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Grim outlook for Barwell as Ashcroft poll puts him 6% down

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Things are looking very grim for Gavin Barwell’s future as an MP, as even his former employer and one-time mentor is publishing figures which show that he will lose his Croydon Central seat at the General Election next May.

Lord Ashcroft has this morning released the results of a poll conducted in the Croydon Central constituency which has the sitting Conservative MP losing to Labour’s Sarah Jones by a 6 per cent margin.

Six-point margin: Gavin Barwell’s ex-boss reckons he’s doomed as an MP

This latest poll involved a large sample of voters within the constituency, and so is considered more accurate than many other opinion polls conducted on voting intentions.

“Cashcroft”, the billionaire former Tory Party treasurer who is spending a fair chunk of his wealth on regular polling of some of Britain’s most marginal constituencies, notes that, “The six-point Labour lead in Croydon Central is the smallest I have yet found in a seat the Tories are defending from Labour in London.”

A 6 per cent lead could see Barwell beaten by as many as 3,000 votes come the General Election, although Ashcroft utilises the pollster’s usual cop-out, that his opinion poll is just “a snapshot not a prediction”.

Given that the Barwell-inspired election campaign for Croydon Town Hall in the spring worked so well (not) – with Labour winning control of the council with 40 councillors to the Conservatives’ 30 – the question now is: how can Barwell salvage his political career and win back around 2,000 voters by next May?

It does not help the cause of the Tory government whip that he is faced with a battle on two fronts. Ashcroft’s “snapshot” suggests that UKIP’s Peter Staveley could get 19 per cent of the vote, while the LibDems vote will collapse utterly in Croydon Central, to just 4 per cent, with many of their former voters going over to Labour.

Ashcroft’s Croydon Central poll gives Labour 39 per cent to the Conservatives’ 33 per cent. This is not altogether different from what Inside Croydon’s tame psephologist, Walter Cronxite, predicted last month, with Jones on 37.5 per cent to Barwell’s 34.3 per cent, although Ashcroft’s poll suggests a bigger vote for UKIP.

Even worse for Barwell, the Ashcroft poll was conducted before Jones launched her vote-winning Zone 4 campaign to appeal to Croydon’s commuters, with a proposal which could reduce their annual fares by nearly £340.

That is a campaign which Barwell quickly backed. But copying Labour policy initiatives after five years in office may not be enough to retrieve the dire situation for the MP for the Whitgift Foundation.

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