by Richard Pooley
Anna Sabine, Liberal Democrat MP for Frome & East Somerset
(NB the clock: a.m.; your correspondent is at the back behind the hairy one. These are members of two campaign teams - the votes from two constituencies were being counted; We won both. )
Crying and yawning are infectious. We Liberal Democrats in the vast hall at the Bath & West showground in Somerset were doing both at 5.10 a.m. on Friday 5 July. Our candidate, Anna Sabine, had just been announced as the Member of Parliament for the new constituency of Frome and East Somerset. Crying? Yes: tears of relief, exhaustion, but most of all, joy. We’d won; and helped get rid of the most incompetent, mendacious and destructive British government in my lifetime (72 years). Yawning? I had been campaigning to get Anna elected since early February. And I’d been up since 3.45 the previous morning, having gone to bed only a few hours earlier on 3 July after an afternoon and evening of last-minute Get Out the Vote (GOTV) door-knocking.
My first task on election day was to pick up four students from their temporary accommodation and drive them to where they could deliver our Good Morning leaflets. From 5.00; not the best time for a student to start work. I did the same. These leaflets, not the last of the plethora of 'campaign literature' we shoved through letter-boxes over six weeks, told people election day had arrived and reminded them to take ID with them (a failed attempt by the Tory government to stop anti-Tories, chiefly young people, from voting – see Gerrymandering – the Tory Biter Bit (only-connect.co.uk) ). I enjoyed it. Ninety houses done in an hour under a cloudless dawn sky and only one dog barked. That’s the skill. Votes can be lost if your leaflet has woken the house up. I have become adept at pushing my leaflet-bearing Postie Mate through letter-boxes and fleeing to the next door before Fido clocks his territory has been invaded.
Next up: telling. I arrived at the polling station at Frome Town Football Club at 7.05, five minutes after it opened. Oh dear, there are two entrances. Where do I stand to ask voters to let me see the number on their polling card (“So we know you have voted and don’t bother you later by knocking on your door”)? The Presiding Officer advises me to stand at the one where the queue formed before 7.00. Damn, how many people have I missed? “Not allowed to say but at least ten,” she says, smiling. It takes me time to stand in the right place, say the right thing, but within ten minutes I am no longer marking a cross on my tally sheet for a person unwilling to let me see their polling card. I am alone until 8.15 when a Green teller turns up. Chatty woman, Jane. Seems confident her party will win. Our canvassing shows they won’t but they are taking votes from us which could let in the Tories. It’s always good to have another teller: voters find it less easy to evade you and numbers are shared. Plus people will normally hand their card over to the teller of the party they are going to vote for. No tellers appeared from the other parties.
No Tory teller was a good sign. Their activists had been invisible all campaign and I had not seen a single Conservative poster in the whole 900-square mile constituency. Yet this is, notionally and historically, a Tory seat. Jacob Rees-Mogg was the MP for 40% of it for the past fourteen years and another Tory for the other 60% from 2015 to 2023. We had 220 stake-boards planted by roadsides all across the area and hundreds of window posters. I handed over to a colleague at 9.15 and drove to our committee room.
The rest of the day was spent on GOTV. I was leading the canvassing in those places where previous canvassing had shown we had lots of support. Sometimes we were knocking on doors we had knocked on twice before. Except in the first morning session they were doors we had knocked on only once before. Perplexed looks and irritable reactions: “We’re not voting for you lot” or “We’re voting Labour/Green/Reform”. Someone had bungled. From then on we had correct lists and received smiles instead of scowls. By 8.00 p.m., two hours before polling closed, three of us were footsore (“done more than 20,000 steps!”) but happy with what we were hearing: “Already voted, thanks. For you!”.
On to the Count at the Bath & West. Only the campaign team could go. It was a first for me. I had thought it was just a formality: see the exit polls on TV at 10.00 p.m., cheer or boo, watch the counting, stay awake until the results are announced in the small hours of the next morning. Not so. I and many of my colleagues were counting agents. We had a vital task to do: report how people voted at each polling station, information vital in any future campaign.
However, the first to be ‘verified’ at the count are the postal votes. In 2001 these accounted for around 5% of the vote. This election they were a fifth. This meant we had had two election days – about 21 June, when postal votes were expected to arrive in people’s homes, and 4 July. This is when one of the Liberal Democrats’ secret weapons is deployed: blue envelopes. For months those party members unwilling or unable to deliver or canvass (the majority) had been addressing blue envelopes by hand to all the postal voters in the constituency – some 9,000 people. Why by hand? Leaflets are mostly unread and thrown straight into the bin (“so why spend so much money and time producing and delivering them?” I am still asking my dear colleagues, to no avail). But if someone receives a hand-written addressed envelope, even if it has no stamp and has been hand-delivered, they will open it and read what is inside. So the theory goes. Nobody could tell me why the envelopes have to be blue.
Nearly all postal voters vote and apparently 90% of them post their votes within 24 hours. Unfortunately, at the count these are not separated by location at the ‘verification’ stage – when the boxes are tipped out onto tables, ballots unfolded and swiftly counted into bundles to check that the number of votes in each box matches the number of votes recorded by the polling station staff. So we can’t see what proportion of postal voters voted for each party in each town or village.
