviously not a new tactic. It would be wrong to give the Conservative government too much credit here. Packing the boards of state (and quasi-state) organisations with allies is best practice for governments in a hurry everywhere. It’s not even a particularly bad thing – we’ve got a list of people we’d like appointed to the boards of various institutions ourselves (let us know if you’re interested in seeing it, we can meet up at your club).

What’s new and interesting about this government is how closely connected all the players are and how apparently shameless they are about their intentions. The government is not appointing dull technocrats here. They’re appointing ambitious Flashman figures who they hope will quickly transform the institutions they’re inserted into. Sharp is son of an ennobled business titan himself, and a millionaire many times over (it seems almost redundant to add that he was once Rishi Sunak’s boss). He wasn’t put into the BBC to give the books a once-over, he’s meant to be turning the place upside-down. The pool of candidates for these high-paying placements is obviously pretty small too – approximately the size of an Oxford college common room by the look of it.

Anyway, the story itself, broken by The Times, is a complicated, dispiriting mess. We won’t try to summarise it in any detail here (you can read it yourself) but you won’t be surprised to learn that it’s got the grubby fingerprints of the Johnson era all over it. There’s the usual dense web of old friends and top jobs and undeclared relationships and the phrase “…there is no known precedent of a prime minister selecting an individual [for the BBC job] who was simultaneously helping them with their personal finances.” really jumps out of the text.

The story involves partygate Cabinet Secretary Simon Case (obvs); Sam Blythe, a distant cousin of Boris Johnson (who we learn was also chasing a top job at the British Council); an undeclared £800,000 loan from an unknown source to cover the cost of one of the Prime Minister’s divorces and Lord Geidt, the independent adviser on ethics who later resigned over another scandal.

A nice detail from the Times story involves Johnson, Sharp and Blythe (the man who guaranted the loan) sharing take-away food and wine at Chequers before the loan was finalised, and a couple of months before Richard Sharp was appointed Chairman of the BBC.

• The web of connections is dense – and goes back a long way. This post from the On London blog connects the dots.

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Second jobs, woke nonsense, stolen artworks, a taskforce that’s done literally nothing – what your MP’s been up to since the new yearAn empty meeting room like the one in which Oliver Dowden hasn’t been holding his strikes taskforce meetingsFollow the money. Oliver Dowden features in this big Sky News exposé of payments to MPs, from which we learn that our legislators have taken £17.1 million from second jobs in this parliament and that almost 90% of it went to Tories. We already knew about Dowden’s extra income but it was interesting to learn that his twenty-five grand* barely gets him into the top 35% of all MPs – although, according to Byline Times, Dowden is also one of ten MPs – all Tories, of course – who have taken jobs with party donors in the last year.

It’s all culture wars all the time. Have you noticed that whenever things get bad for this Conservative government – strikes, small boats, sexual predators in the police, flatlining economy – they seem to develop a heightened interest in university radicals and unisex toilets? This time the Scottish Parliament has provided a handy opportunity for Sunak’s government to win some culture wars points. Oliver Dowden has a role here – he’s been asked by the Prime Minister to appoint an ‘Anti-Woke Czar’ to clamp down on political correctness in universities. Expect much more of this in coming weeks. It’s all they’ve got.

The strikes taskforce is apparently on strike. In December Dowden was appointed head of the government’s Winter of Discontent taskforce. There were a couple of TV appearances but since then it looks like he hasn’t actually done anything. We’ve continued to research this and we still can’t find any meetings, new policies, announcements or action of any kind, in fact (if you’ve spotted any activity from the taskforce do let us know in a comment. We’ll update this post). Our MP has also been out defending the government’s proposed new anti-strike legislation while the rest of us wonder how threatening nurses with the sack can possibly help resolve the deepest crisis in our public services in decades.

Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate realityClinging to the loot. Oliver Dowden opposes the return of stolen artworks – Benin bronzes, Acropolis friezes and so on – appearing on the telly, making it all part of his anti-woke campaign, writing stern letters to the museums and so on. Meanwhile, the museums are just getting on with it, finding clever ways around the government’s rules and sending artworks home anyway. There’s even been progress in the gnarliest of disagreements – the one between the Greeks and the British Museum. The new Culture Secretary, Michelle Donelan, has returned to the matter, and is also insisting that artworks must not be returned. This one is going to run and run.

• To clarify, as we reported here, some of Oliver Dowden’s money in this parliament has come from Caxton Associates, the Mayfair hedge fund notorious for making millions from shorting the pound and for bankrolling Liz Truss’s short-lived assault on rationality last year. Some has come from the slightly less notorious South Hertfordshire Business Club – a club with no web site, no staff, no premises, no accounts and, apparently, no members. According to the Electoral Commission, though, the club has given £82,741.09 to Hertsmere Tories since 2017. Details in this spreadsheet. And more here about the very careful timing of Dowden’s second jobs.

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Here in the suburbs we like to think we are not mugs. We know a distraction when we see it. We can tell the difference between a press release and a live policy. Still, we think we’ve been had.A couple of weeks ago it was announced that our MP, Oliver Dowden, a Cabinet Office minister with a roving brief, would be put in charge of the Prime Minister’s strikes taskforce and that he’d be chairing meetings of the government’s COBRA emergency committee to work out a plan of action.

