Conservatives on brink of huge loss in royal city as soon as the guts of Tory Britain

Tunbridge Wells is famous for being one of just three ‘Royal’ towns in the country, as a home of swanky private schools and the “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells ” stereotype.

For the last 114 years the Kent town has returned a Tory MP to Parliament, often with thumping majorities that earned it the reputation as one of the UK’s safest blue seats.

But even this Conservative bastion could tumble when voters go to the polls on Thursday.

Electoral Calculus pollsters give Conservative hopeful Neil Mahapatra a 27% chance of winning on Thursday, despite the party claiming an eye-watering 55% of the vote in 2019. His cause may not have been helped by the Tory candidate calling the current government a “sh**show”.

Just nine years ago the then Tory incumbent had hoovered up 58% of the vote – almost five times more than the second place candidate.

Political leaders, charity workers and activists in the town point to a bungled Tory campaign, a secret poverty crisis and Brexit as reasons why the Lib Dem’s candidate has been given a 61% chance of robbing Tunbridge Wells of its status as the heart of Conservative Britain.

One in five kids suffer from food poverty in Tunbridge Wells, where Nourish Community Foodbank has given out 30% more parcels to hungry residents each year since 2012.

Dawn Stanford, the foodbank’s operations director, told The Mirror of the shockingly high number of desperate Tunbridge Wellians who now need help to eat each week as the cost-of-living crisis makes the massive challenges of Covid “look easy”.

“People are more desperate now,” she said.

“They’re working as hard as they can work, they are living to their budget, but they can’t make ends meet. I don’t know many people who have savings, they are living pay-check to pay-check. Normal life expenses are tipping people over now.”

It is not just isolated elderly people or those living in Tunbridge Wells’ harder up areas such as Sherwood and Broadwater who receive one of the 300 food parcels Nourish now sends out each week, but children who attend the town’s famously high performing grammar schools, Dawn claims.

Dawn has also helped terminally-ill residents unable to feed themselves and families plunged into crisis by a sudden death.

LBC radio presenter Iain Dale had to pull out of the race to replace retiring incumbent Greg Clark after the resident of 27 years was recorded saying he “never liked” Tunbridge Wells and “I’d quite happily live somewhere else”.

If that doesn’t give Conservative voters a reason to turn out on Thursday, then the ongoing saga of the long derelict, bordered up cinema site in the town centre certainly won’t.

Since 2000 the plot has remained empty and sat on by speculating property developers, who refused to provide public access to a huge chunk of land or build on it despite many thwarted attempts by the Tory run council to get them to do so.

Residents fed-up with seeing part of their once thriving town centre derelict and become an unofficial refuge for rough-sleepers handed the Lib Dems overall control of the council this year, with plans now well underway for the plot to be developed into retirement homes.

The man hoping to continue this success for the party on July 4 is Mike Martin, a Senior Fellow at King’s College London who has served in the Army in Afghanistan and is arguably the closest thing the Lib Dems have to their own Rory Stewart.

Mr Martin told The Mirror that the race was “super close” but winnable, in part thanks to a recent demographic shift away from “old retired Colonels” to young families with more liberal views who have moved out of London.

He is trying to convince them to abandon the Tory ship by selling himself as an internationalist, “a bit right wing economically”, “explicitly pro-green” and strong on defence.

Mr Martin also boasts of being “pro-European” in a pitch to voters in the only constituency in Kent to vote Remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum.

“People totally feel like the Conservative Party has abandoned them,” he said.

“It’s a simple choice in Tunbridge Wells. On July 5 there will either be a Conservative or Lib Dem MP. If you have a Lib Dem MP, you will have someone who lives in the town who is campaigning to fix it.”

Mr Martin has convinced at least one once loyal Tory to support him.

Anthony Harris runs a parish council in the area and was a long-time local member of the Conservatives, until he grew sick of the party’s obsession with Brexit and its failed economic policies.

He has seen the Tories “cleared out” of Remain voters since 2019, to be replaced by avid Brexiteers.

“Most moderate members have been driven out and it’s just getting worse. You go along to these meetings and you have a rump now. It’s a cross between league of empire loyalists and the BNP lot.”

Mr Harris claims the government has been in disarray since Boris Johnson opened a “moral vacuum” within it.

“This betting is the last straw. It is entirely consistent with the fact that since Partygate there is no accountability.”

The former pharmaceutical company boss has decided the “honest” and “clever” Mr Martin will have his vote this Thursday, breaking a decades long streak of him voting blue.

Whether enough former Tories follow to end 114 years of Tory rule remains to be seen.