The Lib Dems represent one big shrug, so why did Conservative utopia Mickleham fall for it, asks Simon Clarke
The Running Horses in Mickleham, Surrey is a dream of a pub. Beer in hand, you sit in its shady garden surveying the wondrous St Michael and All Angels Church. Happily, the Church is open to the public, so you can venture into its cool, flagstoned calm. From the elaborately carved pulpit to the Civil War banners to the grave of the former Canadian PM Richard Bennett, anyone who loves churches, history and politics (and who doesn’t?!) is somewhere close to heaven. The surrounding village is a cluster of beautiful homes, grazing horses and beautiful trees, now burgeoning with fruit.
Mickleham is nestled close to Leatherhead and Dorking in Surrey, and it’s hard to imagine somewhere that feels further from London’s appalling decline, lately embodied by Oxford Street being festooned in “Mind the Grab” warnings not to use your phone lest it be snatched.
It’s also hard to imagine somewhere that feels like a purer encapsulation of Conservatism. And yet, for the first time in living memory, Mickleham doesn’t have a Conservative MP. Like so much of the home counties, its constituency voted Liberal Democrat last year. Now I hate to lower the tone. But I really, really dislike the Lib Dems. Not the individuals of course, but the corporate being, the vacuity-made flesh that is that party.
Why hate the Lib Dems? Oh don’t get me started
Why such strong feelings, you ask? It’s not because of their scarcely believable dishonesty, to which Labour and Conservative campaigners alike will bear witness (Lib Dem bar charts make OBR forecasts feel like holy writ). It’s not because of their Japanese-soldiers-in-the-jungle unwillingness to let go of Brexit. It’s not even their pull-up-the-drawbridge Nimbyism, blocking everything from new homes to reservoirs, while the rest of Britain stagnates.
No. Rather it’s because Lib Dem MPs represent one big shrug, a vote for none of the above, a collective abdication of responsibility. As the country hurtles to hell in a handcart, they are neither left nor right – simply self-righteous. Now they have 72 MPs, it matters if all they can summon are platitudes and litter-picking exercises.
Given most of their seats were taken from the Conservatives, it’s the task of the centre-right to get enough people back in the game. The crucial question is how.
You might think – and a minority of Conservatives do – that this means trimming to the centre, trying to appeal to the soggy liberalism that Lib Dem MPs preach. But this would be entirely wrong. My think tank Onward conducted the largest post-election poll with Focaldata and JL Partners. There are two key findings from this. First, that immigration is why the Conservatives lost. It was the number one policy concern for voters who switched from Tory in 2019 to Lib Dem in 2024. And second, those who left the Conservatives for the Lib Dems actually had very similar views on crime and immigration to those who deserted the Tories for Reform. In both cases, people voted for the party best placed to kick the Tories out.
In other words, the party can win back the former Conservative voters of Mickleham in the same way it can win back those in Middlesbrough. Show that the Conservatives are the party with a proper plan to control the borders, cut crime and restore economic growth, and people will take a second look at the centre-right. But if the party is going to rebuild the relationship with the people it let down, it needs to understand properly why it lost them in the first place.
Sir Simon Clarke is the director of Onward, the centre-right think tank