How the voting bloodbath wiped out the safest of Tory seats

Joshua Reynolds, aged 25, just four years out of a business degree at Cardiff Met University, is a dainty young man with a cheerful face and quiffed sandy hair, not unlike that of Britain’s new Prime Minister. He is trying hard not to look daunted as he sits on a bench near Maidenhead Library. A new Lib Dem MP of less than 24 hours, he has seized a Tory constituency once considered among the top five safest in Britain, previously held by Theresa May, a former British prime minister no less.

“I’ve got a job to do. It’s about being a local champion. I’m a local boy.” Reynolds pauses. “I don’t think I’m going to be the baby of the House.” (He’s not. The youngest MP will be Labour’s Sam Carling, North West Cambridgeshire, who is just 22).

Nonetheless, Reynolds could be forgiven some nerves. Is he shaking in his navy suede brogues? His prime ministerial predecessor was known for her stylish footwear, after all. Did he really think he’d get in? Here in Tory heartland, the safest of safe?

“They are big shoes to fill,” he says of May’s famous kitten heels: “She was a very visible MP and very popular. But when she announced she wasn’t standing for 2024 re-election, I did think, ‘This is my best chance now’. I’ve been working very hard.”

Reynolds is wearing black jeans and a pink shirt. Our eyes fall to his socks, fuchsia pink and covered in doughnuts: “Life can be mundane,” he says, eyeing his feet, encased in suede lace ups. Really? After what happened on Thursday night?

There has been nothing mundane in Maidenhead, or anywhere else in Britain, this week. Indeed Maidenhead – held by the Conservatives since it was created in 1997 – symbolises the Conservatives’ electoral demise perfectly: it was one of some four of the safest true blue seats that were also home to previous Tory prime ministers – all of which fell on the night of July 4.

Fall of the PMs

In this Tory safe seat bloodbath, it turned out every potential assailant was guilty of sticking in the knife: Labour; Reform; the Lib Dems; Greens. It was a hit job in which everyone was to blame, the victim attacked from all sides. They were deserted by voters concerned about immigration and the environment, public transport and petrol prices, high taxes and poor public services, about too few houses being built and new developments blocking the view. It was as though, having appealed to all, the Conservatives now satisfied none.

Labour’s blows, obviously, were the most grievous. Before 2024, an 18.8 per cent swing to Labour (recorded in Brent North in Blair’s 1997 triumph) was thought to be the largest such shift in the UK’s postwar voting history. Yet this week, 46 constituencies smashed that record. One brutal Conservative-to-Labour swing on Friday was recorded in Liz Truss’s South West Norfolk constituency, with a 25.9 per cent swing away (Truss polled 11,217 and Labour 11,847). This makes her, our second Tory ex-PM victim, the Tory’s biggest ever loser.

She easily beat Michael Portillo’s election defeat in 1997, when he was unseated on a swing of 17.4 per cent. Political language has changed too: it’s no longer a “Portillo moment” but a “Truss moment”.

Ruthless Lib Dems

The Liberal Democrats were particularly ruthless killers in the bloodbath, notably in the South and South West, taking 60 seats from the Conservatives, including those held by former ministers: education secretary Gillian Keegan, justice secretary Alex Chalk, culture secretary Lucy Frazer and science secretary Michelle Donelan. Safe seats such as North Shropshire, Honiton and Sidmouth and Gillian Keegan’s Chichester – all of which were Tory in 2019 – fell to the Lib Dems with gains in excess of 25 percentage points. In Chichester, the Lib Dems secured a massive notional swing, securing 49 per cent of the vote.

They also delivered the startling snaffling of David Cameron’s former Witney constituency (held by him until 2016) in Oxfordshire. It was a 25.5 per cent swing away from the Conservatives. (The fourth prime ministerial constituency to fall was Boris Johnson’s former Uxbridge and South Ruslip, which fell to Labour, albeit by 587 votes).

Greens

The Green Party took three extra seats, wielding its knife particularly effectively in North Herefordshire – a constituency which in its various forms has belonged to the Tories since 1906. On July 4 it overturned the Conservative majority of almost 25,000, held by Sir Bill Wiggin, the MP for 23 years.

Back in 2019, Green candidate Ellie Chowns had finished fourth. Then, Sir Bill had won 62 per cent of the vote. Ellie Chowns is now the first Green MP in the Midlands and has a majority of almost 6,000. The Green success against the Tories continued in Waveney Valley, where the party’s co-leader Adrian Ramsay overturned a 22,000 Conservative majority: securing 41 per cent of the vote with a huge swing.

Reform

And then came the Reform UK onslaught. Nigel Farage won Clacton from the Conservative candidate, Giles Watling (elected in 2017) with 21,225 votes – an easy majority of 8,405 over Watling’s 12,820. Richard Tice, chairman of Reform UK, won 15,520 votes in Boston and Skegness, beating Conservative Matt Warman into second place, with 13,510 votes. Boston has previously seen a Tory majority of a staggering 60.9 per cent.

