Polished boots clatter over the cobbles as a group of uniformed military officers emerge from a flag-raising ceremony onto Richmond’s bustling marketplace.
Many stride away in search of lunch after an hour spent in Friary Gardens, where the war memorial stands for the fallen of this historic town in Rishi Sunak’s constituency on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales national park.
Among those who step into the midday sunshine is 69-year-old Paul Betteridge, proudly wearing his campaign medals and a blazer bearing the emblem of his former regiment, Third Royal Tanks, to celebrate Armed Forces Day.
Their motto – “Fear nought” – could, for more than a century, have applied to the Conservative Party in this safest of safe Tory seats. But this year, something feels different.
Betteridge and his wife Beryl, also 69, shake their heads and laugh when asked how they rate Sunak’s chances of being returned as Richmond’s MP, let alone prime minister.
“It’s been a disastrous campaign, and the Conservatives needed a good one more than ever,” says Betteridge. “The campaign started badly with him being filmed standing in the rain, and it got steadily worse from there.”
So has there been a low point, in his view, during this gaffe-ridden election period?
Betteridge sighs and says: “Look, I was 25 years in service with the Tank Regiment, serving all over the world, and I worked for the MoD for a long time after that.
“I’ve been out for 30 years, but I still attend ceremonies like this one today, the flag-raising, because it’s important to remember the sacrifices people made. It seems obvious that we should do that.
“And yet Rishi Sunak didn’t think it was worthwhile staying for the Dunkirk commemoration. The world’s leaders are all gathered there to pay their respects to those who gave their lives, and where is he? Missing.
“It was a terrible moment, and as much as he admitted he made a mistake, it showed really poor judgement – and that, more than anything, got to me.
“I have to be honest, though: the alternatives aren’t great. I’ll probably vote Labour again, but they’re not convincing; we’re finding it very hard this time.
“It’s all very well for the Lib Dems and Greens to make popular policies, because they know they aren’t getting in, and [Nigel] Farage is a disgrace – he says what he thinks people want to hear.”
Sunak is set to return the lowest majority of any Conservative candidate to have held the Richmond constituency in 114 years. If voting goes as the polls suggest, he will cling on as MP in the new constituency of Richmond and Northallerton.
Were this election taking place in 2019, he would return a majority of 24,000, according to the Survation poll for the 38 Degrees campaign website. That projected majority is only 3,000 short of the 27,210 majority he actually returned five years ago.
However, now it’s become tighter than anyone in this true blue corner of Yorkshire could ever have predicted.
The survey suggests that Sunak could win just 39 per cent of the vote share, ahead of Labour candidate Tom Wilson on 29 per cent, with Farage’s Reform UK party in third place on 18 per cent.
Whatever the outcome, it looks set to confirm a remarkable plunge in popularity for Sunak, and gives Wilson a chance, albeit a fleeting one, of pulling off one of the great electoral coups.
The last Conservative to lose this seat in Richmond was John Hutton, who ceded power to the Liberal Francis Dyke Acland in 1906.
Acland lost his seat four years later to the Honourable William Orde-Powlett, and it has stayed blue ever since in an unbroken run of 114 years, mostly with overwhelming majorities.
Sunak was gifted the safe seat in 2015, taking over from former Conservative leader William Hague, a Yorkshireman and a popular MP, who now bears the title Lord Hague of Richmond. At the time, Sunak was a rising star in the Tory party thanks to his razor-sharp skills as an economist.
Former soldier Flint, 76, who dislikes his Christian name so much that he “retired it years ago”, doesn’t think Sunak has won over the folk of rural Richmondshire in the same way.
“You never see him,” he says. “You might see him in Northallerton, because that’s near where his house is, but never in Richmond. Now, Willie Hague, he was different. You’d see him popping into the shops, and he always had time for people; he’d stop for a chat.
“I won’t vote for Sunak, and you’ll be hard-pushed to find someone who has a good word for him at the moment. I mean, for one thing, why are his trousers so short? He’s not a tall fella; why can’t he wear a suit that fits? He needs to ditch the drainpipes.”
Irksome as the prime minister’s trousers clearly are to Flint, they aren’t the greatest of his concerns.
“They’ve ruined the economy, and the cost of living is shocking now,” he says. “Here’s an example. I go into my supermarket for cat food, and it’s £4.50, then it goes up again to a fiver, and now it’s just hit £5.50. For cat food!
“I just don’t trust them, and as an ex-military man, I found him leaving the Dunkirk ceremony really disrespectful.”
Anyone searching for a reason for Sunak’s apparent slump in popularity might conclude that other military men and women are in agreement with Flint.
Although a largely rural constituency, Richmond and Northallerton also encompasses Britain’s biggest army base, Catterick Garrison.
“It went down badly,” says one serving soldier, who declined to give his name. “He thought people didn’t care any more, and that was atrocious judgement, especially when you have a giant army base in your backyard with 13,000 people serving on it. I know for sure he lost a lot of votes in Catterick over it, including mine.”
He has also lost that of Ken Fairey, 83, traditionally a Conservative voter, who now plans to vote for Reform’s candidate, Lee Martin Taylor, formerly a radar technician in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers.
Fairey, formerly a fitter and turner who went on to serve in the police force and the army, says: “He has been a disappointment as prime minister, there’s no doubting that.
“He chops and changes: one day he’s doing one thing, the next something else. I don’t like the other one either – Starmer. I’m sick of hearing how working-class his upbringing was; it’s just not convincing.
“I’ve voted Conservative, but this time I’m going for Reform. I have a lot of time for Farage: he tells it straight, and to me he comes across as an honest man who tells the truth.
“He couldn’t be any worse, could he? I had faith in Boris [Johnson] and he let us down over the pandemic. Sunak hasn’t done anything to repair that.”
