‘Is this about the Ulez?’ asks the woman looking out of her front door at a group of campaigners in her garden. One of them is wearing a round STOP ULEZ sticker on his top.
It’s not actually about the Ultra-low emission zone, which is being expanded to the constituency by the Labour mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, it’s about the by-election in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat vacated by Boris Johnson. But the man hoping to succeed him as Conservative MP, Steve Tuckwell, wants to make the campaign about Khan and cars, not the Conservatives.
Both main parties insist that this isn’t in the bag for them
His leaflets do feature one picture of him walking down the street with Rishi Sunak and tell voters on the final page that he is the ‘Conservative candidate’, but they go much harder on the ‘local man’ and car tax angle. ‘This is a referendum on Ulez,’ he tells me as we pop in and out of the neat front gardens near Hillingdon station. Most of the people who open their doors agree, complaining that it’s going to cost them a great deal of money – and that’s even before Tuckwell has launched into his well-rehearsed doorstep pitch about £4,000 a year for the average homeowner. One, who eventually says he’ll probably vote Conservative because he thinks Labour ‘moan’ too much, disagrees: ‘It’s about the environment, isn’t it? It doesn’t really affect me but I don’t think I should be stopping it.’
Labour are hoping that this race will be the easier of the many, many by-elections being fought (next week three seats go to the polls: Uxbridge and South Ruislip; Somerton and Frome; and Selby and Ainsty).
Labour’s candidate here, Danny Beales, is also bigging up his ‘local man’ credentials because, like Tuckwell, he was born in Hillingdon Hospital. He is not, though, as keen to be followed around on the doorsteps: the Labour campaign have been resolutely telling everyone they are ‘too busy’. It’s the first time in more than a decade of covering by-elections that I’ve had trouble following a campaign team around, and I suspect this ‘busyness’ is part of a safety-first strategy by the party, not least because Beales is asked endlessly about his views on Ulez (he now opposes it) and on Khan. The mayor has not visited the campaign, but I understand he has helped out on phone banks.
Beales and his campaigners want to talk about the cost of living and Hillingdon Hospital. Steve Reed is the MP running the party’s campaign, and a frontbencher. He tells me: ‘The Conservatives are just trying to make it a referendum on Ulez because they have nothing else to say or offer to voters. That pales into insignificance compared to the salience of the cost of living as an issue.’ He says the party’s focus is on the large group of ‘don’t knows’ in their 30s and 40s who have a big mortgage on a detached house, a good household income and children, but are worried by rising costs – both for them and for their children’s hope of getting onto the housing ladder.
A row over a local hospital is a real by-election staple wherever you are in the country and wherever is in government, and Beales has ‘won a commitment’ from his party’s frontbench to rebuild this one, because it is in a dilapidated state. Parties will throw whatever they’ve got at a local hospital come by-election time, especially from the luxury of opposition.
In Westminster, Conservatives who have been to campaign with Tuckwell say they like him and that he would make a good MP. He is already a councillor and was previously a postman so understands the combination of political organisation and shoe leather work that an MP needs. But those MPs also repeatedly describe the campaign around him as ‘demoralised’ and ‘disorganised’, and complain that it is being let down by a team in CCHQ producing poor quality leaflets and campaign materials. They are now also largely being sent to the Selby and Ainsty by-election, where the Tories have more confidence of holding the seat (Hannah Tomes profiles it here).
Both main parties insist that this isn’t in the bag for them: Labour has an eight point lead in polls for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, but is emphasising that it is ‘not a slam dunk and we can’t bank it’. Tuckwell tells every voter he meets – most of whom tell him they are going to or have already voted by post for him – that Labour are the favourite to win. Both are trying to get their own voters to turn up on polling day.
In Uxbridge town centre, many shoppers are still quite attached to Boris Johnson, saying they voted for him to ‘shake things up’, and that they feel he was hard done by over ‘a bit of cake’. He isn’t mentioned at all by the main parties campaigning in the seat: both Labour and the Conservatives are keen to say that he’s not on the ballot paper. But it has been striking that Beales has also largely avoided attacking Johnson when he has been interviewed or spoken at hustings, preferring instead to suggest to voters that they should give him a go for this by-election because there is another chance at the looming general election. It’s a way of winning the trust of a Tory seat, while the Conservatives are trying to make the threat of yet more Labour power over this area, on top of a Labour mayor, seem like something locals can’t afford.
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