Will Brexit play a part in North Shropshire?

Can Boris Johnson’s month get any worse? Plagued by mutinous backbenchers, Omicron variants and Pippa Crerar, the beleaguered PM’s unhappy double-act of doom tonight with Chris Whitty will have done little to lift the gloom around No. 10. The consensus among Tory MPs appears to be that the Christmas recess has saved their leader. Most now expect him to lead them through the winter when he can (hopefully) reset his flatlining premiership, once again.

But all that could change by Friday morning, depending on how the North Shropshire by-election goes. The Tory safe seat, which returned Owen Paterson last time by a majority of more than 22,000, is regarded by the bookies as ‘too close to call’ with both the Conservatives and the third-placed Lib Dems on 10/11  with Ladbrokes. With Labour roaring into an eight-point lead in the polls and Sir Keir Starmer finally overtaking Johnson on ‘best PM,’ a win in true blue Tory heartland would give further ammunition to the latter’s critics within his party.

Paterson himself has largely stayed out of the limelight, following his resignation over the botched efforts to overhaul the standards system in the Commons. A letter he recently sent to former colleagues went down badly within Parliament, with one being so enraged by the lack of any apparent remorse that they hurled it into a bin. Interestingly, John Longworth, the former director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce, registered his resignation from Paterson’s Centre for Brexit Policy a fortnight after the MP stood down from Parliament. Leave means leave, indeed.

And it is that issue of Brexit which will be of interest in assessing tomorrow’s vote. For while the spectre of leadership will inevitably loom over all the post-mortems, it’s worth noting that this constituency backed Brexit by some 60 per cent in 2016. Five years on, does the issue arouse the same passions? It certainly seems to still on the Remain side, judging by the Lib Dems’ own selection of Helen Morgan as their candidate here.

Far from being a loyal Lib Dem during the long struggle of the Brexit wars, Morgan was urging the physicist Brian Cox to ‘start a new party and get us out of this mess’ in 2018. Indeed ‘Liberal Democrat’ seems an interesting label for somehow who was calling for a fresh plebiscite to overturn the 2016 referendum – just, er, two days after the original result. Five years on, such sentiments remain unchanged for Morgan, who declared last December she wept on multiple occasions upon hearing the EU’s anthem and insisted in July, four months before her selection, that Brexit was about stirring up ‘ugly nationalism for votes.’

What an irony it would be if one of the staunchest Leavers in Parliament was replaced by such an ardent Rejoiner Remainiac.