But when each box from an individual polling station is emptied onto a table, the counting agents are shown the box number and polling station and tick off on a tally sheet how each vote has been cast. The counters have to smooth out each ballot paper face up, giving the counting agent a second to see how the person has voted. I swiftly learned which counter was the slowest and which did not cover the voting boxes with their hand. It takes stamina, concentration and reasonable eyesight. I had been canvassing these villages and town wards for months. And here before me was the evidence of how their residents had voted. I made sure I was at the table where the box from one village was emptied. The woman counter unfolded ballot after ballot marked for us and then looked up and caught my eye. My orange-yellow rosette showed my allegiance. Her smile broadened as each Lib Dem vote appeared. 70% of the village had voted for us. Another much bigger village is one of the many surrounding a now-disused coal mine. It’s a run-down place, which we had canvassed without much hope of support. But the votes were not all going to Labour, as in the past. They were coming to us and Reform, the far-right, Brexit-supporting party.
By 1.00 a.m., before the real counting had started, we were confident we had won.
The result:
Liberal Democrat: 16,508 (35.39%)
Conservative: 11,165 (23.94%)
Reform: 6,441 (13.81%)
Labour: 6416 (13.76%)
Green: 5,083 (10.90%)
Independents: 737 & 294
Turnout: 66.28% of those registered to vote
The count also gave us an opportunity to find out how the other parties had conducted their campaigns. I decided to chat up the Reformers, the only other people looking happy with the result. They admitted they had barely done any canvassing. Nor had they produced or delivered many leaflets. They had relied on their leader, Nigel Farage, getting the lion’s share of national media publicity. And they had run a very effective social media campaign, especially on Tik Tok. They really had no idea who had voted for them in the constituency, and seemed surprised when I told them that it was ex-Labour voters as well as ex-Tories. Their aim was to get as high a vote as possible, ideally ahead of the Conservatives who they hoped to replace as the party of the Right by the next election in 2029.
How did we win locally and elsewhere? By concentrating all our meagre resources on a few target seats where we had come second to the Conservatives in 2019 and where we thought we could persuade enough people to vote tactically for us to get rid of the despised Tories. We realised that whilst voters wanted to be rid of the Tories, they weren’t enthusiastic about Labour (or us). They had become far less tribal. The Brexit referendum had detached people from their traditional party allegiance. They were prepared to vote tactically. Policies? Our manifesto was full of them. Some of them even made sense. But we had tried selling our ideas to the electorate in previous elections and that had got us nowhere. Under the first-past-the-post electoral system that we share with Belarus and no one else in Europe only one of two parties can ever win. Since 1923 when the Liberal party was supplanted by Labour, it has been a two-horse race: Labour or Conservative.
Canvassing in Midsomer Norton
This time, at last, we did things differently. We were disciplined, kept to our strategy and were ruthless in executing it. Members were told to help out in target seats and abandon any hope of winning in a constituency where we had not been second last time. I live in Bath, the closest Liberal Democrats have to a safe seat. We hardly campaigned here, much to the annoyance of our MP (as I discovered myself the day before the election: “I’ve been abandoned”. Yes but she still won with a huge majority). Instead some sixty of the six hundred or so party members in Bath went across the border into Frome and East Somerset to campaign there in the last few days. Not all obeyed the command to help us. We Liberals can be rebellious. A seat next door to us, Melksham and Devizes, thought they could beat the Tories too and ignored pleas from Party HQ to come to our aid . They were right to do so; they won.
The leader of the party, Sir Ed Davey, did stunts throughout the campaign – falling off a waterboard four times; haring down a hill on a bicycle; coming down a waterslide. This last was with our candidate, Anna. The resulting photo was on every front page and went viral. Anna became a heroine to her teenage daughter (“You were on ‘Have I Got News for You’!”). He finished with a bungee jump where he could be heard yelling: “Do something you’ve never done before. Vote Liberal Democrat.” I was sceptical. How could we be taken seriously? And that’s what I heard at first on the doorstep. But then the sneering stopped. There was even admiration and an understanding that each stunt was linked to Liberal Democrat policy – mental health in the case of the waterslide, sewerage in our rivers and lakes with the waterboard. When I asked Davey what he was hoping to achieve, his response was simple: “We’re getting noticed.”
We won because we started canvassing months before anyone else, because we convinced enough people to vote for us rather than Labour or the Greens in order to beat the Conservative candidate, because we won the poster war, and because we had an excellent candidate who outperformed all her rivals at every hustings.
We got things wrong. We should not have flooded people’s homes with leaflets; we were doing enough to inform people online. We did not always use the canvassing data we had garnered to focus on the most productive areas. We failed to convince enough members to be active campaigners. We had too many generals and not enough NCOs.
We were lucky too. The Tories ran an inept campaign and seemed not to see us as worthy of their attention. Instead they obsessed about Reform. Farage and his party helped us by splitting the Tory vote. I think we would still have won locally if Reform had not entered the race. But the majority would have been much smaller. I doubt we would now have a total of 72 seats across the country, the highest number we have achieved in 101 years and nine times what we had in 2019. Freedman is right to say we ran a brilliant campaign. But it is hyperbole to say it was the most successful in British political history. For that to be true we would have had to have beaten the Conservatives into third place and become the official Opposition.
The new political map of southern England. The Lib Dem seats are in orange. Frome & East Somerset is the one south-east of Bristol
*Said by Sam Freedman, who has been described by The Sun newspaper as a “think-tank guru”. He’s a former policy adviser to Conservative ex-minister, Michael Gove, and a senior fellow at the UK’s Institute for Government. He writes regularly for Substack. Read his latest book: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It.
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