A dramatic upset in the making?
Welwyn Hatfield is the seat of one of the Tory party's biggest names, but it looks like he might be shown the door at the next election
BY MICHAEL HAVIS
I don’t know what I was expecting from this one, really.
Last week I was in Broxbourne, an ultra-safe Tory seat, and I felt like I might detect some softening in their resistance to a Labour government. I was wrong. However angry they were with the Tories, they still dreaded Labour taking over. I hadn’t expected enthusiasm for Starmer, so much as grim resignation, but I didn’t even get that.
Welwyn Hatfield is a different animal though; it’s been won by Labour before, and there are murmurs that it could be again.
As the name suggests, it’s mainly comprised of two main towns, Welwyn Garden City and Hatfield. The former is the posher of the two and its centre feels very middle class. It has its rougher spots, as most towns do, but it is for the most part a pleasant, leafy place.
Hatfield is a bit of a mix. It’s got a university and all the students that go with it. It has some posher bits and some rougher bits. It certainly feels a lot more diverse than its neighbour, with a lot more non-white faces. And like its neighbour, it has plenty of commuters thanks to a good rail link to London.
Add in a bunch of bluer-than-blue villages, and you’ve got a rough sketch of the constituency. It’s an affluent constituency that leans Conservative, but when the Tories are in the doldrums, it’s also a place they can lose.
That’s exactly what will happen, if the people I spoke to here are anything to go by. And it will be Conservative Defence Secretary Grant Shapps who takes the fall.
Everybody I spoke to recognised what bad shape the Conservatives are in. But visiting a safe seat last week, I found some Tory voters were more sympathetic about why.
This week, even the most robustly Conservative voter (who once stood for the party at an election) offered no defence of the government’s record, and readily listed its failings. He was complimentary about Mr Shapps as a local MP, and intended to vote Conservative again, but in this he was alone.
Two other gentlemen I spoke to, both of whom voted Tory in 2019, illustrated how the government has lost ground. One said he would not vote Conservative again, though he declined to say who would get his vote next time. The other, who said he had voted for the party at every election since Margaret Thatcher’s day, wouldn’t commit to backing them again, and said he “might be looking for an alternative”.
Mr Shapps himself came in for plenty of criticism, and was regarded as disinterested in local issues and “only in it for himself”.
I was fortunate to spoke to three younger voters this week: one young mum, one young dad, and one first-time voter. All three were critical of the government, and intended to vote against the Conservative party.
The complaints I heard illustrated the depth of Tory troubles. Last week, people repeatedly grumbled about the party’s ineffectiveness in tackling immigration. This week, one of our group echoed those complaints, but two more were unhappy about the government’s focus on the subject — one of them having voted for Boris Johnson.
One former local government employee talked about the cutbacks she’d witnessed first hand; the size of her team was slashed by more than half, while the workload remained the same. She wouldn’t be drawn on how she intended to vote, but she certainly didn’t feel positive about the government.
Many, many people who declined to appear on camera, did so saying that their opinion on the Tory party was so negative as to be unfit for broadcast.
To reiterate, this is a Conservative-held constituency, where the party enjoys a majority of more than 10,000 votes. I know that there are bigger Tory majorities than this which have crumbled into dust in recent by-elections, but even so — it’s striking to encounter such uniform negativity about a party that’s won here time and time again.
That being said, Labour were more the beneficiaries of Tory malcontent than a source of enthusiasm. Three of our group suggested they could vote for Starmer’s party, but one suggested it was perhaps “the lesser of two evils” and another said he might go Lib Dem.
All the usual caveats apply. This is a tiny sample size, vox-pops inevitably are. The people venturing into town on a rainy Saturday morning might not be representative of the constituency as a whole — true.
But if I had to make a prediction for the seat, I would say: Labour GAIN.