ELECTION SKETCH: Beyond a Boundary is not only an excellent cricket book, but is what KEN TOWL did last night, going beyond Croydon, and beyond London, to see whether Labour’s candidate in Reigate really does have a sporting chance on July 4
Perhaps it was because it was in a church that it sounded so wrong. The congregation certainly seemed to bridle at the words. We were actually being asked to endorse cruelty. The speaker’s exact words – I took them down verbatim because I was so struck by them – were, “Sometimes you’ve got to be cruel in the short-term to get it right in the long-term.”
Brady Bunch?: Labour’s candidate, 6-4 second favourite Stuart Brady, left (naturally), together with the Greens’ Jonathan Essex, Tory Rebecca Paul, LibDem Mark Johnston and, far right (naturally) Joseph Fox
The speaker was Rebecca Paul, “the Conservative candidate standing for Reigate” as she had announced herself to a wall of silence. She was struggling to sell her government’s Rwanda policy to a packed St John’s Church in Redhill.
“We’ve got to create a deterrent,” she said, “We’ve got to recognise that these are illegal migrants!” This elicited a rare heckle from an otherwise polite, open-minded crowd. “You’re talking about asylum seekers, not illegal immigrants!”
The preceding speaker, Joseph Fox, of Reform UK, had trotted out the predictable tropes, “This is a crowded country… they all seem to have money…”, as he painted a picture of Schrödinger’s Asylum Seeker, secretly rich and desperately poor, taking our jobs and taking our benefits, living in our hotels and taking our housing. Fox had all the incoherence of Trump, but without the crude belligerence.
In fact, if you could get past the implications of what he was actually saying, he came across as strangely affable, yet out of his time. His studied intolerance was met with a weary tolerance from the audience. They had heard it all down the golf club. Now they wanted serious politics and, given how they applauded it at every opportunity, they wanted humanity.
Middle of the road: Stuart Brady might suggest there’s light at the end of this tunnel
They got it with Stuart Brady. He pushed back hard against the Rwanda policy, so hard, in fact, that he discarded the modern politician’s veneer of calm and spoke from the heart.
He was taking a chance with this, and perhaps he couldn’t help himself, but it worked. He described it as “one of the most despicable policies… has echoes of some of the worst chapters of human history… I think most Tories knew, in their heart of hearts, that it was inhumane. Think about the depths they are taking our country to!”
Brady lives in Croydon and he is Labour’s candidate in Reigate, a Surrey constituency just over the border from Greater London which, under the latest election boundaries, includes places just a bus ride from Croydon, in Banstead, Chipstead and Woodmansterne, as well as Walton, Redhill, Tattenham Corner and, of course, Reigate.
Reigate has existed in some form or other as a parliamentary constituency since 1295, but for the past 114 years it has always elected a Conservative MP (apart from a brief period when the MP defected to the Referendum Party). Since October last year, Reigate’s Crispin Blunt was sitting in Parliament as an independent, after having had the Tory whip removed. Blunt is not standing this time; the Conservatives picked Paul to replace him as their candidate.
So Brady ought to be very much the outsider in this election contest.
St John’s: a very Surrey kind of hustings venue
At last night’s hustings, Brady was at his most impressive when he allowed himself to go off-script and speak from his own heart of hearts. I looked across at Paul, glaring at him. She might, otherwise, and as far as anyone could tell, be a competent politician, hampered by having to defend the barely comprehensible.
Brady has impressed over the past few weeks with his energetic campaign, his straight-to-the-point talking-to-camera tweets and his Hermione Granger-like ability to seemingly turn up at every point in the constituency on the same day. I wanted to see what the buzz was all about.
According to several polls and the various tactical voting sites, here in stockbroker belt Surrey, Brady has leapfrogged the LibDems and established himself as the only progressive candidate with a chance of winning a “blue wall” seat from the Conservatives.
This was half the battle. Meanwhile, the Tories appear to be doing everything they can nationally to lose the substantial one-nation Tory vote. It has been a heady month for the umbrella-averse, D-Day-disrespecting, betting cheat-protecting Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
All of this goes to explaining why pollster Savanta has Reigate as “too close to call”. The bookmakers, who we are all obliged to mention in this election, have the Tory Paul as 8-13 favourite to win Reigate with Labour’s Brady at 5-4 (according to Sky Bet). So not quite the outsider, after all…
When Paul made her “You’ve got to be cruel” comment, I thought to myself: “I can’t believe she’s really saying this. I’ll have to start with that.”
Annoyingly, at the next opportunity, Brady referred back to her comment: “You have to be cruel? That is the choice here. If I were a journalist covering this, that would be my headline.” Damn you, Brady, I thought, for your perspicacity. Now, when I lead with the cruelty comment, it will look like it was your idea!
