Winner in 2019: Wendy Chamberlain (LibDems)
NOBODY could accuse the voters of North East Fife of not doing their level best to get their constituency noticed over the last two General Elections.
In 2017, they re-elected the incumbent SNP MP Stephen Gethins, but only by a majority of two votes over the Liberal Democrats – the narrowest margin in any UK constituency race since the Second World War (joint narrowest if the voided 1997 result in Winchester is considered).
Then in 2019, Gethins (below) was the one and only sitting SNP MP to be defeated, losing to Wendy Chamberlain even though his party was making sweeping gains elsewhere in the country en route to a landslide.
Additionally, the Conservatives’ vote share in North East Fife plummeted by 11 percentage points in 2019, the biggest drop seen in any UK constituency.
All of these facts are connected to each other, because the peculiarities of the 2019 result were directly caused by the frustrated reaction of Conservative supporters to the 2017 outcome.
However dramatic Gethins’s photo-finish win had been, he had only taken 33% of the vote, and that wouldn’t even have put him close to victory if Unionist voters had been more united behind his leading opponent in the way that had happened in several other similar constituencies.
In recent days, an indiscreet Labour candidate in Aberdeen has effectively confirmed what was always obvious from the empirical evidence: that Unionist parties have previously had informal understandings to give one party in each constituency a free run against the SNP.
But it seemed there was some sort of localised glitch in North East Fife, because the LibDems and Tories actually did try hard against each other there in 2017.
Perhaps the LibDems were simply unwilling to cede ground in a constituency that in the very recent past had been held by their former leader, Menzies Campbell.
The result was that the Tories increased their vote share by eight points, but couldn’t break out of third place, and they therefore deprived the second-placed LibDems of crucial votes that could have overwhelmed the SNP.
It was consequently very easy in 2019 for the Lib Dems to point to their near miss two years earlier and say to Tory supporters that the SNP hold was the fault of the Conservatives for splitting the Unionist vote.
That explains the collapse of Tory support in the constituency in 2019, and a corresponding surge in Lib Dem support that was enough to secure the gain, even though the SNP vote was substantially up too in line with national trends.
A Norstat poll over the weekend showed that a substantial minority of the Scottish electorate are planning to vote tactically on Thursday, with the biggest group being those who would otherwise be voting Tory but are instead intending to vote Labour or LibDem in an attempt to stop the local SNP candidate.
That would imply that the Tory voters in North East Fife who moved en masse to the LibDems five years ago will stick with the Lib Dems this time. But the big question is how many additional potential Tory tactical voters are still left out there for the LibDems to squeeze.
At 13%, the Tories’ local vote share in 2019 was only half of their Scotland-wide percentage. That’s exceptionally low given that North East Fife and its predecessor seat had been a solid Tory heartland for decades until 1987.
It may be that the Tories have already been stripped back to a core vote who would be much less likely to consider making a tactical switch now.
And while many people’s mental picture of North East Fife may be of wealthy Tories in St Andrews or Crail voting tactically for the Liberal Democrats, that’s only one side of the equation.
There are also lower-income voters in the constituency, particularly in Leven, and boundary changes are now bringing in a chunk of territory from the SNP-Labour battleground seat of Glenrothes.
In fact, on the notional results within the new boundaries, the SNP would have won the constituency in 2019 by two percentage points, with a healthy vote share of 41%.
The problem is, though, that if the national poll trends are to be believed, that vote will drop on Thursday, perhaps to the low 30s or even worse, meaning the LibDems will feel that the seat is still theirs to lose.
It’s not a lost cause for the new SNP candidate Stefan Hoggan-Radu by any means, but a static LibDem vote is unlikely to be good enough for him. He’ll actually need the LibDem vote to slip.
