Broxtowe – why should you be fascinated by this corner of Nottinghamshire? After all, ‘suburb in the East Midlands’ sounds more like the place Adrian Mole diarised from, rather than somewhere to set political pulses pounding.
Yet if there is a best place to stand as a microcosm of English politics, it’s here. It’s the ultimate bellwether constituency, having elected MPs to the governing party since its creation in 1983. The only exception was a ten-month interregnum in 2019 when the vocally anti-Brexit Anna Soubry jumped ship from what looked like a sinking Conservative Party to the lifeboat of The Independent Group with Chuka Umunna. Unfortunately, that particular lifeboat was overloaded with egos and sank without trace in the 2019 general election. Broxtowe duly elected the Conservative candidate, and our conformist reputation was restored.
What’s the fun in normal? Let’s first take a look at what Broxtowe is.
The Broxtowe dumbbell
First, it confusingly doesn’t include the Broxtowe Estate that sits in Nottingham’s city sprawl. No one knows why, except a theory about a boundary commissioner with a fondness for liquid lunches. It’s instead a rather awkward dumbbell shape, with one side the key university-adjacent, cosmopolitan town of Beeston and it’s less prosperous little sister, Stapleford, with a contiguous cluster of suburban villages blurring around them. Then, a long and narrow stretch of rural before a broadening out into DH Lawrence country, with the former pit town of Eastwood, where the aforementioned poet (Lawrence, not Mole) was born and raised.
Recent boundary changes have pushed the brewery town of Kimberly out of Broxtowe and into the North Nottingham constituency, after a local row about how to divvy up the area. The Tories favoured keeping Kimberley and its deep blue satellite villages, and chopping Beeston in half to be rid of a strongly red corner. This failed, partly due to the lack of coherence in their reasoning, and partly due to it being utterly absurd and wildly unpopular.
Darren Henry
The incumbent MP, Darren Henry, has not had a glorious half-decade. Rarely seen (rumour has it he spends his time in Wiltshire, his home county, where he has failed on multiple occasions to be selected as a candidate) and ineffective, he’s regarded as little more than a careerist. A huge Liz Truss fan, he was briefly promoted to the Whips Office where he failed to contain the rebellion that eventually toppled Truss and saw him hauled back onto the back benches.
His ascent to the position of MP was troubled: local Tories much preferred the effective, intelligent and locally-minded Richard Jackson, then the leader of the borough council, but his proximity to Anna Soubry didn’t win him any favours from CCHQ: in parachuted ex-RAF man Darren. As we shall see, he is not the only Broxtowe candidate in 2024 with a troubled relationship with his local party.
While Darren’s majority (5,331) and our historic ability to pick winning party candidates should see him ousted, in 2021 it looked like the Henrys were building a political dynasty here, when his wife, Caroline, was elected as Police and Crime Commissioner. Things unravelled fast though. She was caught speeding on multiple occasions despite promising a crackdown on speeding motorists in her campaign, and Darren was found to have the highest expenses claim in the whole of Westminster, thought to be connected to staffing issues when his constituency manager went rogue and aggressively turned up at the door of a local journalist demanding unflattering stories be removed from publication. I’m well versed with this scandal, I was the journalist he paid a visit to.
Turning red?
Electoral Calculus has Broxtowe turning red at a pretty much nailed on 94%. Yet there is little complacency in a constituency that has seen surprises in 1992 and 2015. UK-wide polling famously struggles to accommodate our First Past The Post, constituency-based system, where local factors too small to be seen by a national poll can be magnified massively at the ballot box. Just this morning, an insider on the campaign for the Labour challenger, Juliet Campbell, told me that they were going to have to fight for every vote.
He may have a point, as she is also a parachuted candidate who displaced a popular local councillor ‒ the left-wing Greg Marshall, who narrowly lost in 2017 and stood again in the 2019 Labour wipe-out ‒ who everyone assumed would be the candidate.
A prominent local Labour source told me as I was putting together this piece that they, and many others, were “not helping to elect a London-based imposed candidate who in my view nothing like the sort of MP that Broxtowe deserves”.
Ouch. With allies like that…
Campbell can still take assurances from the local activist expectations for Darren Henry: a once-loyal, young and hard-working activist merely sent, in response to a question asking if they were ready for an election, a smiley emoji 😊 followed by a sick emoji 🤢 followed by a laughing emoji 😂. This can’t be good news for the incumbent.
Still, she has to build a local profile fast. Of late she hasn’t cut through, possibly working on the assumption of a later election. She’s been clearly caught off-guard, and was, a couple of days after the announcement, seen hurrying around Beeston Tesco getting office supplies together.
Usually, parties will allocate large resources to a marginal like Broxtowe, but with Labour’s tactic to park as many tanks as it can on Tory lawns, this won’t be happening. Campbell’s campaign may not be the casual stroll to the Commons that the national polling implies. It would be a major upset, of course, but anything can happen in the next few weeks. There are no ‘normal’ elections.
Get in touch
I’ll be next reporting on the other contenders, with Lib Dems, Greens and Reform having candidates in place and campaigns hurriedly rolled out. I’d be delighted to hear from readers with any questions, insight or good ol’ scurrilous gossip: message me at lordmattbeestonia@gmail.com or on ex-Twitter at @beeestonia.
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