Lib Dem candidate Matthew Green was pipped at the post by Conservative Stuart Anderson in yesterday’s general election. He lost by just 1,624 votes.
Green was a late candidate after Chris Naylor had to stand down on medical advice. He came from nowhere to slaughter Philip Dunne’s majority of 23,648.
This seat could have been won but the Liberal Democrat national team were focussed on winning North Shropshire, which in my view was never in doubt. The view was that South Shropshire wasn’t yet winnable. It was but we didn’t get there. I’m gutted.
Overall, it’s been an excellent night for the Lib Dems. It’s a shame we didn’t get the icing on the cake and an MP dedicated to South Shropshire rather than one most interested in his parliamentary career.
Our thanks to Matthew Green and his team for demonstrating that South Shropshire doesn’t have to be Conservative in perpetuity.
Results
South Shropshire. Stuart Anderson 17,628; Matthew Green 16,004.
North Shropshire. Sitting MP Lib Dem Helen Morgan won with 26,214 votes against the Conservative’s 10,903 votes. She always looked comfortable and is one of the hardest working MPs in the Commons. One of the most deserved wins of the night.
Shrewsbury. Conservative Daniel Kawczynski was wiped out by Labour’s Julia Buckley who gained 22,932. Kawczynski gained just 11,577 votes. Julia Buckley, leader of the Labour group on Shropshire Council, will be an MP that represents Shrewsbury after years of Daniel Kawczynski pursuing his own agenda. He was obsessed by the environmentally destructive North West Relief Road, which now looks more uncertain than ever.
Wrekin. Conservative Mark Pritchard scraped in with 16,320 votes, ahead of Labour’s Roh Yakob on 15,437. For the Tory leaning Wrekin constituency, this is a good result for Labour but they didn’t quite strike home.
Telford. It was a comfortable win for Labour’s Shaun Davies, currently leader of Telford & Wrekin Council, with 45% of the vote.
North Herefordshire. The Green Party has won comfortably with Ellie Chowns removing long standing MP Bill Wiggins. It’s a good result and seriously good for the green agenda in the Marches.
Full election results are available from the BBC.
I, like you and anybody who knows anything about North Shropshire, knew that it would be a hands-down LD win. If just a small amount of the resources had been diverted to South Shropshire, the LDs would have won.
Over the course of the past few decades I have never seen so few Conservative posters on display, and so the final election result seemed odd to me. Matthew Green clearly had a proven track record here, and I noted almost exclusively orange posters all the way to Wales with the exception of Hereford.
It will be interesting to see if the elephant in the room which came out of seemingly nowhere to take nearly a fifth of the vote in Ludlow will be downplayed here as much as it has been in the mainstream media.
I think you are being kind to the Lib Dem national team, but they may well have been swayed by some egregiously wayward recommendations by at least two polling organisations that recommended tactical voting for Labour. One of these confidently predicted a Tory victory with a probability of 52%, a 22% chance of a Labour win and a 1% chance (yes, one per cent!) of a Lib Dem victory.
Anyone trying to vote tactically would have been influenced by these analyses – as one who has fairly serious reservations about Starmer and Labour, but who knew about Matthew Green’s victory in 2001 and increased vote in 2005, and who knew that local Tories would never vote Labour, I nearly was. Maybe next time, and I hope you can get Matthew to try again next time. There will be a different tactical vote recommendation next time.