It’s not clear if Oliver Dowden has ever seen the inside of the Cabinet Office Briefing RoomSince then, we assume Westminster’s been quiet for Christmas and we understand he has chaired two or three meetings but it’s hard to tell. It’s always difficult to be absolutely certain about COBRA meetings, since they’re supposed to be secret and minutes won’t be released for decades. There was some minimal briefing about the first meeting and subsequently Dowden was said to be ‘resolute‘. Since then we’ve heard nothing. To summarise:

• The only concrete action associated with Oliver Dowden’s role managing the government’s response to the strikes that we can find is the drafting in of the military – although that had actually been planned in detail weeks before Dowden got the job.
• There have been no announcements of any further actions from Dowden’s COBRA meetings (we can’t be sure they’ve even happened).
• The taskforce has no formal status, no terms of reference. It doesn’t have a web page. There isn’t even a press release (nothing to link to at all). No detail of who attends has been published and we don’t know if it will meet again.
• The strikes have continued. More are now planned for the new year. Dowden’s taskforce hasn’t apparently done anything, either to advance negotiations or to mitigate the effects of strikes. It’s what the Americans would call a ‘nothing burger’, a pure publicity confection. In fact, they’re ready to bet that we’ll never hear another word about the strikes taskforce.

Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate realitySo, the fact that Dowden, sole proprietor of the government’s non-existent response to Sunak’s Winter of Discontent, has also been put in charge of the government’s longer-term ‘resilience strategy’, is perhaps not as reassuring as the government would have hoped, although the fact that this task actually does have a web page might suggest that it’s a bit more than a nothing burger, that it might actually produce some action.

On the other hand, putting a Cabinet Office minister who has no formal portfolio but at least a dozen other jobs in charge of preparation for disaster instead of, say, a Minister of State, suggests a certain lack of seriousness. Are you reassured to learn that the part-time Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is responsible for coordinating Britain’s response to, you know, super-volcanoes, drought, bird flu, state cyber-attacks, terrorism?

That this government has routinely cut investment in preparation for unfortunate events – including flooding – and actually scrapped a Cabinet committee that was planning for a pandemic six months before the big one might also suggest that they’re not really concentrating.

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It looks like a compromise with the unions is possible but it’s not clear the government wants to take it. Meanwhile The Minister for the Winter of Discontent is on manoeuvres – and the soldiers are preparing for action this ChristmasThey’re readyIt’s difficult to put your finger on Oliver Dowden’s charm. He doesn’t have the military bearing of a Penny Mordaunt or the “do I look bothered?” insouciance of a David Cameron or the weird magnetism of a Michael Gove. If you were going to pick a Minister to put up against a million furious public service workers who haven’t had a pay rise in twelve years we suspect Dowden wouldn’t be your first choice.

On Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday morning programme the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster didn’t offer any immediate explanation for how he got the job but we do know he’s a close friend of Rishi Sunak and has a reputation as a diligent ‘fixer’ – “I have to say we will be resolute in response to this…”

Of course, Dowden won’t be fixing policy himself or negotiating with the workers’ union reps directly. His job is to provide some kind of contingency response to the strikes – we understand he chaired another COBRA meeting this morning, his third. So far 1,200 troops have been assigned to cover for ambulance drivers and border guards over Christmas, although it looks like this was arranged without Dowden’s help. The Minister’s response to the emergency mostly involves showing up in TV studios on time.

Captain Dowden is ready for actionDowden’s main point in the Kuenssberg interview (and in others over the weekend) – that the government cannot move on wages because it must honour the independent pay review bodies’ various pay proposals – fell apart immediately. We know that the government regularly ignores statutory pay reviews. We can’t think of a good reason to make an exception of the nurses or the school teachers.

And, it turns out, the independent pay review bodies are not all that independent. They are issued with detailed instructions by ministers for each annual pay round. The Health Secretary’s latest instructions to the NHS body are pretty clear: “it is particularly important that you also have regard to the government’s inflation target when forming recommendations.”

More to the point, the government can and does impose hard limits on the pay increases that may be proposed. The current Conservative government did exactly this, in fact, in 2011 and 2012, as part of the austerity regime. This explains why real pay in the public services hasn’t risen since before the financial crisis.

Meanwhile, Conservative backbenchers have noticed that the government seems to be painting itself into a corner on public service pay. Unions have been telegraphing for weeks that their members would probably accept offers somewhere between the current low-ball proposals and their published demands (in Scotland they’re already doing so). Jake Berry, like Oliver Dowden a former Chairman of the Party, says the government will have to “improve its offer“. It looks like there’s a political win on the table for the Tories – an affordable offer that acknowledges a decade of real-terms pay cuts and real suffering and lifts the threat of a new Winter of Discontent. Is Rishi a mature enough leader to take the opportunity? Does his fixer have the courage to tell him to?

• The BBC has details of all the proposed December strikes.
• This useful article from the Institute for Government explains the workings of the pay review bodies.

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Since he was Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden has opposed the return of stolen artworks to their owners. But it looks like they might be going home anywayThe Parthenon marbles awaiting return to GreeceIn the last few years Dowden hasn’t missed an opportunity to assert that objects like the Parthenon marbles and the Benin bronzes ‘properly reside’ in the British museums and galleries that currently hold them.

As Minister he refused appeals from institutions and governments who wanted their artefacts back and opposed all efforts by trustees and directors to open negotiations or to transfer artefacts. In a notorious letter sent to heads of national collections in September 2020 he carefully connected removing statues of slavers with returning stolen art – classifying both as ‘contested heritage’ and insisting that Government-funded bodies “should not be taking actions motivated by activism or politics.”

Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate realityMore recently, UK institutions have begun negotiations or have actually returned items. The Horniman museum in South London returned six Benin bronzes last month and Cambridge University has agreed to return 116. Both made use of a provision in a new charities law that allows institutions to ‘deaccession’ items when they perceive there is a ‘moral obligation’ to do so. Mr Dowden doesn’t like this provision and has been asking questions about it in Parliament. Dowden thinks that woke museums may be ‘virtue signalling’ when they agree to return looted items to places “…where they may be less safe.”

