Who is Matthew Patrick? Wirral West’s new MP

Matthew Patrick has been elected as the new Labour MP for Wirral West cementing his party’s hold on the seat.

The constituency had been up for grabs at the 2024 general election after Margaret Greenwood, the previous Labour MP, announced that she would be stepping down when an election was called. She had held the seat since she flipped it from the Conservatives in 2015.

The seat was long considered marginal but in recent years it had swung more towards Labour. However recent boundary changes adding more Conservative areas to the seat suggested that party might have actually won the seat in 2015 and 2019 if those boundaries had been in place for those elections.

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However the Conservatives saw their share of the vote fall by 18.1% with only 26.3% of the vote in 2024. This left Labour with a comfortable lead and winning 46.4% of the vote.

Mr Patrick, who grew up in Birkenhead, was first elected as a councillor in Upton in 2013 in what was described as “a wake-up call for the Tories.” Though succeeding a Labour councillor, there was a 4.5% swing to Labour in the ward that makes up Upton and the Woodchurch Estate.

He drew on this experience throughout the campaign, referring back to a campaign to see a new playground built on the Woodchurch. Mr Patrick went on to be councillor for another five years raising awareness about stem cell donations and served as cabinet member on the environment where he oversaw a u-turn on a controversial proposal to ban dogs from beaches.

However he stepped down from the role in September 2018 after accepting a job in London saying it had been an enormous privilege. During the pandemic, he made headlines after posting a video of him eating a raw onion to highlight how he had lost his sense of taste and smell after catching Covid.

He came back to Wirral politics in 2023 putting himself forward for the Wirral West Labour nomination. He ended up being decisively elected by the local party though the selection was not without controversy with several members resigning from posts over the choice of candidates.

Mr Patrick is considered to be more in the centre of Labour and received the endorsement of former council leader Phil Davies early on in the campaign. He was also a close ally of the late Lord Frank Field, who served as a popular MP in Birkenhead for 40 years.

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