Is Jeremy Hunt heading for his Portillo moment? On campaign trail as chancellor fights to keep Surrey blue
Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Candidate for Godalming and Ash Paul Follows is taking on the chancellor (Will Durrant/PA Wire)
If the polls are to be believed, Jeremy Hunt’s Godalming and Ash constituency should still be teeming with Tories despite five years of chaos under Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.
The chancellor is plotting a narrow course to victory in the true blue Surrey seat, which has been Conservative since its creation as South West Surrey in 1983.
But on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, with just over a week until polls open, The Independent struggled to see how Mr Hunt can avoid the humiliation of the infamous ‘Portillo moment’ - when the then defence secretary was unseated at the 1997 election in stunning fashion.
After spending the afternoon strolling the leafy suburban streets and wandering along the waterways, we were unable to find a single openly Conservative voter. Mr Hunt’s rivals in the race are Lib Dem Paul Follows, Labour’s James Walsh, Reform UK’s Graham Drage, Ruby Tucker for the Greens and Harriet Williams for the Women’s Equality Party.
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In a sign Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey’s strategy of winning over so-called Surrey shufflers may be working, this newspaper encountered a series of voters enthusiastically backing his party’s bid to smash the southern blue wall on 4 July.
Residents of Godalming, the 10,000-strong market town just a 30-minute train from Waterloo, said scandals including Partygate, Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget and the general election betting allegations currently engulfing the Conservatives had pushed them over the edge.
On a quiet residential street a short walk from the town centre, The Independent met Steven, a retiree and former Conservative voter, including for Mr Johnson in 2019, who said he was sympathetic to Mr Hunt personally but would be voting for the Lib Dems.
“I have voted Conservative but have just not been impressed with their performance lately, I know they faced Covid and things but I just don’t trust them now,” he said. “A lot of them seem to be in it for their own good. I am quite impressed by Jeremy Hunt… and I do not particularly fancy Keir Starmer, but there needs to be a change and that is my main reason for voting Lib Dem.”
He also praised the local Lib Dem candidate Paul Follows, the leader of Waverley Borough Council as “a good guy doing a good job”.
On the other side of town, The Independent met another Steven, Steven Wing, a retired systems engineer who has been a long-time Lib Dem backer.
“I voted for Margaret Thatcher once,” Mr Wing said, “I thought she was on the right track to start with… then after that I thought ‘this is not for me’.”
Mr Wing said he has met and likes Mr Follows and considers him a very good local campaigner. Asked about the Conservative government, he said: “Despicable. Everything they do is completely wrong and against my values.”
And asked what he thinks about the prospect of Sir Keir Starmer entering Downing Street, he said the Labour leader seems like “a decent bloke”.
On another leafy Godalming street a couple of former Labour voters spoke to The Independent in a quaint living room over a much-needed cup of ice cold ginger beer.
Philip and Helen said they would usually lean toward Sir Keir’s party, but with the Lib Dems within touching distance of clinching the seat they are backing Mr Follows.
The pair reeled off a catalogue of local complaints against Mr Hunt, including once retracting a remark about a local school being “poor” rather than fighting for additional support for it.
They also lashed out at his “stupid comments” about how much people in the constituency earn. Mr Hunt in March said that £100,000 a year is “not a huge salary” for people in his Surrey constituency.
“I’d love to have £100,000, it just shows the stupidity,” Philip said.
They praised him for being active on some higher profile local issues such as when there was heavy flooding on the northern side of town, but Philip said overall “I don’t think he is a particularly good local MP”.
Helen then listed a series of complaints about Mr Hunt’s association with the Conservative Party nationally, including voting against Marcus Rashford’s campaign to give children free school meals during school holidays and supporting Liz Truss as prime minister. She also took a pop at Mr Sunak, saying while he was “a relief after the other two… I wonder if there is a shop where you can buy a spine”.
But the final straw for Helen and Philip was when their son was taken ill during the second Covid lockdown. “We were literally visiting him through the hospital window, sitting in the car park and sitting with our phones talking to him through the window,” Helen said.
She added: “And then you find out that they were having their parties… it still smarts.”
When The Independent met Lib Dem candidate Mr Follows at Coffee#1 on Godalming High Street, he spoke emotionally about finding Partygate “personally offensive”.
“My mum was in hospital for nine weeks and my father was in for nine months… I found it personally offensive when these people were out breaking the rules,” he said.
Mr Follows said: “And it’s the same thing with the betting [scandal currently engulfing the party], it’s one rule for them and another for everybody else.”
He described building up a loyal supporter base over the last five years, having stood against Mr Hunt in 2019, and said for the first time winning against the chancellor feels doable.
“We have outpaced Jeremy in door-knocking, literature, social media… one of the problems the Conservatives are facing everywhere is that their ground game is diminishing because people have been leaving them in droves,” he added.
The Independent did not see a single Conservative poster in the town, compared with a slew of Lib Dem posters and garden stakes. Mr Follows said his team have counted just 50 Tory posters across the constituency, compared with almost 400 backing the Lib Dems.
“He is losing votes on the right to reform, in the centre to me and we will hopefully gain a decent number from people on the left lending me their votes,” a confident Mr Follows said.
He lashed out at Mr Hunt’s voting record on key local issues such as sewage, the area’s waterways have dangerous levels of e coli, Brexit and drilling for oil and gas.
“People aren’t stupid, he has been a Conservative MP for basically 20 years, a cabinet minister four times including some of the big jobs, so we are getting into a position now where he is telling everybody everything is fine,” Mr Follows said.
“People will look at the ballot paper and see ‘Jeremy Hunt, Conservative’, and that isn’t going to fly,” he added.
Mr Follows praised his leader Sir Ed’s antics on the campaign trail as an inventive way to gain media coverage of key Lib Dem announcements that would otherwise be overlooked.
And he touted his credentials as a truly local candidate, saying “I’m a kid from social housing up the road… I’ve lived here a long time now and I want to help people,” he said.
Walking together from the coffee shop to the infamous Godalming Pepperpot building, Mr Follows was approached by a life-long Green Party supporter who has come out to support his campaign in this election.
Frances had been delivering leaflets around Godalming for the day and, asked why she had decided to support Mr Follows, said she could not see Mr Hunt win.
But she said it is “tight, Jeremy might win”... to Mr Follows. “He might,” Mr Follows conceded, “that’s why we have to do everything we can”.
Mr Hunt’s wife was joined on the campaign trail by Mr Sunak’s billionaire wife Akshata Murty on Tuesday, in a sign the Conservatives know he needs all the help he can get.
The chancellor cancelled a planned interview with The Independent about his campaign locally and has been accused of shunning the media, barring journalists from a recent election event.
The news in Godalming was not all good for Mr Follows, but would not provide much comfort to Mr Hunt either. One voter spoken to by The Independent was not aware there was an election on and had not registered to vote. Another said they were simply not interested.