Tom Spiller OBE is the former President of the Conservative National Convention and chaired the 2017 Conservative Party Conference.
I imagine every reader of ConservativeHome knows that General Election result was not ideal, and perhaps from the perspective of the core goals of the party – just plain wrong.
However, there is one particular feature of the General Election result that looks very much like it was wrong in an objective, and legal sense.
I am referring to the extraordinarily close result in the Hendon constituency, a new constituency which was in large part constituted from a formerly Conservative seat.
The 2024 General Election was remarkable in that the number of Parliamentary seats which were won by majorities of less than 1,000 more than doubled, from 23 in 2019 to 51 in 2024.
The same was true in relation to seats with majorities of up to 2,000 which also more than doubled from 45 in 2019 to 100 in 2024. In total, there are 223 marginal seats in Parliament with a majority of less than 10 per cent of votes cast in what was a relatively low turnout General Election. It should be plain to all that Labour’s majority is as fragile as it is large.
Nowhere is Labour’s electoral position more fragile than in Hendon, which returned the most marginal result in the country; a Labor gain by 15 votes.
Consistent with national trends, the story of the election result in Hendon was one of previous Conservative voters staying at home (Conservative votes were down 10.5 per cent) and a significant margin of votes cast for Reform (7.4 per cent).
The Reform vote is of course not entirely made up of former Conservatives, the proportion is probably nearer to half, but given the wafer-thin margin of the Conservative loss in Hendon, we can confidently say that any voters who switched from the Conservatives to Reform were a decisive factor in the result.
As to why the local Conservative vote stayed at home, you can take your pick from any number of reasons that racked up along the way from 2010 to 2024.
However, there were some Conservative voters who not did not cast their vote for our candidate for much more sinister and, if correct, unlawful reason that should worry us all.
Our candidate in Hendon was Ameet Jogia, a nice young man who is one of those most rare things, a Parliamentary candidate who was both a local favourite and a Spad with heavyweight Westminster credentials.
Mr Jogia told The Times that whilst he was nursing his sorrows after the election, he was contacted by a dozen constituents, who (having opted for a postal vote) told him that they were unable to cast their vote for him because they had not received their ballot papers.
Mr Jogia’s words on the subject were sufficiently colourful to bear repeating: “There were so many others [who didn’t receive their postal ballot] too… In my case this would have made a difference. We were robbed[!]”.
Needless to say, it is unlikely that 100 per cent of constituents who were affected by this issue contacted Mr Jogia directly, and therefore there is a reasonable chance that the wrong result was recorded by the returning officer for Hendon as a result of administrative failure on the part of the local authority.
Fortunately, the Representation of the People Act provides that either an unsuccessful candidate or an elector of the relevant constituency may petition the Court to overturn an incorrect election result. Unfortunately, the opportunity to challenge the result in Hendon has been lost as the relevant time period for issuing a petition expired on 26 July.
This leaves us free to ruefully speculate as to whether a petition would have succeeded. In my view, all other things being equal, it would have.
The relevant case law is replete with interesting examples, but perhaps most significantly the results of Winchester in 1997 and Fermanagh and South Tyrone in 2001. Fermanagh and South Tyrone is perhaps most similar to the Hendon result as it concerned a polling station which unlawfully stayed open after close of poll and wrongfully issued 53 ballot papers – the inverse of what appears to have happened in Hendon where too few ballots papers were made available to the electorate.
However, whilst in the Fermanagh and South Tyrone case 53 illegal votes did not effect the outcome of that election, the missing 12 or more missing postal votes in Hendon would have been. A better known example of an electoral petition is of course Winchester where Liberal Democrat Mark Oaten won at the 1997 General Election with a majority of two votes. In the subsequent legal challenge by the Conservative runner up, 54 votes that were counted as spoilt ballots were overturned by the Court, thus resulting in the original result being declared void and a by-election. The by-election provided a much more decisive vote – the Conservative candidate was defeated by 21,556 votes this time.
Would a challenge in Hendon gone the way of Winchester?
Well probably not if someone other than our candidate had brought it. Any member of the electorate could have done it in Mr Jogia’s place, and a few were interested in doing so, including persons well-known to me. This would of course serve to remedy the “sore loser” issue which arose in Winchester.
Also, any observer of British politics will note that the fragile electoral victory of Labor has translated almost immediately into one of the shortest honey-moon periods of any new government in the post-war period.
With this in mind, one can reasonably assume that, if the challenge in the courts had gone the right way, an election would have been scheduled at the same time as Labour’s mishandling of national events. In turn this may have impacted on the desire of former Conservative voters to turn out, and it would be Labour’s turn to face the usual referendum on government that takes place during mid-cycle by-elections.
Or perhaps I’m being overly optimistic.
Sadly, at this stage in the cycle, our movement lacks the access to funds and necessary spirit to spring into action and take tactical opportunities such as this, but we must all hope that changes in the near future.
In these opening weeks of the 2024 Parliament, the size of Labour’s majority, and the relative weakness of the conservative movement in this country, it would seem that there is little that can be done to oppose the government and its socialist agenda in Parliament. Instead, it is sadly likely that the only realistic method of opposing the government is likely to be through the Courts.
While Hendon is a closed case, and our movement wallows in limbo for another month let us hope that it recovers sufficiently to wake up to this new reality after a new party leader has been elected – although I won’t hold my breath. In the post-war period there has only been one incident of government changing hands at one election, and then again at the next.
I am referring of course to the ill-fated and brief government of Edward Heath from 1970 to 1974. While the world is a very different place now, the optimist in me cannot help but see global macroeconomic and domestic similarities between the early 1970s and today . I am of course not optimistic about the idea of our potentially winning the next election and then losing the one after.
Rather, I refer to my optimism that while we are currently in a glum, gray and sluggish Wilson-Heath era, our passage through these times will bring forth another great reformer, in the same way the 1970s brought forth Mrs Thatcher.
It is my great hope that soon the British people will be ready again for a message of deregulation, growth, a smaller state but a bigger society and a lifting of the deadest of all hands that lies on all of our families at present.
The question is really when our party will be up to the task of delivering that much needed message – must it really take another 10 or 15 years?