Meanwhile, national collections (like the British Museum and the V&A) can’t make use of this provision because they’re bound by another law, the British Museum Act of 1963, which explicitly prohibits return of artefacts. When Culture Secretary, Dowden hoped to suppress this kind of worthy posturing by packing boards of trustees and opposing the appointment of anyone with ‘decolonisation’ on their CVs.

One of his appointments was George Osborne, former Chancellor and the man who brought Britain nine years of austerity – including harsh cuts to museum funding – inserted as Chairman of the British Museum’s board in 2021. Everyone’s assumption was that this appointment would mark a change of direction for the museum – with more pride in the museum’s colonial history and less shame about the awkward provenance of its collection. The Guardian called it ‘a startling jolt‘ and wondered ‘can it it really have come to this?’ As recently as November George Osborne asserted that the great collections ‘would not be permanently broken up‘ but did acknowledge that loans of objects might be possible.

Things are obviously moving quickly now, though. Dowden’s been demoted, resigned and promoted again since then and Osborne is showing signs of having gone native at the BM. We learn, from a Greek report quoted by the Art Newspaper, that he’s actually been in secret discussions with the Greek Culture Ministry, which has long campaigned for the unconditional return of the Parthenon marbles. It looks like a permanent loan might see the marbles taken to the Acropolis Museum, where a specially-built, climate-controlled gallery has been waiting (a loan would allow the museum to get around the tricky provisions of the 1963 law). Experts say that the British Museum’s increasingly ramshackle accommodation risks damaging the marbles and a refurbishment means they’ll have to move soon anyway. Some galleries at the museum are in such poor condition that they’ve had to be closed and one of Osborne’s other priorities is to raise one a billion pounds (yes, a billion) to fix the leaky roof and crumbling walls.

It’s safe to say that Dowden’s bluster in the media and public bullying of the institutions haven’t really paid off. The galleries don’t want to be recruited to the Culture Wars and the momentum for return is building. There’s a British campaign group working to return the Parthenon marbles, more museums are opening negotiations and influential Parliamentarians are applying pressure. Lord Vaizey, also a former Culture Secretary, is pursuing a campaign through the House of Lords. Let’s face it, it’s about time.

• There’s an interesting episode of the Art Newspaper’s podcast about the secret negotiations. The world of galleries and museums is very excited about this story. It represents a breakthrough in a decades-long impasse.
• On Nick Robinson’s Political Thinking podcast Dowden makes a passionate defence of keeping statues of slavers and murderous colonists on display (but stops short of Jimmy Savile).

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It has begun. Yesterday, Captain Dowden marched into the COBRA situation room – for there is a situationAs we reported last week the PM has put Oliver Dowden in charge of his Winter of Discontent Task Force. Dowden assembled his first responders in the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms to begin the fightback against the wretched nurses and posties. The committee will meet once more this week.

Captain Dowden is ready for actionSounds like there wasn’t much to discuss. Dowden doesn’t have many options: how to deploy a maximum of 2,000 troops available to him and whether civil servants and agency workers might be persuaded to break strikes. Well over a million workers will strike or are balloting to strike in December and January – rail workers, ambulance drivers, Eurostar crews, bus drivers, highways workers, baggage handlers, postal workers, nurses, driving examiners and civil servants – so the government’s emergency measures will be mainly symbolic.

The only photo that exists of the secret Cabinet Office Briefing RoomsWe know that 600 military drivers have been asked to “familiarise themselves with vehicles” so they can drive ambulances for the 21 and 28 December strikes. 10,000 drivers will be on strike on those days and they have promised to continue to provide emergency cover so it’s not clear how much the troops will be able to help – probably mostly photo opportunities. Dowden’s press team has been sending out robust quotes, of course. He’s ‘straining every sinew’ apparently (in Scotland there’ll be no strike because nurses have accepted an average 7.5% pay increase).

We’re in the phase of the crisis when Ministers stamp their feet and talk tough. On the BBC’s Today programme this morning, Transport Minister Mark Harper insisted that rail workers must accept what he euphemistically calls ‘reform’ while also insisting that the negotiations are nothing to do with him, guv. Justin Webb tried to get Harper to confirm a Financial Times story that he’s been blocking a deal that was acceptable to the unions. The Minister flannelled manfully but essentially accepted the assertion (and used the word ‘reform’ 15 times as he did so). ‘Reform’ is a persistent theme across all the current disputes, of course – the Uberisation of postal services that Simon Thompson proposes, the privatisation of NHS services that Sunak and other Ministers continue to advocate. Pay and conditions are not the only things on the table this Winter.

Meanwhile, it might – or it might not – reassure you to know that, in his Cabinet Office role, Oliver Dowden is also responsible for the government’s wider resilience planning – you know, plagues, energy crises, Winter weather. He answers questions in Parliament on the subject and says things like: “The national resilience framework will be the first iteration of our new strategic approach. It will strengthen the systems, structures and capabilities that underpin the UK’s resilience to all risks.” The new framework was actually first announced back in August by the previous incumbent Kit Malthouse. It’s difficult to know how much confidence to invest in a new ‘resilience framework’ from the people who brought you over 200,000 Covid deaths, a near-death bond market crisis, Michelle Mone and an epidemic of child poverty. Perhaps we should wait and see.

• A 15-minute profile of Oliver Dowden from BBC Radio 4.

