Radlett Wire

Well, having said in the previous post that there can’t possibly be anything more boring than a county council election we are ready to revise our position – just a little. In that post we said: “…a swing to Reform large enough to displace the Tories in Hertfordshire would be a real political earthquake.”

Well, that earthquake happened. The Tories have been displaced and will be replaced in County Hall not by Reform but by a coalition that must now be assembled and will presumably include the largest party – the Liberal Democrats – plus the Greens and Labour. On the face of it a leadership coalition will need to include all three otherwise it won’t be big enough to overcome a possible alliance of Conservative and Reform councillors (whether that particular coalition of frenemies would even be possible is another matter).

It’s not the first time an election has resulted in ‘no overall control’ here but, since the County Council was set up in 1974, this is only the second time the Conservatives have been out of the leadership coalition.

Here in the Watling division, there’s been substantially less drama: Caroline Clapper is still your county councillor. Her majority has been reduced but she’s still very comfortably in place.

Reform’s performance here in the Watling division is a real challenge to the historic balance and puts the party comfortably in second place. Here’s the history:

You’ll see an essentially continuous growth in the Tory share since the origin of the council in the 1970s, with a handful of dips along the way. You’ll see a very steep decline in the Labour vote since a 1993 high point which reflects the trend across the whole UK in that period: Labour has essentially retreated into the big cities, leaving the Tories to dominate rural England and the small towns (with various local exceptions, usually run by the LibDems).

Down near the bottom of the chart you’ll also see a handful of coloured blobs. The pale blue one to the right is last week’s Reform performance and, interestingly, the purple one in 2013 is UKIP, scoring a share here in Watling of 16.5%, essentially the same as Reform’s share last week – a reminder that UKIP’s rise in England, although it ultimately fizzled out, felt pretty climactic too, back then.

Reform’s 14 seats on the council pretty much reflects the average across the English councils included in the election – and the three-way division in percentage terms – the three largest parties on 26%, 26%, 24% – essentially explains the problem presented to the big parties by Reform’s arrival.

The picture is obviously much more dramatic at the county level than at the level of our own division, Watling, where Tory control is still essentially total. In the chart you’ll see the Liberal Democrats surge past the Tories for the first time in the County Council’s history, leaving Labour in the dust (and the Greens catching up with Labour). Reform bounces to 14% of the vote, better than for any populist party in the county’s history but some way behind the party’s average across all the areas where elections took place.

What looked, until last week, like one of the Toriest places in England, now looks like a much more mixed environment, an effect seen across all the authorities in which elections took place. This is likely to be particularly bad for the Conservatives, of course – Reform’s target electorate is essentially theirs and they will now have to fight it out over one end of the political spectrum – we can’t escape the conclusion that the arrival of three-, four- or five-party politics in Britain is going to change things for everyone – even in Radlett. We’re not in Kansas any more.

• You can get all this data from a number of excellent online sources, these days, of course, including the BBC’s local election pages; the County’s own results pages (which are much better than they used to be) and Wikipedia, which is, as you’d expect, the absolutely definitive source for election data across the country – and across time. However, there is only one place on the whole Internet where you’ll find all voting data – going back to the origins of the constituencies, divisions and wards involved – for Radlett, and that’s Radlett Wire’s own big election spreadsheet, which is free to use and download as you want.
• Other really good sources during this election period in Hertfordshire have been the always excellent Your Harlow online local paper (and Harlow isn’t in Hertfordshire); Bishop’s Stortford’s Independent; Chris Day, a reporter covering politics in Hertfordshire for Reach who is part of the BBC-funded local democracy reporting scheme and the Watford Observer, plugging away in an increasingly difficult local media market.

When we started blogging about Radlett, in the very distant past, Oliver Dowden wasn’t even a thing yet. He’d recently returned to the Tory Party HQ from a period at a vast, global PR company. And it wasn’t just any PR company. It was one of those vampiric outfits that would rather do the dirty, morally complicated – and highly-remunerative – work of laundering the misdeeds of dictatorships and cults than get stuck into promoting a new breakfast cereal.

Sir Oliver’s employer, Hill and Knowlton, famously represented the American tobacco lobby as long ago as the 1950s, helping to muddy the waters as the evidence for the health effects of their products accumulated. It hasn’t got much better since then. The firm has topped the table of firms representing murderous regimes (Indonesia, China, Kuwait and so on…) for decades and used a catalogue of disreputable techniques to help the US government sell the invasion of Iraq to middle America. The story of the firm’s complicated entanglement with the Scientologists and Eli Lilly – the Prozac people – is worthy of a movie (Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Al Pacino – that kind of vibe). We imagine the only reason there hasn’t been one is that the producers would have to get past Hill and Knowlton and the Scientologists to get it made.

We have no idea which accounts Sir Oliver worked on when he was with the firm (and the Scientologists were long gone) but we suspect this period must have been formative for a political operator like him. We also suspect that what he learnt there has informed his own conduct in later years. We’ve lamented in the past just how irritatingly squeaky-clean he’s been during his Parliamentary career. Staying out of trouble and cleaning up after less temperate colleagues and superiors has become his signature move. Search through Sir Oliver’s appearances on the Sunday morning programmes and you’ll find essentially a long string of competent defenses of the indefensible.

