‘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.
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