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Our MP has been Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster for six weeks. He’s the most senior minister in the Cabinet Office and he finds himself with a huge range of roles. The most important one sees him taking on hundreds of thousands of striking workersDon’t panicThe government’s website lists Oliver Dowden’s many responsibilities: driving delivery of the Government’s priorities, oversight of all Cabinet Office policy, oversight of civil contingencies and resilience (inc. COBR), national security including cyber security, oversight of Cabinet Office business planning, oversight of major events, propriety and ethics, oversight of cabinet work on science, technology, and innovation, including oversight of the Office of Science and Technology Strategy (OSTS), public appointments, honours and the GREAT campaign.

This long list will suit Oliver Dowden. It’s evident that he likes to be in the thick of it and, during his years in various bagman roles for his party, he’s developed a reputation as a ‘fixer’, an operator. He’s the new Michael Gove.

Now that the balloon’s gone upOliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate realityDowden’s first combat mission sees him taking command of the Prime Minister’s new industrial action task force. There’s nothing on the government’s website about the task force yet so we can’t be 100% sure what it’s called. The Daily Mail is calling it a Winter of Discontent Unit while trade paper Personnel Today has gone with Strike Response Unit. Either way, it’s obviously a high-risk job – and more evidence that Dowden is ready to get his hands dirty. You really don’t want to carry the ‘Minister for the Winter of Discontent’ label around with you for the rest of your career if it goes badly.

With public support for the strikes at its highest level for decades and the public service workers comfortably on the moral high ground, there’s a chance that Dowden will find himself supervising a decent-sized cave-in. Remember, only one government in UK history has been brought down by industrial action and it was a Tory government.

A handful of ideas for how to deal with runaway strikes has emerged so far and there are some old chestnuts. What are Dowden’s options in his battle with the nurses and fire fighters?

The military optionAt any one time no more than a few thousand soldiers are available for strike-breaking and even fewer are qualified to do specialist jobs like driving ambulances or nursing the sick. There’s some hurried training going on but with a hundred thousand nurses alone going on strike it’s hard to know what impact they can have across the whole economy. History shows that military stand-ins rarely offer more than symbolic cover. Incidentally, the government’s crash course apparently takes in non-military volunteers, so if you’d like to add ‘strike-breaking’ to your CV, you might want to drop Oliver Dowden a line.

Soldiers fighting a fire in the 1970sThe military option is risky. Nothing says ‘Winter of Discontent’ better than pictures of soldiers fighting fires and staffing A&E departments on the TV news. And when they’re covering for workers who have high levels of public support there’s a strong chance it’ll make things worse, dialling up the tension and antagonising ordinary people. General Dowden might fancy himself at the head of a column of green goddesses, or saluting the troops as he strides purposefully into a field hospital, but Britons don’t generally like to see the military on the streets unless it’s a parade.

Making it harder to strikeWe routinely talk about the right to strike – and it’s a meaningful phrase but in Britain there’s no such right. No law protects the right to withdraw your labour and, in the absence of a written constitution, there’s no resort to fundamental rights. This is why it’s so easy for governments to withdraw or diminish the ability to strike.

We think of the Thatcher era as the golden age of anti-worker legislation – between 1980 and 1993, Conservative governments passed six acts of Parliament limiting workers’ power to go on strike – but the last 100 years in Britain have seen an almost uninterrupted succession of efforts to contain and frustrate the freedom of workers to take action. From the 1927 Trade Disputes and Trade Union Act, which stopped ‘sympathy strikes’ (and also made it harder for unions to give money to the Labour Party), to Barbara Castle’s 1974 Trade Union and Labour Relations Act, which introduced compulsory strike ballots, to Tony Blair’s 1999 law that was supposed to guarantee union recognition but actually made it harder.

More recently, the present government’s 2016 Act introduced new obstacles to calling strikes and was meant to make moments like this impossible. If these rules had existed during the original Winter of Discontent many of the strikes would have been illegal. An awkward fact for the government is that the unions have risen to the challenge – administering hundreds of votes across multiple employers, complying with all of the new rules to the letter and still winning big majorities for action. In the most recent RMT vote the turnout was 71% and 89% voted to strike. The Royal College of Nursing had to run separate postal votes for over 200 NHS trusts plus other providers and even where votes did not reach the threshold for action huge numbers of nurses voted to strike. This was not supposed to happen and if decent wage offers are not forthcoming there’s every prospect of future strikes in areas that voted not to on this occasion.

The government’s response, of course, is more legislation. A bill to provide for ‘minimum service levels’ will reach Parliament in the new year and it may be expanded to ban ‘blue light strikes’ all together.

Agencies and strike-breakersLegislation that allows employers to bring in agency workers to cover for strikers was hastily introduced earlier this year but the government has now said that commercial health companies will be invited to provide cover too. Both tricky, of course, especially in schools and the NHS, where there’s real support for strikers. Some agency suppliers have said they don’t want to be involved in strike-breaking and private hospitals may not want to see pickets in their leafy grounds. Strike breaking in Britain is part of the folk memory, of course. A ‘volunteer police force’ was got up to suppress strikes in Liverpool in 1911. During the General Strike The Times rallied volunteers to join an oddball group of toffs and actual fascists called The Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies.

Anyway, in case the Minister is planning to make his name by recruiting a volunteer force of his own we’d like to put it on record now that it ought to be called ‘Dowden’s Fusiliers’.

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When you resign as a Minister you have to wait three months before you can start to take money from a hedge fundA revolving door – Bradley HuchtemanOne of the good things about our MP, across the seven years since he was first elected, has been his apparent distance from the unsavoury cronyism and money-grubbing that many in his party enjoy. Perhaps it’s because he didn’t come into politics via the Eton -> Oxford -> City of London pipeline. He started without the thick address book of boardroom connections and pals in Belgravia investment funds that so many old-school Tory MPs rely on.

