I can’t see where PM pulls in the votes
The mood among Conservative candidates is not one of unbridled optimism.
IHAVE to admit I am confused by reports that the West Midlands is where the Conservatives hope to win this General Election.
Of course, the region has always been an important battleground in every national election.
Not only does it have a good number of marginal seats, but they tend to be marginals where the Conservatives are fighting Labour directly.
If the Tories take a seat from the
Lib Dems in the south west, that puts them one seat closer to gaining a majority.
But if they take a seat from Labour in Warwickshire, that not only brings them closer to Government, but puts Labour one step back.
So yes, the West Midlands is important.
But that doesn’t explain suggestions in parts of the national media that the Conservatives hope to make 20 gains in the region.
I reckon they’ll be lucky to gain more than five.
Where are these 20 gains going to come from?
There are a few obvious Conservative targets such as Dudley North, where Labour is defending a majority of 22 (and the candidate that won that majority in 2017, Ian Austin, is now urging voters to back the Tories).
In Newcastle-under-Lyme,
Staffordshire, Labour is defending a majority of just 30. And in Warwick and Leamington, Labour has a majority of just 1,206.
After that, it gets tougher. Wolverhampton South West returned a Labour MP with a majority of 2,185 in 2017, while Stoke-on-Trent North has a Labour majority of 2,359.
Those might be winnable for the Tories. But then you’re looking at the likes of Stoke-on-Trent Central, where there is a Labour majority of 3,897 – or 11.8 per cent of the vote cast. In other words, you’d need a swing from Labour to the Tories of almost six per cent for it to change hands.
Other possible target seats for the Conservatives include West Bromwich West and Wolverhampton North East, but both of these would also require swings of more than six per cent.
It’s not impossible, but nothing like that has happened on a nationwide scale since the Labour landslide of 1997, when the swing from the Tories to Labour was around ten per cent (although in recent years the SNP and Lib Dems have experienced huge swings, either in their favour or against them).
That’s not to say that individual seats can’t sometimes return spectacular results.
Conservatives are also targeting Birmingham Northfield, which Labour won with a majority of 4,667, or 10.5 per cent of the vote, in 2017.
But Tories haven’t had much luck making gains in Birmingham. In recent elections it has targeted Edgbaston, Erdington and Northfield, to no effect.
Even when David Cameron won a majority for his party in 2015, they couldn’t crack Birmingham.
There is, of course, one Conservative seat in Birmingham – Sutton Coldfield. That’s the only seat in the city that the Tories have won since 1997.
Anything can happen. I might end up looking a right mug once the votes are counted after 10pm on polling day, December 12.
But some of the speculation from Conservative supporters does seem extremely optimistic.
Part of the problem is that the Tories have already squeezed the West Midlands pretty dry.
In recent elections they have already taken a series of marginal seats from Labour, and while it makes sense to focus resources on the West Midlands in order to hold on to them, that does mean that there’s not much low-hanging fruit left.
I’m thinking of seats such as Stoke-on-Trent South, Telford, Worcester, Walsall North, Nuneaton, Redditch, Stafford, Dudley South and Cannock Chase, all of which have had Labour MPs in the past decade (ie, before the 2010 General Election and in some cases later than that) but which elected Conservative MPs in 2017.
And I have to say that the mood among Conservative candidates is not one of unbridled optimism.
That’s not to say that Labour candidates are happy either.
The most experienced of them – by which I mean MPs defending their seats (though technically nobody is an MP while the election takes place)
– are extremely gloomy about their prospects. But Conservatives aren’t sure where their majority is going to come from.
Some of them think the party will lose seats in the West Country, a former Liberal Democrat stronghold.
David Cameron won a majority in 2015 on the back of a collapse in the Lib Dem vote, but it looks like the Lib Dems are enjoying a revival.
There’s a view that Labour will do well in London, where plans for a second Brexit referendum may be popular.
And some Conservatives also think they could lose seats in Scotland, although reports from Scotland itself suggest the party’s vote may be holding up pretty well.
On the other hand, as Tory strategists point out – and, indeed, as Boris Johnson has said – Conservatives would have a majority in the House of Commons if they could just win nine more seats than they did in 2017.
With a margin as tight as that, perhaps it’s worth throwing resources at the West Midlands even if just four or five constituencies are really in play.
The real problem for the Conservatives in the West Midlands, however, is that they’ve been so successful already. There just aren’t that many winnable seats left.