Dowden doesn’t make stupid gaffes or originate mendacious laws but he’s exemplary at putting things straight after others have. We feel sure that whoever takes over in November will find a use for the ultimate bagman, although we’re not convinced an operator of Sir Oliver’s calibre will be able to tolerate a minimum of five years of crisis management from the opposition benches. As a politician he’s never known anything other than government and we’d be surprised if he isn’t pretty soon bored with the mundane constituency stuff – he’s certainly already fielding calls from the other side of the revolving door.

Thank you, Sir Oliver

Here at Radlett Wire, we have a lot to thank our MP for. It was his election that revived our interest in this blog in the first place. We’d been writing about the Christmas Lights and the Rod Stewart tribute act at the theatre and the new pet spa up at Battler’s Green farm for a few years and we were honestly bored to death. When diligent-but-boring, five-terms MP James Clappison was brutally despatched to make way for David Cameron’s most trusted SPAD we were kind of excited.

We changed the theme of the blog sharpish and we’ve been keeping an eye on Oliver Dowden ever since. And, to be honest, the people of Radlett seem to be a bit less interested in him than they were in the Christmas lights (did we tell you Anthony Joshua switched them on once?). Our numbers fell of a cliff when we made the change and they’ve never really recovered. If we had a single commercial thought in our heads we’d have gone back to the tribute acts and dropped Sir Oliver all together.

And we find this instructive, of course. We’ve learnt that ordinary electors are definitely much more interested in constituency matters than they are in the goings-on in Parliament. This is universal, of course. For most people the fact that their MP is a Machiavellian schemer in SW1 is utterly irrelevant – boring, in fact. It’s much more important that this MP is visibly working to stop the hideous green belt development that’s going to block out the light or ready to stand up for a constituent against the council. That kind of thing.

Things pick up around here at election time. People seem to like our detailed posts about the candidates and the campaigns and the election results posts are always popular – and this is the stuff that keeps producing traffic long after the election. We assume these posts become a kind of reference – and they continue to show up in Google search results so they must be of some value. This is why we try to make sure our posts are:

• Packed with useful information – the more the better. This will make for long (sometimes slightly boring?) posts, but this is important work so that’s cool.
• Absolutely objective and scrupulously accurate. We have our opinions but they don’t influence the facts. We never share unverified stories or gossip. Our spreadsheet of historic election results, for instance, is the only place you’ll find the whole history of Hertsmere elections in one place.
• All about the politics. We’re not interested in the private lives of the politicians we talk about, only their public conduct and their official roles.
• Comprehensively sourced – with links to every resource we make use of. And we’ll link to sources of every complexion – from the Telegraph to the Morning Star, via the Guardian, the Office of National Statistics and – of course – Wikipedia.
• Up-to-date. We’ll go back to older posts and add new information. Our voting in Hertsmere post has been updated multiple times since first published and currently provides the most comprehensive guide to the history and politics of the constituency you’ll find anywhere.
• Sarcastic. Always sarcastic. Sorry.

The fact that the local press has largely stopped covering Parliamentary and constituency politics between elections is another reason we want to carry on covering the activites of our MP. There ought to be somewhere that puts on record, all in one place and with a critical eye, the business of a single constituency MP. They’re important people, our representatives – and have been for hundreds of years – since long before ordinary people were able to vote for them. We shouldn’t let them operate unobserved.

So, Sir Oliver’s list of sketchy behaviour is not a long one. And what’s on it is, let’s face it, not the most damning. Hardly a morning’s work for a Boris Johnson or a Nadhim Zahawi. But we’ve been keeping track of it, so here’s a list, with links to our original coverage.

• What you’ll notice about the dates associated with the last two items on this list is that took place while Sir Oliver was out of office and on the back benches. The rules are less onerous when you’re not a minister. They don’t apply to shadow ministers either so expect a bit of a boost to Sir Oliver’s income from these outside sources now that he’s in opposition.
• You should also bookmark Sir Oliver’s entry in the register of members’ interests on the House of Commons web site. You’ll notice a fair number of gifts, mostly seats at the opera and at sporting events. No trainers, though.
• There’s a function within the British civil service called The Government Digital Service that’s won praise around the world for its work in making government information easily accessible. As a result, information published by the UK government, Parliament and other public bodies is mostly presented in very user-friendly and open ways. Not all of it, though. If you’ve ever searched it, you’ll have noticed that the Parliamentary register of interests is presented in an essentially un-searchable form with no analysis or comparison functions (the same goes for the record of MPs’ expenses, for some reason). It’s not in a database and it’s extremely hard to compare one MP with another or one year with another. It’s almost as if it’s been hidden. We can’t think why the MPs would want information about their gifts and outside jobs to be quite so awkward and inaccessible. The brilliant people at MySociety have recenly begun to publish the members’ interests data in various useful formats, though. There’s a spreadsheet you can download.