Do or Die Incumbency Pulls...

Boris’s expulsion of 21 Conservative MPs (sorry “withdrawing of the whip from”) leaves several curious questions in my mind.  The first is whether or not he thinks Brexit is a giant game of Escape from Colditz.  And the second is...

 

Well, it doesn’t look to me like Mr Johnson does much in the way of “plan Bs” but one has to wonder how – if Boris gets his wish of a general election in October - CCHQ are going to get candidates in place in that time?

Assuming they've even thought that far ahead...?  Okay half a dozen are retiring anyway but that still leaves two dozen....

Back in the days of David Cameron prospective parliamentary candidates were dispatched to their constituency associations a good two years in advance of the election.  This allowed them to deluge local residents (particularly in ultra-marginals like mine) with industrial quantities of paper Tory propaganda before the short spending limit kicked in during the actual election campaign...

Of course the local associations’ candidate choice processes were not always the most democratic (see here) but at least they bothered to go through a pretence at internal democracy.  With no time to run an exhaustive ballot process will CCHQ effectively just dump candidates on constituencies?
 

Also withdrawing the whip from sitting MPs is never quite as easy as it sounds.  During the 00s David Cameron withdrew the whip from then Croydon Central MP Andrew Pelling in a scandal that became known locally as Pellingate (see here). 

Mr Pelling then sat as an independent while the police investigated but when they couldn’t get enough evidence together to make a case out of Mr Pelling asked for the whip back and Dave said no.  So Mr Pelling stood as an independent splitting the vote.  

Mr Pelling had a lot of money (from supporters) and from his 2^nd career as an Investment Banker which he’d managed to keep going despite being technically off sick from his parliamentary duties with depression and managed to pull 3,239 votes.

A bit of a worry when it’s the 2^nd most marginal constituency in the country.  His successor Gavin Barwell later lost the seat at the next general election (called by Theresa May who gave him a Downing Street job by way of apology which he also lost but that’s another story…).

The point is that sitting MPs are known (by those in politics in polling) to have a thing called “incumbency pull” which basically means because they’ve been there for ages there are a certain number of voters who will tick their box simply because they’re local, seem to be nice or they’ve met them. 

This is why after Dave got rid of Andrew Pelling he gave Gavin a good 2 years to bed himself into the constituency prior to the next election.  Gavin had a blog, a twitter account and generally wandered the streets posting leaflets more frequently than an actual postman.  Boris’s substitute 14 will not have this advantage at the next election …so one wonders if mercy may not be shown to those who grovel?  Or perhaps not…   

Anyway Pelling’s antics give us a possible scale for the size of incumbency pull in the region of 3000 votes (and keep in mind there is no scandal about the below unlike with Pelling) so let’s see of the 21 which have such a majority…

Kenneth Clarke 8,010

Philip Hammond 18,050

David Gauke 19,550

Greg Clark 16,465

Sir Oliver Letwin 19,091

Justine Greening 1,554

Dominic Grieve 24,543

Rory Stewart 15,910

Sir Nicholas Soames: 19,673

Alistair Burt 20,862

Sam Gyimah 23,914

Stephen Hammond 5,622

Guto Bebb 635

Richard Benyon 24,380

Steve Brine 9,999

Richard Harrington 2,092

Margot James 7,654

Anne Milton 17,040

Caroline Nokes 18,006

Antoinette Sandbach 11,942

Edward Vaizey: 17,380

… out of the 21 above at least 1/3 are, as I say, retiring but I count at least 3 seats where incumbency pull could be a real vote-splitting problem if the current soon-to-be-ex-Tory MP stood against a Boris-Conservative candidate …?

Still that’s first past the post for you…