We won’t claim to have kept a very close eye on Mr Dowden’s entries in the register of members’ interests but we can’t recall any dodgy sources of funding or spectacular bungs or ‘dark money’ – and, of course, he entered Parliament years after the expenses scandal and decades after the torrid era of cash for questions and the golden era of Tory sleaze. Clean hands.

Dowden’s constituents haven’t had to worry about all the mysterious payments, holidays on private islands, research trips to exotic locations or even the usual long list of directorships and advisory roles that other Tory MPs go in for. He’s been a hard-working representative for Hertsmere and he’s not been closely associated with any of the scandals and screw-ups that have ripped through his party and the government in the last few years. Perhaps it was naive to expect a rising home counties MP to stay out of all this indefinitely, though. The pressure on any MP, especially when you’ve just voluntarily given up your Ministerial salary, must be real.

Dowden’s latest entry in the register records what might be an important rite of passage – his first decent-sized payment from a hedge fund. £8,398 from Caxton Associates LP in Berkeley Square for twelve hours of ‘policy advice’ provided between 24 September and 24 October 2022 (that’s an hourly rate of £700).

The dates here are important. When a minister (or a senior civil servant) wants to take up a paying job or a role that might cause a conflict of interest, they first have to consult with the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, ‘an advisory non-departmental public body’, sponsored by the Cabinet Office. Oliver Dowden evidently did this after his resignation as Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party and Minister without Portfolio on 24 June. The committee’s advice (a seven-page letter) makes it clear that there would have to be a clear three months between stepping down as a Minister and taking up the Caxton role. You won’t need us to calculate for you that 24 September is exactly three months after Dowden’s resignation.

Of course, this is also why Dowden’s contract with Caxton ended on 24 October, the day before he took up his present role as a Cabinet Office Minister in Rishi Sunak’s cabinet.

So why would a hedge fund want a back-bench MP on the payroll, even if only for a month? ‘Duh’, you might say. But, in this case, the answer’s in the kind of hedge fund we’re talking about. Caxton Associates is a ‘global macro hedge fund’, a fund whose job is closely connected to politics. Investopedia, always useful for this kind of inquiry, says:

Global macro hedge funds are actively managed funds that attempt to profit from broad market swings caused by political or economic events. Global macro hedge funds are market bets around economic events. Investors use financial instruments to create short or long positions based on the outcomes they predict as a result of their research. A market bet on an event can cover a wide variety of assets and instruments including options, futures, currencies, index funds, bonds, and commodities. The goal is to find the right mix of assets to maximize returns if the predicted outcome occurs.

Investopedia

All hedge funds protect investors from risk by making bets that will pay off if things go wrong. Macro hedge funds like Caxton protect their clients from the policies and actions of governments – particularly when they affect interest rates, currency movements, equity and bond markets – by making clever bets against them. Some hedge funds are said to have made enormous sums from betting against (‘shorting’) the pound and the UK economy after Kwasi Kwarteng threw everything in the air.

Caxton Associates’ boss, Andrew Law, is a major Tory donor who supported Liz Truss’s campaign for the leadership and happens also to have hosted the famous 23 September cocktail party – on the evening of the mini budget – that Kwarteng attended. It’s assumed that Dowden wasn’t invited to that party, of course, although his engagement with Law’s hedge fund began on the next day.

How all this works is a mystery to us. How Dowden, a card-carrying member of the anti-growth coalition, a Sunak supporter who vocally opposed Liz Truss, winds up advising a hedge fund that supported her campaign, literally the day after the catastrophic mini budget, is likely to remain mysterious. The ACOBA letter says it was ‘updated on 22 November’ but it’s not clear when Dowden informed the committee that he intended to take up the Caxton job. Perhaps he applied for the job after his resignation from Johnson’s cabinet but before he made his opposition to team Truss’s voodoo economics public. Perhaps hedge funds don’t care much about the political complexion of the politicians they pay.

We’re tempted to speculate that a short period out of office like this – Dowden’s first since he was appointed Paymaster General in July 2019 – offers an opportunity for a generous supporter like Andrew Law to funnel some funds into an MP’s bank account in a way they haven’t been allowed to during his period in Ministerial office. It’s certainly hard to imagine Dowden sitting down to provide twelve hours of policy advice during that torrid month.

Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate realityAnd this is before we even get to Pierce Protocols Limited, an interesting ‘art services’ firm founded in 2005 that provides publishing and technology services for artists and is also involved in the febrile world of NFTs (cryptographically unique artworks), employing 66 people and turning over £19.8M in 2021. Under the brand name Heni the firm publishes monographs and editions of prints by famous artists like Gerhard Richter, Gilbert & George and Sabine Moritz. Most of the company’s income comes from the editions. In 2021 there was a modest profit. The company has also provided the crypto technology behind Damien Hirst’s latest stunt The Currency.

According to the register, beginning on the same day as his payments from the hedge fund (remember the three-month rule?), Pierce Protocols began to pay Oliver Dowden £5,000 per month, for eight to ten hours of work (still a pretty decent hourly rate of between £500 and £625), ‘until further notice’, although the payments also stopped when our MP was appointed to the Sunak cabinet (there’s an ACOBA letter about this job too). We’re inclined to use the word ‘mysterious’ again here because, well, to be honest, the Damien Hirst-Oliver Dowden connection is not one we expected to be writing about right now. We certainly would not have guessed, back when Dowden was walking the leafy streets of his constituency, eulogising privet hedges, that a role in the trendy art world was in his future. But perhaps getting a former Culture Secretary on the books might be considered a win for any business at the cutting edge of the art business and shouldn’t be considered mysterious at all.

