MILKMAN’S SON DELIVERED LABOUR SAFE SEAT
THE SON of a milkman who would go on to paint a former Labour stronghold blue has described his mother’s bafflement when he told her he was standing for Westminster. Lee Rowley made history in 2017 when he ousted Labour from North East Derbyshire – a seat held by the party since 1935.
His political ambitions came as a shock to his mum, as he describes in an article on the Express website. She asked him: “But why on earth are you wanting to go into that?” Winning a seat in Parliament, he explains, was simply not considered an option. He writes:
“For us, a working- class family from Derbyshire, our focus tended to be more on putting food on the table than politics. Parliament was for other people. Even if we were to get involved, it certainly wasn’t supposed to be for the Conservatives... Throughout my lifetime, North Derbyshire had always been Labour.
We were the land of the Clay Cross rent strikes, of fiery speeches, May Day rallies and mines. We repeatedly sent Tony Benn and Dennis Skinner to Westminster.” However, as he grew up he sensed a “disconnect” between those dispatched to Westminster and the voters.
“As I helped my dad on his milk round before going to school in the early 1990s, things started to shift,” he writes. “When I served some of my now constituents on the fish counter in Morrisons at the turn of the millennium, you could sense a growing unease. And then, in the Blair and Brown years, things started to move.” Mr Rowley, who studied history at Oxford and Manchester, argues that it was the very values at the heart of his region’s identity that encouraged people to switch politically.
He adds: “Slowly, over time, we all realised these proud working- class values were better represented by the Conservatives, rather than those we had previously trusted.”