Tories aim to oust ‘condescending’ Grieve
Joy Morrissey is defending a 24,543 majority against rebel who won in 2017 but was kicked out over Brexit
A MIDDLE-AGED man in slippers shaped like footballs delivers the model response Joy Morrissey hopes to hear on the doorstep.
Standing at the entrance to his home in Gerrards Cross, Bucks, the voter explains that he “made a mistake” when visited by canvassers a few days earlier.
“I told them I would be supporting Dominic Grieve but didn’t realise he wasn’t standing as a Conservative. Of course I’ll be voting for you,” he assures Ms Morrissey. The 39-year-old west London councillor is attempting to take the Beaconsfield seat that Mr Grieve has held since he overturned a 23,000 Lib Dem majority in 1997.
Mr Grieve, who embarked on a campaign to scupper first Theresa May and then Boris Johnson’s Brexit plans, was expelled from the party in September.
Beaconsfield Conservatives were among those urging Mr Grieve to “desist” from attempting to undermine the Government over Brexit but their pleas fell on deaf ears. Now the former attorney general who became a vocal advocate of a second Brexit referendum is one of a handful of ousted Tories standing as independent candidates in their old constituencies. Ms Morrissey has the task of defending the 24,543 Conservative majority he won in 2017.
“The whole thing is very sad,” she says. Unlike Mr Grieve, she supported Leave in the 2016 referendum. “It’s sort of coming into, not when there’s a family breakdown, but when someone who you are very close to decides they cannot compromise. I want to restore that trust. I want to bring everyone together despite how you voted, and I want to focus on the issues that matter, be a local champion and not talk about Brexit.”
But it is difficult to avoid Brexit when that issue, above all others, separates Ms Morrissey from Mr Grieve.
She admits her predecessor remains a Conservative in many aspects of his thinking, and like Mr Grieve she is a critic of HS2, which is due to be built on the edge of the constituency. “If I am elected, I will be advocating stopping HS2,” she says.
But on the EU she says: “Everyone has compromised. Boris has compromised, the ERG [European Research Group of backbench Tory Eurosceptics] has compromised, the EU has compromised. The only person that has not compromised has been the independent candidate who has said ‘ my view is the right view and I’m not going to change, no matter what’.”
Ms Morrissey avoids naming Mr Grieve on all but a couple of occasions. She says there is “frustration” that he “refused to listen, that he refused to accept the democratic result of the referendum. That can come across on a personal level as a little bit condescending if you voted Leave. But it is also condescending if you believe in democracy and in honouring the result.”
Mr Grieve has admitted “in theory I ought to lose” but said last week: “I might just do it. There is a buzz”.
But Ms Morrissey says: “These are
‘Some people had never voted before. They came out and voted. If we deny them their right to leave, we’re saying their vote doesn’t matter’
very intelligent, very clued-in voters. What’s interesting is they don’t like disloyalty and the sort of machinations that have gone on with the independent candidate.”
Ms Morrissey was born in the US and worked in film, including acting in several low budget comedies, before taking a masters in European social policy at the London School of Economics.
She says: “I was really interested in the EU and even wanted to work in the EU but when I started to understand the EU I saw the enormous democratic deficit of elected accountability. That was my sole reason for voting Leave.
“I’m still annoyed we’re not accepting the result. Some people had never voted before in their lives. They came out and voted. If we deny them their right to leave, we’re saying their vote doesn’t matter. Where does it end?”