• The Guardian has run with the story of Oliver Dowden’s relationship with Caxton – another rite of passage for squeaky clean Dowden
• The register of members’ interests is an interesting beast – evolving since it was first set up in 1974, especially after the cash for questions scandal and the Nolan Report that followed it. This article from the Institute for Government explains its function.
• The register itself is on the Parliament web site and is updated twice per month. It’s interesting that in an era of openness and transparency, the register has been kept as a complicated tree of chronologically-organised documents that’s not easy to interrogate.
• ACOBA, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, is the body that advises Ministers on appointments like Dowden’s jobs with Caxton and Pierce. In principle the committee is meant to police the ‘revolving door’ between government and business. Some think that in practice they mainly politely hold the door.

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Media training for Ministers of the Crown must now include excusing the indiscretions of people you probably think are beneath contempt In the past, when ministers broke the rules, made egregious errors or just royally embarrassed themselves, the routine was fairly simple. You resigned sharpish and – depending on the severity of your offence –… Continue reading Defending the indefensible

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Our MP has been grilling ministers about a new charities law – but it’s really all about the Culture Wars The new Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is now busy answering questions on behalf of his government but in his final days as a backbencher he was busy asking written questions in the House… Continue reading Dowden’s new vocation

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Oliver Dowden’s progress around the fringes of the Cabinet continues. This time he’s Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster The new Prime Minister’s cabinet is coming together. Oliver Dowden has moved sideways. Bringing his sequence up to date: Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office (9 January 2018 – 24 July 2019), Paymaster General and Minister… Continue reading And he’s back in the room…

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The Bungafication of the Conservative Party Is it possible that the Conservative Party is going to recycle its last Prime Minister, the one who was kicked out amidst multiple scandals after sixty of his ministers resigned in despair? Yes it is. SATURDAY MORNING UPDATE. Sunak has achieved the 100 nominations he needs to go through… Continue reading Are the Tories about to go full Berlusconi?

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The entertaining, not to say South-American, scenes in the Commons last night did not cover the Mother of Parliaments in glory. Politics nerds will enjoy the irony, though, that the chaos was actually caused by Ed Miliband, whose canny last-minute anti-fracking bill put the government on the spot. If Miliband’s motion had succeeded, Parliament would… Continue reading Regime chaos

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We might have been wrong about our MP. He might be a Culture Warrior after all. (It seems odd to be writing about ancient art while the nation descends into chaos but the business of Parliament goes on and the former Culture Minister has been on his feet in the Commons). When you’re a Minister… Continue reading ”I love the Benin bronzes”

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Our constituency has only ever had three MPs: a Thatcher ally removed after he turned out to be quite possibly the greatest heel in Tory history (in a competitive field), a diligent but unremarkable backbencher, ejected to make room for a SPAD on the fast track, and the SPAD himself The chart shows 36 years… Continue reading How does Hertsmere vote?

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Liz Truss’s first Prime Ministers’ Questions passed without Oliver Dowden’s presence but our MP’s definitely been pitch-rolling* for the big green belt fight The Tory Party’s own Anti-Growth Coalition smells blood. Parliament is back after a long conference season break, extended by the Queen’s funeral. Labour is now an average of 30 points ahead of… Continue reading Battle commences

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He swerved his party’s conference and he’s getting ready for a battle with Truss over planning and the green belt We’re not insiders here at Radlett Wire, just observers. We can’t tell you what’s going on in our MP’s head, we can just tell you what he’s up to, what he’s saying in public, how… Continue reading Oliver Dowden is the Anti-Growth Coalition

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Honestly, you have to feel for our MP. Almost the definition of ‘left behind’. The man whose early resignation threw the switch for the final Johnson meltdown and one of the first to come out for Rishi in the leadership contest, he’s been silent on all platforms since before the ‘mini-budget’. The mini-budget that seems… Continue reading Spare a thought for the left-behind

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It’s over. Oliver Dowden has gone home and put the kettle on. So, a little time has passed, a dynastic shift has occurred. Liz Truss, apparently unpopular with her MPs and unexpectedly not quite as popular with the party membership as she was hoping, is our new Prime Minister. The composition of Truss’s cabinet is… Continue reading Twiddling his thumbs in a new era

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In a fancy garden near here, the strange drama of the Conservative leadership contest approaches its climax Last week, Rishi Sunak, currently trailing Liz Truss by 26 points in the contest that will produce a new leader of the Conservative Party (and, because of a mediaeval malfunction in the Parliamentary machinery, a Prime Minister too)… Continue reading Oliver and Rishi, down by the pool

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In the Tory leadership race, Team Rishi has deployed the ultimate THW (Tory Heartland Weapon) – the green belt – and Oliver Dowden is ready The green belt Is a 1930s invention – the product of Fabian paternalism and modern local government activism. It was a radical idea that limited speculative building, protected green space… Continue reading Green belt red alert

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You have to wonder what a former party Co-Chairman gets up to during a turbulent time like this He’s ready for Rishi. You already knew this. Oliver Dowden’s social media is saturated with Sunak endorsements. If there’s no Ministerial role for our MP in September it’ll be because the other weirdo won. Sunak may be… Continue reading Keeping busy

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Our MP was way out in front with his resignation from the Johnson government and may have been plotting against the PM for months It seems like a long time ago but it’s actually only a month since Oliver Dowden, MP for Hertsmere, resigned as Conservative Party Co-Chairman. And you’d be forgiven for forgetting that… Continue reading Whither Dowden?

