Radlett Wire

Everything you need to know

We updated this post on 7 June 2024 to reflect the final nominations for Hertsmere. There’s a complete list of candidates in all constituencies on the BBC web site.

The time has come. The election has been called and is in the diary for Thursday 4 July. You presently have no MP. Nobody does. There are now only candidates. Oliver Dowden, although he is still Deputy Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, has carefully changed his social media bios to reflect this.

The deadline for submitting a nomination has now passed. Sorry. Have a go next time. Georgia Elliott-Smith from Gina Miller’s True & Fair Party, said she was going to stand in Hertsmere but then disappeared and has not submitted her papers (looks like only four candidates ultimately got their forms in for True and Fair). Independent Ray Bolster, a mysterious late entry, has caught us by surprise. We know nothing about Ray and hope to learn more soon. Obviously we’re disappointed there’ll be no surprise come-back for the levitating Natural Law Party.

Who are the Hertsmere candidates?

There’s some detail about all of these candidates in the party guides we’ve already published – click the links in the table. Only John Humphries, the Green Party candidate, is a bit of a mystery. He’s not a stranger, though. He stood for the party here in 2019 and three times as a Green candidate in various local council elections – although unsuccessfully.

The parties and the history. As a loyal reader of Radlett Wire you’ll be aware of our four-part guide to all the parties standing in Hertsmere: part one, the fringe parties (including Reform and the Greens); part two, the Lib Dems; part three. Labour; part four, the Conservatives. You’ll also have read our definitive history of the Hertsmere constituency, which goes back all the way to our very first MP, in 1983, disgraced Thatcher ally Cecil Parkinson.

Your new constituency. Like many constituencies in Britain, Hertsmere is a different shape for this election. In fact, it’s smaller, both geographically and in population terms. The purpose of the boundary changes was principally to bring the ‘electorate quota’ – the number of voters living in each constituency – to between 69,724 and 77,062 voters. Population change over the decades had caused some, mostly urban, constituencies to get much bigger than that and some, mostly rural, constituencies much smaller. The changes are thought to have strengthened the Conservative Party’s electoral advantage in Britain, but not by much – and certainly not by the enormous amount that was originally feared. The overall number of constituencies hasn’t changed.

The effect in Hertsmere is not drastic – one Bushey ward has moved out of the constituency and one Hatfield ward in. The overall effect will be to reduce the voting-age population of the Parliamentary constituency by about 7%. Pollsters and news outlets have had the considerable headache of reflecting the new populations in their data. For instance, the Electoral Calculus projection we’ve been sharing here regularly is for the new constituency boundaries.

Voting in Radlett, whatever the election, is run by Hertsmere Council. They run the count and provide the polling places. The returning officer works for the council (when Sunderland and Newcastle race to get their results out first it’s a battle between two councils). Hertsmere will publish a list of polling places closer to the date of the election but it’s safe to assume the Radlett ones will be at Phillimore Hall, the Radlett Centre and the United Synagogue as usual.

Registering to vote. You’ve got until midnight on 18 June to get your name on the register. Once you’re registered you can apply for a postal vote but you’ll have to do it by the end of the following day, 19 June. If you think you won’t be able to get to the polling station on the day you can send someone to vote for you – a proxy vote. You’ve got until 5pm on 26 June to apply (and, if everything goes pear-shaped, you can set up an emergency proxy at any time up till 5pm on polling day).

Fun fact. You’ve still got time to stand for election yourself. You’ll need ten people to nominate you and £500, though.

Voter ID is now required for all UK elections. The Conservative government thought this would give them an electoral advantage, since young voters and poorer urban populations are less likely to have good ID, but Jacob Rees-Mogg thinks it’s backfired. Here’s a list of permitted forms of ID. Check it carefully because you may find you don’t have the right kind. It helps to be old. For instance, senior railcards and 60+ Oyster cards are okay but not young persons’ railcards or student ID. You don’t need to take the polling card you’ll be sent in the post. If you’ve got no valid ID you’ve got until 5pm on 26 June to apply for a voter authority certificate (you don’t need ID to get one, which seems like a bit of a loophole, but you will need to know your National Insurance number).

• More about contituency boundary changes.
• You won’t find this election results data, going back to 1983, anywhere else. It’s in a spreadsheet so you can download it and, you know, analyse it or whatever.