The result of this collective charge at Tory MPs was an extraordinary casualty count, notably among “big beast” cabinet ministers with previously impregnable majorities. Jacob Rees-Mogg had a 14,729 buffer before losing his seat to Labour. Penny Mordaunt, Leader of the House of Commons, and practically a national treasure after she valiantly carried the Sword of State for more than an hour during the King’s Coronation, was also polished off – a possible future Tory leader to go into that good night along with all the former Tory leaders.

How it happens

Maidenhead is a prime example of how such seismic electoral events occur. Made to appear sudden, election-night processes, such losses are in fact the product of years of eroding voter confidence.

In 2015 at the election in Maidenhead, for example, Theresa May took 65 per cent of the vote, with a 29,059 majority, the largest in the land. Reynolds was just 16 at the time, sitting his GCSEs at one of the area’s five good state schools.

The constituency was – then – wealthy, where the number of people claiming unemployment benefit was less than half the national average, and life for most was comfortable. Residents earned more money than average, had expensive houses and, it was thought, Maidenhead was being looked after with investment.

How times have changed. Now Maidenhead is like a building site: pavements ploughed, areas fenced off. There is a tragic-looking small shopping arcade whose refurb never materialises: “terrible” tuts one woman, “totally empty”. The premises that aren’t vacant include phone repair shops and a Poundland store. Maidenhead gives the appearance at least of being in a bad way. People don’t like the asylum seekers in the Holiday Inn. There’s a vocal protest over another plan to concrete over green spaces. The Elizabeth Line is nowhere near as smooth as it should be: “Take a look on Facebook,” a local publican tells me, “It’s always really lively about that.”

“Developers building flats nobody wants to live in. Now they want to concrete over our golf course,” one woman who has lived there since 1975 says sadly. “We’ve lost all our old lovely buildings. They’ve left Marlow and Henley alone, but look what has happened to us!”

Maidenhead, it seems, is like the Tory party: it’s in the grip of an identity crisis.

At the 2017 poll, Joshua Reynolds was working in M&S while doing his A Levels. Bookies set odds that May would win 1/200 in that election. Two years later, as it turned out, she was up against Reynolds, already a councillor aged 20, and vocal on local issues: “My lecturers would have given me four months off if I’d won.” He dented May’s lead, reducing hers to just under 19,000, but it was still a comfortable Tory win. Constituents loved her, but her Tory replacement when she stepped down? Not so much: “People don’t vote tribally anymore,” says the landlord of the Off The Tap pub, perhaps nailing, in that one observation, the crux of the Tory demise.

This time around, after Reynolds’s campaign to get the hospital walk-in centre re-opened after it shut during Covid, Maidenhead swung away from Conservative to the Lib Dems by 19.8 per cent of the vote. Reynolds polled 21,895 while May’s Tory replacement – Tania Mathias – polled just 18,932. “Theresa was a wonderful MP” a former assistant head mistress tells me when I meet her on the high street, en route to finding Reynolds. She has known May for 25 of her 27 years in office: “Sometimes Theresa would present school prizes straight from flying in from abroad as the prime minister. I saw her out and about trying to help her replacement – but there was no match for Theresa.”

“I’d have voted Conservative if it had still been Theresa,” says the GWR man at Maidenhead railway station (he voted Labour). It seems the Tory vote in Maidenhead was lost to Reynold’s campaigning on local issues: too much development; the loss of the golf club. And because Reynolds was a local boy. “I voted for Josh,” says the Off the Tap landlord: “I don’t feel there is much chance for change [with any of the parties] but I know him. I distrust politicians. I hope he won’t use it as a ladder to London [power] and that one day I’ll wake up and see what he has done for us and think “Good for you.”

Maidenhead followed a loose pattern of losses for the Conservatives in Berkshire. Of the nine constituencies in the county, two were held by Labour, three went from Conservative to the Liberal Democrats, one went from Conservative to Labour, and two new seats also went to Labour. None here went to Reform.

Then I meet two men on the bridge, Simon and Paul, both working in a local IT firm. We watch a large machine on the water clean out weeds. Both voted Reform, with the familiar reasons: the Conservatives are not conservative enough. Richard Dudman on the local vegetable stall and a Maidenhead resident for 32 years couldn’t be bothered to vote, speaking to what has been identified as poor turnout and voter apathy: “They’re all terrible! Whoever is in charge, they never do what they say.”

Joshua Reynolds promises to be different. As he ponders life as an MP, he talks me through his statement socks: “I like to bring a little fun to life”, he confirms with a wide smile.

Will you be wearing them in Parliament?

“Oh yes, 100 per cent.”

And do you have enough pairs?

“I’ve got socks with beef burgers on them, hotdogs, doughnuts, in yellow, blue, green, orange...all different colours.”

As I leave the confused market town of Maidenhead, bound for the Elizabeth Line that promises so much in connections to London, but causes so much local complaint, I see a hoarding on the side of an unfinished building, one of so many “in development”:

“A new era for Maidenhead is Around the Corner.”

Time will tell if it will be as cheerful as its new MP’s socks.