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Careful, your MP wants your email address Oliver Dowden, Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party and unlikely attack dog in the Culture Wars, has a new, slightly demeaning job. He’s been tasked with finding and exploiting connections between the Labour leadership and the rising tide of trade union action in the UK. The plan is, of… Continue reading Minister for junk mail

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Oliver Dowden, our MP, is Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party. It’s an unelected role that’s in the gift of the leader of the party (Boris Johnson), so it’s often used as a place to ‘park’ useful Ministers while they’re out of formal office (this also explains why there’s quite often more than one Chairman –… Continue reading The thankless work of a Party Chairman

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One of the things we’ve done on this blog – with, let’s face it, limited consistency – is keep an eye on the public statements and Ministerial actions of our MP Oliver Dowden who, these days, is Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party and Minister without Portfolio (we started, in fact, under his predecessor, James Clappison,… Continue reading Culture wars update

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The news that Oliver Dowden wants to make it a bit harder for people to change street names got us thinking about how streets get their names and why they’re changed. Street names are interesting aren’t they? A mix of impenetrable, often very ancient, labels for paths and byways that even precede the Roman names… Continue reading The culture war will be fought in the streets

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An important change to the law during lockdown made it possible for women to get abortion pills (early medical abortion) prescribed over the phone (the legislation calls this ‘telemedicine’) and then to have the pills, which are taken in two doses, 48 hours apart, sent to a home address (this is for abortions earlier than… Continue reading Here’s how Oliver Dowden voted in the free vote on access to home abortions

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UPDATE 13 April 2022. As expected, the Prime Minister’s fixed penalty notice has arrived (two in the letterbox in fact). Our MP was not the only loyalist to be dropped in it by the news, of course, although Oliver Dowden’s “…he is not going to be subject to a fixed-penalty notice because he is confident… Continue reading Oliver Dowden on partygate

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Our MP, Oliver Dowden, former Minister who is now co-chairman of the Conservative Party and Minister without Portfolio, has been walking the leafy streets of his constituency and has hit on a striking metaphor for the values he and his party stand for: For me, the privet hedges of suburbia are the privet hedges of… Continue reading Oliver Dowden – horticulture warrior

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No, not an oyster bar. But Oyster contactless is – possibly – coming to Radlett station this Summer In November last year Oliver Dowden, our MP, announced the extension of the Oyster scheme to Radlett (in fact the extension is taking Oyster all the way out to Luton Airport Parkway but he’s taking credit anyway).… Continue reading Oyster update

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A dramatic result in Radlett’s EU constituency – East of England. A wipe-out for Labour and a big loss for the Tories. An amazing result for the Brexit Party, the Greens and the Lib Dems (oh, and UKIP essentially disappeared). The Conservatives lost two of their three MEPs in our EU Parliamentary constituency, leaving them… Continue reading The EU Parliamentary election results are in

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Radlett is in the East of England constituency for the EU Parliamentary elections. We’ll send seven MEPs back to Brussels (and, for half the time, Strasbourg, of course). In 2014 the East of England elected these MEPs from three parties (full election results are on the BBC web site). Our representation in the EU is… Continue reading An EU polling day round-up

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If the Brexit referendum were held today Radlett would vote Remain by a substantial margin Just before the 2016 EU referendum we ran an opinion poll here at Radlett Wire. Although the wider constituency, Hertsmere, voted Leave – by a slightly closer margin than the national one – according to our poll Radlett voted narrowly… Continue reading How would Radlett vote now?

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In the 2016 EU referendum Hertsmere, which is Radlett’s electoral district, voted Leave by a small margin. In an opinion poll we took just before the referendum, you voted Remain, by an equally small margin.

In our opinion poll we asked exactly the question that we knew we’d all be answering in the referendum itself (and we added a ‘don’t know’ option because you don’t get one of those in the polling booth).

Although, like all web site polls, it wasn’t at all scientific, we did get a reasonably good sample: 361 people (or about 5% of the Radlett electorate) participated. The end result was a small majority for Remain. Dividing ‘don’t knows’ equally across the two referendum responses gives us a result of 50.7% Remain to 49.3% Leave. Given the profile of the area, that doesn’t seem implausible.

Results of our pre-referendum opinion poll. The wider polling district, Hertsmere, voted Leave by 50.8% to 49.2%. We also subsequently learnt that neighbouring Shenley had actually voted Remain – by a margin of 51.78% to 48.22% so that might also serve to confirm the validity of our poll.

So, two months before Britain legally leaves the European Union (whatever the deal), how would you vote now? Click the survey button and answer our two referendum questions (it’s entirely anonymous). We’ll share the results here and on our social media accounts.

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On 30 November last year, Oliver Dowden, our MP, announced on his web site that he’d secured a promise from the Department of Transport that the Oyster scheme would be extended to Radlett and Potters Bar (both in his constituency, of course – but the extension will also take in St Albans and go out all the way to Luton Airport). This is, of course, unreservedly good news. It’ll make it easier and cheaper to get into town and it’ll give commuters an alternative to costly season tickets.

But – forgive us – we’re sceptical. We’ve heard this before (in 2016, for instance). In fact we’ve heard it several times before. And on each occasion, of course, it’s not actually happened. Our MP is presenting this as a ‘victory’ and the Minister has apparently promised that it will happen this year (2019) but, having followed this story for years, now, we’re going to believe it when we see it. And, in the meantime, we’re going to run a countdown on our Twitter account. Or rather a count-up. It’s been 41 days since we heard that Oyster is coming to Radlett. We’ll keep counting until it actually arrives. Let’s see how long it takes.

