In a brief gap between knocking on doors, Gen Kitchen pauses to consider the paradox of the byelection she is fighting: in a seat with an 18,500 Conservative majority and two decades of Tory incumbency, virtually everyone expects her to win for Labour, and with some ease.
“It does worry me,” she concedes, shuffling the bundle of leaflets she is handing to residents on the estate of 1970s homes in Higham Ferrers, a small market town in Northamptonshire, a few miles outside Wellingborough.
“We have a good promise rate from the door knocks, we get really good responses from Facebook, but I’ve got used to losing in the Labour party, and I’m not quite over it yet. I don’t want to be in a position where I lose by 200 votes and I think: ‘I should have done more door-knocking.’
“And we’re not complacent. An 18,500 majority in anybody’s money is really difficult to overturn.”
It is fair to say that the Wellingborough byelection, where constituents will vote in a replacement for Peter Bone on 15 February, is unusual in several ways.
To begin with was the manner of Bone’s departure. The veteran Brexiter was ousted in a recall petition after a watchdog found he had bullied a staff member and exposed his genitals near their face, which Bone denied.
The local Conservatives then chose as their candidate a local councillor, Helen Harrison, who is Bone’s relatively new partner, after his separation from his longtime wife and office secretary, Jennie – who is also a councillor, and on the same local authority.
All this, coupled with the Tories’ dismal national polling status and Labour’s overturning of even bigger Conservative majorities in October byelections in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire, means Kitchen is the overwhelming favourite.
A Northamptonshire local who went on to be a councillor in Newham, east London, Kitchen had become a highly visible presence in the constituency even before Bone’s departure was confirmed.
In contrast, Harrison has been largely hidden from media scrutiny. Local Tories rebuffed the Guardian’s request to meet her, saying she was too busy knocking on doors, talking up her status as a local and a keen and early fan of Brexit.
Even ministers have been staying away, the only exceptions being Andrea Leadsom and Tom Pursglove, who have neighbouring constituencies.
Some might argue that Harrison’s campaign is failing even on basic optics: anyone visiting her Wellingborough HQ, hastily repurposed from Bone’s constituency office, is greeted by an abandoned car dumped directly outside, its tyres flat and interior filled with rubbish.
Yet another unpredictable factor is Reform UK. The Nigel Farage-formed party has put up one of its deputy leaders, the businessman Ben Habib, and hopes to show it can translate strong recent national polling into votes, something that could seriously harm the Conservatives in the general election.
As ever with the successors to Ukip, its campaigning is simultaneously energetic and somewhat freewheeling. On the day the Guardian joins it, a promised contingent of canvassers from the West Midlands has been decimated by food poisoning after an ill-fated trip to a rib restaurant. This leaves just two people, and the party’s part-time press officer, to tour addresses in Rushden, near Higham Ferrers.
What they lack in numbers they compensate for in fervour, at one point chasing Bone down the high street after he is spotted loping past carrying a clipboard. After he vanishes, one of the canvassers, a 76-year-old who wants to be known by just her first name, Ruby, talks a string of people into attending a party event featuring the former Tory minister Ann Widdecombe.
Speaking later to the Guardian, Habib said he hoped the party would do better than in Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth, where it took 3.7% and 5.4% of the vote respectively, now that Reform is polling nationally at up to 10%.
“People then, I think, on the whole still hadn’t heard of Reform,” he said. “But with all the coverage we’ve had over the past few months, there’s a much broader recognition of who we are, and that’s obviously a good thing as far as we’re concerned. That level of support and recognition simply didn’t exist in the last two byelections. It’s going to be interesting to see if that transfers into votes on the day. I get a sense that people are angry about the state of the country.”
There are a number of possible outcomes to all this, almost all of which feel unfavourable to the Conservatives, who are expected to lose another seat on the same night. Kingswood, on the edge of Bristol, lost its sitting Tory MP after the former energy minister Chris Skidmore, whose majority was 11,000, quit in dismay at the government’s push to drill for new fossil fuels.
Asked how they would vote on 15 February, Wellingborough constituents give different answers, but none seemed to involve definite support for Harrison.
“It’s probably time for a change – I think she’ll do a good job,” Kenneth Horton, a retired accountant, said after chatting to Kitchen on her canvassing round. “My only problem is Keir Starmer. He doesn’t impress me at all. I don’t know if it’s because he’s not a very good speaker – which is surprising, considering he’s a lawyer – but there seems to be no fire there. At all. Johnson was inspirational, but he was a fool to himself.”
Jacqueline, out shopping in Wellingborough with her husband, Peter, said neither of them had yet chosen which of the 11-strong field to support. But even as a long-term Conservative voter, she had already made one decision: “I know who I won’t vote for: the Tories. It’s mainly what has gone on locally. It’s the way the new person, his partner, has got in. It’s all a bit strange, isn’t it?”
