Newark, the Tories, and a gentle rap on the head

Later today, in the town square in Newark, I have an appointment with a gentleman who has promised me that I can rap him over the head with a rolled-up newspaper (a la Godfrey Bloom).  Philip Ingall is president of the Newark Conservative Association, and last week he assured Channel 4 News, on camera, that the party would get a majority of more than 10,000.  And he agreed that if they didn’t, I could perform the aforementioned punishment.

Tory officials were horrified by what Mr Ingall said, and tried to prevent him speaking to other journalists for the rest of the day.  But he seems a very honourable, decent  man, and so I’m sure he’ll turn up.  It would take the most humourless of officials, surely, to stop him coming.  In any case it will be the most gentle of raps (a lot lighter than Bloom’s).

For the Conservative majority here – 7,403 – is still extremely impressive, even though it’s less than half the Tory majority in 2010 (of 16,152 over Labour).  Indeed, Mr Ingall could point out that the Tories were almost 10,000 votes ahead of Labour, but it was Ukip who came second, of course.

The Tories did well in part because the other three main parties conducted such half-hearted campaigns.  Newark was a Labour seat from 1997 to 2001, and previously too, albeit on more favourable boundaries.  In normal times this would have been a prime target for an Opposition hoping to form a government less than a year from now.

Labour officials tell me they had lots of star names, but there was little presence on the ground.  I didn’t see one Labour person in in the four hours I spent touring the seat yesterday.  It’s almost as if Labour had decided they’d leave it to Nigel Farage and his merry men to embarrass the Tories in this part of Nottinghamshire.  It seems to reflect a national Labour party strategy of outsourcing their campaigns to Ukip.  A very dangerous strategy.

The truth of Labour’s half-hearted effort will be exposed in the expense returns 35 days from now, which I expect will show the party spent way way below the £100,000 limit.

Last night the Labour MP Chris Bryant, who led his party’s campaign here claimed that many Labour supporters had actually voted Conservative to stop Ukip winning.  It sounds implausible, but the claim was backed up by the Independent Paul Baggaley, who came a highly creditable fourth here, and almost kept his deposit.

The Liberal Democrat candidate David Watts joked last night that he had always wanted to break records in a by-election, and so it proved.  His party fell from a promising 20 per cent of the vote in 2010 to just 2.5 per cent this time, a drop of 87 per cent.  I’m not certain, but I suspect that may be the biggest fall in the vote for any major party in modern by-election history.

The Liberal Democrat campaign in Newark was dire, abject, pathetic, and rather sad.  They came sixth, and lost their deposit – yet again – by a long way.  David Watts admitted that not one of the party’s 57 MPs had even come to support him.  Not one.  Not even Greg Mulholland, Ian Swales, or Sir Alan Beith.  For all of these Newark is conveniently on the train route or the A1, on the way to or from their constituencies in Leeds, Redcar and Berwick respectively.  What happened?  Did the Lib Dem whips send out an order forbidding MPs from coming to help Mr Watts – the opposite of what normally happens in by-elections?

Yet the Lib Dems have a proud history of fighting by-elections.  Here they left Mr Watts twisting in the wind, though he seemed remarkably cheerful at the count last night in the circumstances.  I don’t know why they bothered.  Why do people agree to such humiliation?  Mr Watts, and the several other Lib Dem candidates recently left to fight rubbish by-elections, all deserve peerages.

But Ukip’s campaign wasn’t much cop either.  We’ve known since the Patrick Mercer scandal broke last autumn that a by-election was quite possible here.  So why did they leave it until five weeks ago to pick a candidate, and a rather weak candidate at that?  Nigel Farage came here only twice, and one of those trips was only yesterday afternoon, by which point most people will have voted.  There was no buzz about the Ukip effort, in contrast to Eastleigh in the winter of 2013, a campaign which Mr Farage visited several times.  It was almost as if Mr Farage, having decided that he himself wasn’t going to fight Newark (because he might not win), then decided he didn’t want anyone else to win it either (and thereby take the historic prize of being Ukip’s first elected MP).

Statistically, in historic terms, this was a great result for Ukip – their 25 per cent second only to the 27 per cent they got in Eastleigh.  It’s just by the standards of the European election results last month it’s rather disappointing.

Ukip were out-numbered, out-fought, and out-organised by the Conservatives, who ran their best by-election campaign since at least Crewe and Nantwich in 2008.  In his victory speech last night Robert Jenrick made a point of thanking the local volunteers who’d helped his campaign.  In truth, local volunteers were rather hard to find, swamped by  those who were drafted in from outside to help him – including, famously, 100s of Tory MPs and ministers, and scores of paid party staff.  Mr Jenrick forgot to thank them publicly.

The Tories had five campaign offices around the constituency.  They issued reams of different leaflets.  Indeed, one is bound to ask how they managed it all within the £100,000 legal expense limit, and indeed people at the count were wondering that.

The Liberal Democrat candidate estimated to me that the Tories had spent £250,000 fighting Newark.  And the Ukip leader Nigel Farage told me he was highly sceptical about whether the Conservatives had kept within the legal limit.  He said Ukip would be scrutinising the Tories’ expense return and receipts very closely.

So would Ukip try to get the result overturned if they could show the Conservatives had breached the limit, I asked.  Mr Farage suggested they probably wouldn’t, as re-running elections doesn’t always turn out in  favour of the party who pushes for the re-run.

All the main political parties have a long track record of breaching expense limits in major by-elections, as I have often reported in the past.  If anything, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have been more frequent culprits in the past.

One can’t help but feel sorry for the Conservative agent, the man who has the legal duty to submit a return by 11 July.  He has a lot of work, and explaining, to do.

Watch below: Philip Ingall commits to being whacked on the head with a rolled-up newspaper if the Tories won with less than a 10,000 majority.