Roll up, roll up and roll up your sleeves prospective Conservative candidates

In July Kemi Badenoch made a speech, whilst Nigel Farage battled a bin in Clacton and Andy Burnham, having dispatched Kier Starmer to a bin in Westminster, figured out how to be the Mayor of Britain.

While Burnham continues to work on his Tik-Tok game, the clock is running on the mission Badenoch set for the Conservatives:

“We are recruiting serious people who understand common sense, can get stuff done and can unite the country. In the unlikely event that Burnham does call a snap election – and I do not think he will, because turkeys do not vote for Christmas – we will be ready. Since I last wrote in the Telegraph about how we will recruit the next generation of Conservative candidates, we have been deluged with brilliant applications. More than 2,000 people applied, and we will now step up our selection process over the summer as we build a government in waiting.”

I didn’t mention Farage en passant. His post Clacton victory holiday has been rent by squabbling in the top team while he’s away. A lot of the focus has been on the egregious Zia Yusuf the indomitable antedote to charm, a man who has branded himself a “Lethal Election Threat” to the Tories.

For a man who hasn’t been elected to anything but donated his way to a top position in Reform UK, he’s literally gone from ‘buy’ to L.E.T.

He hasn’t stood as a candidate and they turned him down for Runcorn, to plonk for Pochin. She’s not the only former Tory in their ranks-of-former-Tories which brings me back to Badenoch’s mission.

Next week as St Giles day (yes it really is) ushers in the month of September the Conservatives open up the first tranche of constituencies they want to find candidates for and there’s some eye-catching ones, not least in a seat one defector thought better of a by-election at the time of their departure.

So roll up those who are ‘in it to win it’ here’s the first tranche of seats being contested in September and what you need to know.

Newark

Current MP: Robert Jenrick (Reform) majority secured as a Conservative, 3,572. Electorate on 4th July 2024: 79,783. Turnout 67%.

Rob needs no introduction to ConHome readers, as at one point he dominated our reader survey ‘Shadow Cabinet Leadership Table’. We now know around the time of last year’s Conservative Party Conference he’d started talking to Farage via ConHome Founder and until recently Reform member Tim Montgomerie (having left the Conservatives in Dec 2024). Kemi dramatically sacked Jenrick, and on 15th January this year removed his membership after finding “irrefutable evidence” of his plan to defect, which he hastily did some hours later at a press conference with Nigel Farage.

A UK Polling report on 30 June suggested the Conservatives will win Newark at a General Election with 36 per cent of the vote, while Jenrick and Reform will finish second with 27 per cent. This of course is no guarantee. Jenrick is a workaholic, very driven and a good campaigner. The seat will need an equally determined Conservative candidate to beat him, which is surely something CCHQ and Badenoch would cherish.

So far it’s been reported his former friend and County Councillor for Newark East, Sam Smith is interested in delivering that win, he will not be alone though in wanting this one.

Clacton

Current MP: Nigel Farage (Reform) majority secured in by-election (Reform Hold) 13 August 2026 12,784. Electorate on 13 August 2026 79,785. Turnout 44%

As we know the Conservatives, like Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens decided not to stand in a by-election called by Farage and in which he decided to run, so here is the 4th July 2024 result which saw, at the 8th attempt, him finally become an MP; Majority 8,405. Electorate 78,245 Turnout 58.7%.

To unseat Farage would be, quite clearly, a major Tory coup and it is entirely possible that the seat will be fought again, before any General election depending on the outcome of the parliamentary Standards Commissioner’s investigation into the allegation of failing to declare the five million pounds crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne handed over to Farage in the year before he became an MP, as the rules stipulate. Farage maintains the rules do not apply to ‘personal gifts’ and he was advised of this at the time he became an MP.  He has subsequently dismissed the process as a political attack on Reform, suggesting it’s not such a big problem if he ‘failed to sign some piece of paper’.

So the Tories may have included Clacton in this first tranche to be ready for by-election v2.0 as well as the next General Election

Previous MP for Clacton former actor (now acting again by the way) Giles Watling, 73, lost in 2024 but despite suggesting he’d be prepared to have run in the last by-election, and having had a personal core popularity in the seat – more a victim of the brand rout, than a rejection of him – it’s not clear if he’d be looking to run at a GE again. And – and maybe it shouldn’t be – age might play a factor in that for the local Tories.

The seat will be a fight, but it’d be a high profile one for whoever takes it on.

South West Norfolk 

Current MP: Terry Lamb (Labour) Majority 630. Electorate 74,724. Turnout 59.3%

So who wants to be the inheritor of Liz Truss? Yes this is the seat she lost in 2024. A second blow after having been elected and then rejected in the shortest premiership of modern times, just 49 days as Prime Minister. There was a time when Truss was hugely popular with the membership, she beat Rishi Sunak to the leadership, and she had been a prominent cabinet minister for some time. Word was in the FCDO that half her team worked on Foreign Affairs and the other half worked on her leadership campaign which started a long time before the official one. Well the campaign to win it back starts soon, and it will be hard. Labour hold the seat but Reform did very well in the local elections in Norfolk in May, and the best can be accurately said of the Conservative performance was that it was not nearly as bad as predicted, but still bad. Terry Lamb however sits on just a 630 majority. Speaking of majorities…

Hendon

Current MP: David Pinto-Duschinsky (Labour) Majority 15 Electorate 74,865 Turnout 55.1%

It was Ameet Joggia who fought the General Election in 2024 and in a way became a casualty of the new political reality we have. Pinto-Dushinsky wins for Labour with a majority of just 15 votes, on 15,855 Joggia got 15,840. Third was Reform UK’s Joshua Pearl on 3038, more than enough had it been a straight Tory-Labour fight to give Joggia the seat. But that’s not how things are so the new Conservative Candidate will as in many of these cases have to fight on two fronts, but Hendon is clearly one the Tories feel they could claw back.