Brady’s CV is interesting and impressive, and he introduced himself through it last night. A one-time professional rugby player (Saracens), he is now a barrister who has represented brain-injured players in their negligence claim against the rugby authorities. He has worked for the CBI on eliminating barriers to trade and he believes firmly in the rule of law, not in “one rule for the governing, ruling class and another for everyone else”.
At last night’s hustings, Brady was criticised from the left by Green candidate Jonathan Essex, who tried unconvincingly to place himself as the progressive and electable alternative to the Tories.
“The last real poll,” he claimed, “was the local elections” when the Greens in Surrey had made substantial gains at council level. It appeared to be imperative for Essex to believe that this would translate into victory at constituency level in order to stop a Labour supermajority and “Farageist Conservative tendencies trying to pull Labour in one direction”.
Panel-beaters: they do hustings in a very civilised manner in stockbroker belt Reigate
Thereafter, Fox referred to himself as the “Farageist candidate”.
“I rather like that,” he said, gleefully. In fact, Fox, uninhibited by any belief that he might actually win, was able to relax into his role and enjoy himself. His best moment came after Paul introduced herself.
Why elect her? “Number one,” she said, “I live here.” Brady had confessed to living “over the border” in Coulsdon. This might impress one or two local people, but a sophisticated Reigate audience expects more than the reductive argument of proximity in return for its votes.
“Number two? I am fed up with incompetence from any of our politicians – not just the Conservatives.”
Her problem here was that we had just had 14 years of incompetent Conservative Prime Ministers. This detracted a little from the punchline: “I can reassure you I haven’t been near a bookie.”
Inevitably, this produced a relieved laugh from the audience but also provoked a cry from the wily Mr Fox: “I bet you have!” Which got a bigger laugh.
When the closing statements came, Brady focused on restoring trust, on the young people he had met at St Bede’s School that day who had only known government by self-serving politicians and so were inevitably cynical about politicians in general.
You betcha: there’s really no way back for the Tories when the Torygraph runs cartoons like this
Rebecca Paul, standing for Reigate, chose another tack. Women’s rights. She was a woman. She was the only woman because only her party had chosen a woman. This was because her party was the only party that knew what a woman was.
She was “really distressed by this”, she claimed. How could you trust anyone who didn’t know what a woman was? She wouldn’t be told that she was a transphobe.
Presumably, all those denizens of Reigate who had been planning to call her a transphobe were persuaded not to. Presumably, since no one went on to call her a transphobe. Indeed, there appeared to be no appetite for a terf war at all in this part of Surrey.
If things weren’t so difficult nationally for the Conservatives, Paul would probably sail to victory in this erstwhile Conservative heartland. But the Tories are in deep trouble and, although Paul is still odds-on favourite, like her, I wouldn’t bet on her chances. Brady’s odds (6-4 with Betfair) are generous considering that this is, effectively, a two-horse race.
Brady is no JFK. I don’t think we do JFKs in Surrey. But he is a charismatic speaker who combines passion with a safe pair of hands and a deep commitment to doing things right.
His team tells me that he has managed to get around a hundred activists working with him, a Brady Bunch if you will, helping to get his message out there, something that any 2024 Croydon candidate would envy.
Whether he wins or loses this time, we are going to hear more of Stuart Brady.
You can bet on it.
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
Mr. Brady, your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?
Why no mention of the Lib Dem candidate?
Yes. The austerity enabler is mentioned in a picture caption. Having his photo taken was his biggest contribution to the evening.
Is it really necessary to use the term austerity enabler when writing on any LibDem candidate?
Yes.
Ask any university student from the last 15 years paying off their loan.
The LibDems have as their leader someone who served in the Cameron cabinet. Though clearly, he and the FibDems are keen that the electorate suffers some kind of mass amnesia.
If it wasn’t for Davey and his power-crazed mates, much of the damage to this country – including Brexit – might have been avoided.
Really? Mark Johnston wasn’t even a LibDem then and so even if I accepted the argument, which I don’t by the way, he’s hardly accountable.
Of course he’s accountable. He’s actually chosen to join the FibDems *after* seeing the disaster they helped inflict, enabled, on this country.
I always laugh when I see people or policies described as ‘progressive’ – it never seems to describe the leftie-liberal correctly. I mean, no one would describe socialism as progressive any more .. people like Bliar and Sunak have consigned that old idea to history.
Zell am See? Braunau am Inn, more like it
IC is the go to place for election news and intelligent comment … unless you want to know about the Reform candidates. What’s the story?
There is no story.
They are nothing other than a rebrand of the 1970s NF.
And that isn’t short for Nigel Farridge.