The radio presenter Iain Dale has withdrawn his bid to be the Conservative candidate for Tunbridge Wells after he was found to have said he did not like the town.
Dale, a longstanding Tory supporter, had resigned from his job on LBC to stand as a candidate in the Kent seat but said he was “not willing to suffer death by 1,000 cuts” over his comments.
Speaking on LBC about his decision to withdraw, Dale said: “I got a text from the local Conservative party saying they’d had a communication from the Lib Dems with this clip from the For the Many podcast two years ago in which I had said – I hadn’t remembered this – I didn’t like living in Tunbridge Wells and would quite happily live somewhere else … There is a context to it but nobody’s interested in context or nuance in these situations.”
Dale, who had previously been a Tory party adviser, said he made the comments two years ago on the podcast and they were part of banter between him and his other presenter, the former Labour home secretary Jacqui Smith.
He said he had told the national and local party that he had criticised Conservative policy in the past, including Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda policy. But he had not remembered making the comments about Tunbridge Wells, and felt this was not possible to overcome as it would have appeared on every Liberal Democrat campaign leaflet.
“I decided on Wednesday evening that I would ask them not to put my name on the shortlist,” he said.
Dale said he did not want to do anything to damage the party and could not be confident about not having said other controversial things in the past, given his long history in broadcasting.