Here’s our guide to the whole history of elections in Hertsmere and part three of our preview of the 2024 (or 2025) general election.

The nearest actual elections on Thursday were down the road in London (Khan re-elected with an increased vote share) and up the A1 in North Herts (Labour win). It felt a bit sad to be left out of such a consequential election. I don’t know what it was like in your house over the last few days but in ours we were glued to the news channels and the news feeds.

And we honestly can’t learn much from the results, widely accepted as having been a catastrophe for the Conservative government (and, if anything, actually a bit more catastrophic than the worst predictions), about the situation here in Hertsmere.

Psephologists think it is valid to project general election results from previous elections, so you’ll find forecasts based on these results in the media. Sir John Curtice, the Strathclyde academic who haunts the TV studios for the whole duration of every election and seems to need no sleep, came up with this projection for the BBC. It obviously gives Labour a big majority in vote share.

But this gives us a pretty unhelpful idea of how things will go, not least because it doesn’t map to actual Parliamentary seats. Others have had a go at working that out. Sky News, for instance, has a projection that suggests Labour will win the election but without an overall majority.

This has been seized upon by Tory spokespeople, including the Prime Minister. It obviously holds out the promise of another ‘SNP-Labour coalition‘ scare campaign. The idea of a Groundhog Day general election campaign fought on this basis is too depressing for words, of course. We may reconsider that plan to move to a monastery.

Here in Hertsmere things obviously look just like they did before the election, except for the important detail that we now have a new Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner. Jonathan Ash-Edwards won by a good majority, Sean Prendergast came second for the Liberals. Again, it’s hard to get much from this data, mainly because the turnout will have been much lower than it was last time – somewhere in the twenties, once it’s been calculated – because hardly anyone votes in PCC elections. We’ve added a sheet for the PCC elections to our big spreadsheet of polling data for Hertsmere – very much the only place in the world where you’ll find all of this data in one place. Tell your friends.

The projection we depend on here at Radlett Wire is the one from Electoral Calculus. Their most recent data, updated a few days before the council elections, gives the Tories approximately the same essentially unassailable lead here in Hertsmere – although their chance of winning has fallen from 71% to 61% across about two months. Labour candidate Josh Tapper has his work cut out.

Enough politics. Back to watching the rain through the window on this lovely bank holiday Monday.

• There are two serious electoral models in the UK at the moment. We’re not talking about opinion polls or polls-of-polls (like Electoral Calculus) or guesses from wise columnists or wild social media assertions. We mean academic projects that use actual election results to calculate likely outcomes of future elections. There’s Professor John Curtice’s projected national share, which he does for the BBC and the one from Nuffield College, Oxford profs Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher. The political parties will also have their own elaborate projections, but they keep those to themselves.
• Why aren’t all the council elections on the same day?
• The BBC has all the council, Mayoral and PCC election results and you’ll find the full national results for the PCC elections on Wikipedia.

Labour

Part one of this general election preview is about the fringe parties (including Reform) and part two about the Lib Dems. Part three, about the Conservatives, is next.

Look, we promise we’re not going to go on and on about this but the recently-selected Labour party candidate for Hertsmere, Josh Tapper, USED TO BE ON GOGGLEBOX. That’s him, on the right, with (left to right) sister Amy, dad Jonathan and mum Nikki. You will certainly remember the Tapper family – they were on the programme for eleven series, from the very first programme in 2013 until 2018. Tapper’s TV history has certainly brought his candidacy a lot of national publicity – we can’t imagine the selection of a Labour Parliamentary candidate winning much coverage in The Sun without the Gogglebox factor, for instance.

Right, that’s it. We’re not going to mention Gogglebox ever again. We’re sure Mr Tapper will be happy to know that. He’ll definitely want us to talk about the fact that he’s one of the youngest Labour candidates in the country (26) and that he’s been put up against no less than Deputy Prime Minister and privet hedge-botherer Oliver Dowden. Dowden has been reselected by his local party but has not yet submitted his nomination papers (so there’s still a slim chance he’ll run for the hills before the election).

After Gogglebox and Yavneh College in Borehamwood, Tapper found himself in Theresa May’s office, via a civil service apprenticeship scheme, and then worked for left-of-centre think-tank Demos. In 2022 he very narrowly missed election to Barnet council, in the Edgwarebury ward. Tapper is also great-great-grandson of the founder of legendary and late-lamented Aldgate kosher eatery Bloom’s which many will remember fondly (although not for the food).