David Pinto-Duschinsky is the son of right leaning legal and constitutional expert Michael Pinto-Ducshinsky connected to Policy Exchange and a member in 2011–12, of the Commission on a Bill of Rights set up by the UK Coalition Government in 2010 to advise on reform of the 1998 Human Rights Act. In March 2012, he resigned live on TV after complaining that his views were being ignored.

David is a PPS in the Department for Work and Pensions, both under Starmer and Burnham popped up in a Parliamentary debate to clash with Conservative Esther McVey over her bill for mandatory labelling of halal and kosher meat.

Chelsea and Fulham

Current MP: Ben Coleman (Labour) Majority 152. Electorate 78,468 Turnout 60%.

Former Conservative Greg Hands, a former party Chairman in 2023, a Minister for London (might he fancy running for Mayor?) and a Minister for Trade Policy lost the seat in 2024. To take this one on, one suspects a knowledge of bridges, and the closure of one, will be important. The Liberal Democrats came third in this seat in 2024, but on not so much more than Reform. Again Ben Coleman’s majority is small. He declined to stand down as a councillor in Hammersmith and Fulham at first but did subsequently relinquish that role.

Ribble Valley

Current MP: Maya Ellis (Labour) Majority 856. Electorate 80,484 Turnout 64.6%

Former Conservative MP Nigel Evans, a deputy Speaker will tell anyone that he positively lived for Parliament and being an MP. Here’s another seat where the Reform vote counted. Evans losing by 856 votes, where Reform got 8524. this Nigel has not announced he’s standing again though we are aware friends and colleagues urged him to get back on the list. It’s a a beautiful part of the country so there’s that for anyone wanting to be the candidate, but it’ll be the less pretty realities of today’s political landscape that any new candidate will have to navigate here.

Aylesbury

Maidstone & Malling

Current MP: Helen Grant (Conservative) Majority 1,674 Electorate 76,449. Turnout 60.7%

This is a seat the Conservatives won in 2024. The majority is smaller than you’d like but it’s Tory. Labour were the second challanger and Reform third but short with over a 4k margin from Helen Grant MP who won it. Helen is the shadow Solicitor General and announced in July she’d stand down after 19 years as an MP (our own ConHome columnist Matthew Jeffery can be spotted in the photo) She’ll go at the next election, saying that despite being well, a fight with cancer had made her decide now was the time to ‘pass on the baton‘. She referred to the time she’d had as a candidate to bed into the seat when her predecessor, one Anne Widdecombe, announced she’d be stepping down. That run up time for whoever the Tories pick next could be about the same if an election is in 2028/9. The fact this was Anne Widdecombe’s old seat and the ghastly circumstances around her death, may make this a seat Reform would dearly like to take, but she was a Conservative longer than she was anything else, and as I grew up in this constituency, knowing Anne from my teens, I’ll be watching this one with an added interest.

Poole

Current MP: Neil Duncan-Jordan (Labour)  Majority 18 Electorate 72,509. Turnout 61.4%

Robert Syms was the Conservative MP for Poole, an MP since 1997 winning despite the Blair landslide of that year. He spent time in the Treasury and as a whip. The majority in 2024 of just 18 was accepted only after a number of recounts. Again Syms was close to winning with is 14,150 but Reform were third with 7429. Poole was also a symbol of the scale of defeat in 2024 for the party overall, Syms seeing a drop of 27% from 2019 result where his majority was 19,116. Again the Tories think they could get this one back and want someone in soon who can start the work of trying to do so.

And

Redditch

Current MP: Chris Bloore (Labour) Majority 789. Electorate 71,042. Turnout 59.6%

Rachel McLean, friend and colleague to Kemi Badenoch, is now in the Lords, but here she lost the seat she’d won in 2017, holding the seat vacated by Karen Lumley, fondly remembered by me as one of the first Tory MP’s I got to know well. We lost Karen on 25 May 2023, at the age of 59. She fought Redditch twice unsuccessfully before defeating a sitting Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith in 2010.  Rachel has not left politics by any means, and is an active Tory member of the Lords, and supports Badenoch’s leadership though no longer her Strategy Director, after a reshuffle of the team last summer.

Redditch has swapped hands and is one of those seats that if it can be taken from Labour’s Chris Bloore, is one of theose seats the media look at for an indication of the scale of a revival in a party’s fortunes. The seat has people who work at Jaguar Land Rover but the Tories are looking for a tiger to take it back.

ConservativeHome will take a look at the October tranche in late September.