Conservative MP quitting Parliament
Fire up the Riso because it’s the week of MPs making announcements about their future. This time news from the regularly scandal–prone Conservative MP Nadine Dorries:
UPDATE: And now there’s a second by-election.
In related news, over half of Boris Johnson’s new peers were rejected.
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Interesting. Is this the sort of seat that Tories could lose in a bye election and regain in a general?
Quite possibly. As tempting as attempting to win this seat may look, my thoughts are that effort and money would be better spent on long term winnables. Mid Beds has been a Conservative seat for most of its history. If you look at by-election successes from the past, very few remain Liberal Democrat for long, particularly if we weren’t the challenger at the previous election and had only a small local party. Is it likely that Labour will stand aside this time? They have polled significantly better than us in each election since 2010. Having said that, Labour will be favouring Uxbridge and South Ruislip and I suppose that by-election efforts tend to take people away from other non-political activities.
On th eother hand, the bye-elections including Uxbridge would be heavily damaging to the Tories. What chance a Tory dash for a General Election now?
Although it can also be a way of building local parties as we saw in Tiverton & Honiton in May with significant gains across the Mid Devon and East Devon councils which include the constituency. I think from memory they won more than fifty seats across the two council areas, although not all were in T & H.
Also worth noting that Labour may also be distracted by a third even more critical (to them) by-election in Rutherglen & Hamilton West if the ex-SNP MP is recalled following her thirty day suspension from Parliament.