Labour on red alert as Derbyshire Tories scent victory at county council

Written by Matthew Parris and published in The Times on Sat 30th May 2009

Liberal Democrat Candidate for Derbyshire County Council Division of Dovedale - James Jennings

It's hard now to picture local Derbyshire politics as I found them on arriving as a prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate in 1978.

The county council had been Tory since 1977. County councils like Derbyshire could be. Even though Britain had swung to Labour in 1974. Even though the county included (then, not now) the city of Derby, with its bucketloads of Labour votes. Even though the pits, where thousands of Labour voters worked, were still going strong. Even though it never has been a typical leafy English county, but rather the edgy grafting-together that it still is, of the livestock farming and sweet, green Pennines in the rural north and west (much of it the Peak District National Park) and the hard-bitten little towns of the coal, steel and engineering flatlands in the east, bordered by the roar of the M1.

The Tories lost Derbyshire in 1981. They have never regained the county. They've gradually lost, too, all their parliamentary seats except one - the constituency of West Derbyshire, which I represented. Apart from Labour's loss of Chesterfield to the Liberal Democrats, they hold all the other Derbyshire constituencies.

Why the Tory retreat? The pit closures hurt, the dismantling of large parts of the steel industry hurt, the "north-south divide" hurt. And even the hugely controversial county council Labour leadership of David Bookbinder never appeared to offer the Conservative party a ghost of a chance of getting Derbyshire back. The arrival of less abrasive leadership after Mr Bookbinder's departure only made it harder.

Now, however, for the first time in 28 years, they sense that chance. Tories I've been speaking to are quietly confident that from the present position (Labour 38 seats; Tory 14; Lib Dem 10 and independent 2), Labour will lose overall control. One party agent told me he felt that the 12 per cent swing necessary to give the Tories overall control might be within their grasp, but that the likely result was no overall control.

My sense of it is that the official Conservative position is that Labour will lose but the Tories won't win - but the secret hope is that they just might, and they do think it possible.

No huge local authority issues dominate the Derbyshire scene. "I'm hopeful," Colin Swindell, the Labour candidate in my own division of Dovedale, "that where I'm known I can win some extra votes. But elsewhere most people will be voting on national issues, particularly MPs' expenses."

Mr Swindell has about as much chance of winning Dovedale as Matthew Johnson, at 19 the Tories' youngest candidate, does of winning Clay Cross in the Bolsover constituency. Two brave men. Derbyshire is still pretty tribal. Simon Spencer, Mr Swindell's Tory opponent, agrees that the big issue is MPs' expenses, but puts it differently. "Being local, and locally known, is what's going to make the difference," he said. "Voters are angry with all the main parties because of the MPs' allowances affair. We're all experiencing it on the doorstep."

The Liberal Democrat candidate, James Jennings, used more vigorous language. "They take one look at you on the doorstep," he told me, "and it doesn't matter which party you're from. They say things like, 'I can't even believe you're showing your face around here'. But I try to calm them down and get them talking."

Nobody is talking about the European elections, where the loss of the Kilroy-Silk effect (he's not standing again) should help the Tories to one extra seat. The talk is only of MPs' expenses and Derbyshire is not immune from the sense of something close to a witch-hunt. That public anger is affecting all main parties, that there are no local government stories driving the campaigns and that the Labour county council with its softly-softly approach to Derbyshire voters and strong performance on Audit Commission league tables is hard to label as a rogue authority, all make the county a good litmus test of the national mood.

This is not particularly Cameron country, even among Tory voters. The Tory leader has made progress in winning a measure of respect among his natural supporters and floating voters, but I sense no Cameroon enthusiasm.

Derbyshire's Labour vote is typically "old" Labour. In the countryside where I live, it is associated with a few farm workers and with the quarrying industry. In the flatlands of Derbyshire's more industrial east, its origins lie in the pits, the furnaces and the shopfloors. It is moderate, dogged, quiet and an affair as much of the heart as of the intellect. It has also been loyal, sustaining a fair few deadbeats at Westminster, as well as national figures such as Dennis Skinner, Tony Benn (during his second parliamentary incarnation) and Margaret Beckett. How loyal, however, this county election will put to the test. In Dovedale it's the Conservatives' Chief Whip, Patrick McLoughlin, MP, my successor, who's had his brush with controversy over election expenses, though two public meetings may have helped to calm whatever disquiet there may have been.

But apart from Liberal Democrat Chesterfield, the voters throughout the rest of the county have Labour MPs as their representatives of the breed. The faith of Derbyshire's Labour faithful will be tested on Thursday as never before. I'd put a bet at odds of three to one on an overall Tory victory, not just a Labour loss.