Now for the politics

So, Tapper is the eleventh Labour candidate in the history of the Hertsmere constituency, since it was created in 1983. He will be hoping profoundly, of course, that he’s not the eleventh loser and he’s probably in with a better chance here than anyone since Beth Kelly, in 1997, who lost by 3,000 votes. That, of course, was the year of Tony Blair’s landslide, when Labour won the largest number of Parliamentary seats for a single party in British Parliamentary history – 418 (more than twice the party’s total at the last general election in 2019).

Sensible projections for vote share at the next election put Labour comfortably in government, of course, but they don’t quite put a Labour candidate into Parliament for Hertsmere. Electoral Calculus, which is the one we usually rely on here, still gives the Tories a comfortable 64% chance of winning in Hertsmere but their likely majority is very much in 1997 territory, which must be exciting for Tapper and his campaign.

Hertsmere Labour candidates over the years:
Josh Tapper (2024/25) – civil servant, former Goggleboxer
Holly Kal-Weiss (2019) – special needs teacher.
Fiona Smith (2017) – ex-military, fund-raiser.
Richard Butler (2015) – Councillor in Hertsmere and Hertfordshire.
Sam Russell (2010)
Kelly Tebb (2005)
Hilary Broderick (2001)
Beth Kelly (1997) – NHS manager and one-time Borehamwood councillor, endorsed Josh Tapper for Hertsmere in 2024.
David Souter (1992)
Frank Ward (1987) – went on to stand for UKIP in 2015.
Ian Reed (1983)

Tapper’s mountain

The historic chart makes the challenge for Tapper clear. Even the precipitous fall in support that the Tories have experienced since 2019 – essentially unparalleled in British electoral history – is unlikely to put Josh Tapper into Parliament at the next general election. The grey bar in the chart shows the result in Hertsmere if YouGov’s January MRP projection is correct. It puts Labour about 3,000 votes from a majority – spookily close to that 1997 result. Labour’s bump in support in Hertsmere puts the party at roughly where it was in 2017, when the swing to Labour was the largest in decades and Theresa May got a nasty shock. Nationally, as well as in Hertsmere, the challenge for Labour this time is that the lost Tory votes will be shared between Labour, the resurgent Lib Dems, the insurgent Reform Party and, in some places, the Greens.

Many are already calling the next UK general election ‘the Gaza election’ and it seems certain that the war will be a doorstep issue in Hertsmere, a constituency with a high proportion of Jewish households. Our MP, as a Cabinet Office Minister, has been asked to address the issue on many occasions since 7 October. We’ll admit to having no idea what the impact on voting will be or how Tapper will respond, though.

Since we made the chart there’s been another YouGov MRP poll and it puts Labour even further ahead nationally, with over 400 seats, but it doesn’t move the result in Hertsmere so Tapper evidently still has a mountain to climb.

Of course, Labour will be hoping that Josh Tapper – a charismatic local boy and a TV star – has what it takes to claw back those 3,000 votes. It must be thrilling for him and for local Labour supporters to contemplate that narrowing national gap. If anyone can, we reckon Josh Tapper can.

• Wikipedia has a list of all the Parliamentary candidates declared so far. Tapper is listed but we’re not 100% sure he’s submitted his official nomination papers and paid his deposit yet.
• We’ve updated our guide to elections in Hertsmere, going all the way back to the very first election here, in 1983, and we’ve put all the voting data into a spreadsheet.
• Money will be a concern – for Tapper and for all candidates in Hertsmere. Going up against a government minister in a safe seat like Hertsmere is not cheap. And we know that Oliver Dowden has access to big money for his campaigns, not just via his party but also via business donors. An ‘unincorporated association‘ called the South Hertfordshire Business Club, for instance. A club with no web site, no staff, no premises, no accounts and, apparently, no members (it shares an address with the St Albans Conservative Association, though), according to the Electoral Commission, gave £82,741.09 to Hertsmere Tories between 2017 and 2022. Details in this spreadsheet. Does Josh Tapper have access to that kind of money for his campaign?
• The MRP technique used by YouGov is significantly more accurate than ordinary polling but not infallible. YouGov’s 2017 poll came very close, predicting the hung Parliament and some of the outlier results, but 2019’s was less accurate, underestimating the size of Johnson’s majority.