Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Boris should be ashamed of his treatment of Shaun Bailey

(Getty images)

What with all the excitement about Hartlepool and the understandable fuss about Scotland, there’s one aspect of the elections that seems to have passed everyone by, and that’s the result of the mayoral contest in London. 

You may have missed it: Sadiq Khan won, with 1.2 million votes. But the Tory candidate, Shaun Bailey, did really unexpectedly well, with 977,601 votes. In some constituencies in outer London, he beat Sadiq comfortably; in other central London areas, he ran him really close, leaving the most predictably metrosexual or Corbynite areas to give Sadiq his majority. So Bailey got not far off a million votes. Just think what he might have done if Boris and the bigwigs had actually come out to support him.

It was nice to hear Boris visited Hartlepool in person two or three times. That’s probably as many times as he managed to campaign with Shaun Bailey, who was right on his doorstep, bidding to occupy precisely the same position Boris graced twice. I may, of course, have blinked and missed it, but the high powered people, starting with Boris, were conspicuous by their absence from the mayoral campaign. 

Boris owes Shaun Bailey. He treated him shabbily and he should be ashamed of himself

Obviously, Tories had the Red Wall in their sights, but it wouldn’t have been too much trouble to tramp the pavements in a socially distanced way for a candidate who was actually within walking distance or just, you know, give him vociferous backing. 

The last time I wrote about this the word was – true or not, it was indicative – that the party was thinking of pulling funding from Shaun Bailey on the basis that he wasn’t going to win. Well, here’s a thing…he could have won, or closed the gap dramatically, with better backing.

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