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RBS has confirmed that they’re closing 259 branches, 62 at the Bank of Scotland and 197 at Natwest. Radlett is on the list. The bank is doing a pretty thorough job of informing customers and local people about their plans. There’s a leaflet for each closing branch, with an explanation of why the branch has been chosen for closure and details of alternatives (although, amusingly, the Radlett leaflet suggests the soon-to-be-demolished petrol station as an alternative cash point location!).

Are you a Natwest customer? Will you miss the Radlett branch? Or have you already gone fully digital?

[polldaddy poll=9893162]

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Amazon is the beast that ate shopping. In the US, Amazon is responsible for 43% of all online sales and is worth more than all the big bricks-and-mortar retailers put together. About a quarter of the US population pays for Prime membership (more figures). There’s an extraordinary battle going on in the US right now – 238 towns and cities are bidding billions for the right to host Amazon’s ‘second HQ’ (In Seattle, home of the first one, 7.5% of the working-age population works for the firm).

Amazon came to the UK in 1999 – its first major market outside the US – so we’ve had plenty of time to get used to buying all our stuff from the Seattle monster. And, although they don’t publish the numbers, we’re probably just as addicted as the Americans.

Radlett’s in an Amazon sweet spot. We’re close enough to the big warehouses to have access to all of the company’s services – from the basic delivery service to groceries (including Whole Foods, the upmarket food retailer bought by Amazon earlier this year) and the Amazon Prime Now app, so you can order practically anything for delivery within an hour. Step outside your front door during daylight and there’s a reasonable chance you’ll see an Amazon delivery happening. Radlett is the kind of prosperous suburban community that forms the backbone of Amazon’s profitability everywhere. We’re a kind of case study for Amazon’s take-over of UK retail.

So, we wanted to know how Radlett relates to Amazon. The anonymous survey is still live so please take two minutes to complete it if you haven’t already. There are ten questions and a box for you to type what you think of the company. If you complete the survey you get to see the complete results at the end. Fascinating reading.

Here are five insights from the survey results:

We shop with Amazon all the time

Over 85% of respondents shop at least once per month with Amazon. For almost a third of us it’s ‘several times per week’! This is the kind of loyalty that any retailer would kill for.

We spend a lot

64.2% of us spend at least £50 per month with Amazon and nearly a fifth (17%) of respondents say they spend over £200 per month. That’s a lot of money: the average household grocery spend in the UK is £53 per week.

We love Amazon Prime

Nearly three-quarters (71.2%) of respondents pay for Amazon Prime – the service that provides free delivery and access to lots of other services, from free Kindle downloads to music streaming. This is really telling. Radlett has a major Amazon addiction.

We dig one-hour delivery

Prime Now represents the next stage of Amazon dependence. A mobile app that gives you free one-hour delivery on groceries – from Amazon, Morrisons and Whole Foods (plus loads of other products held in the Hemel Hempstead warehouse). 30.2% of respondents use it or have tried it. We’ve certainly used the app in our house and the delivery drivers I’ve spoken to confirm that we’re not untypical in using the app to get emergency booze supplies midway through dinner!

We’re Amazon nuts

Not to put too fine a point on it, respondents to our survey are hopelessly in love with Amazon. 84.9% are either positive or very positive about the company. 28.3% ticked the box labelled ‘Very positive – I’ve become completely dependent’. And only 3.8% of us have any negative feelings at all, ticking the box labelled ‘Quite negative – I’m not comfortable with their market power but will use them occasionally’.

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If you live in Radlett you live in an Amazon sweet spot. You can get free, one-hour delivery of practically everything in the warehouse and you can use all of the company’s services, including grocery delivery and the Prime Now mobile app. But not everyone likes the Seattle behemoth. Do you? Take our Amazon survey and we’ll share the results with you, here and on Twitter and Facebook.

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About a week ago, just before the 2017 General Election, we asked you which local issues would motivate you to vote. We did this for the last election too, back in 2015.

So, in order of importance to you, here are the issues that got the Radlett electorate voting, with the 2015 position in italics and the number of votes for each issue (in brackets).

1. The NHS (140) – up from 3rd position

2. Local amenities (134) – up from 8

3. The freight terminal and the green belt (133) – down from number 1

4. Caring for the elderly (130) – up from 11

5. Crime and policing (130) – down from 4

6. Transport and commuting (129) – non-mover

7. Young people (129) – up from 9

8. Development in Radlett (121) – down from 2

9. The Newberries car park development (121) – new entry

10. Housing (120) – up from 12

11. Local business (117) – down from 7

12. Environment (114) – non-mover

13. Or is it really all about Brexit? (112) – new entry

14. Schools (105) – down from 8

The NHS has displaced the freight terminal as your number one concern since 2015, the Newberries car park redevelopment is a new entry at number nine and, although we were really expecting you to tell us that Brexit trumps everything else, it was the second-least important issue in the survey. Does this reflect a national loss of interest in the mechanics of Brexit, now that it’s a done deal? And will the biggest electoral surprise in decades throw the whole Brexit calculation in the air again anyway?

It’s also fascinating that schools have dropped from number eight to last place. The huge cuts coming down the pipe for all state schools are clearly not freaking out the population of Radlett.

Our 2017 election survey results are here. And you can read the 2015 results here.

And on the national scale, Tory donor (and noted tax avoider) Lord Ashcroft runs a large and detailed survey of UK voters after every major vote. His most recent data is absolutely fascinating. He shows, for instance, that the only age group that voted majority Conservative in last week’s election was the over-55s.