Adventures in local elections, Ashford Borough 1981-2005

[yellowperil]

Ashford Borough Council wards by county division 1991- Ashford Rural West

One of the reasons why I didn't spend as much time on Central fighting my own election as perhaps I should was that I had responsibilities in other parts of the Borough, and particularly that was true of Rural West,my own home division and already I was in place to fight that for the counties in two years time. My feeling was that this time there was a lot to play for here in several of the Borough wards.  Of course the first thing was to make sure Eileen was safe in Pluckley but she was doing very well as a councillor and making quite an impact both on the ward and as a debater on the floor of the council. One thing which had happened within weeks of getting elected was finding an elderly gentleman in Little Chart, a former farm worker, living in a tin hut with no heating in a severe winter and desperate to be rehoused, and within a very short space of time she had achieved that, and after that the little close-knit community of Little Chart was hers for the asking - we reckon next time LC voted over 85% for Eileen where  formerly it had been her weak spot. That sort of success with her casework was getting her known generally- that particular example was the first of many.

Then , Charing was looking interesting because a row was brewing up between the two halves of the ward, Charing proper and the separate village of Charing Heath, and Bob Rawlings , a Charing parish councillor, was probably the only one who really understood what was going on.

And most interesting of all was the situation in Smarden, where Harold Hilder, the council leader, was retiring. Harold had been a personal friend, by that time for over  a quarter of a century, long before either of us showed any visible interest in politics in one another's presence. That had survived Harold becoming a Tory councillor and even becoming Leader, though privately I wasn't that impressed by his performance as leader. But he was quite prepared to tell me his take on the person the Conservatives had selected as his successor because he was incandescent with rage and he was prepared to say it quite openly to anyone who would listen. The word "crook" was used in the conversations I heard and he was certainly not be voting Tory next time!  And then I came up with  a potential Lib Dem successor. Sheila and Tony Brown lived in Smarden and had been SDP members and Sheila particularly was very well known and liked in Smarden as she ran a small antiques shop ( well junk shop really) in the heart  of the village. She would not however be known in Egerton, the other village in the ward, unlike Harold who had lived in both villages, but that also applied to the new Conservative candidate.. The other snags? Well she wasn't too keen on the whole electoral process and would need to be helped a lot through that, even though she had a lovely friendly approachable personality. She wasn't sure she was really a Lib Dem, she was definitely a Social Democrat and a bit suspicious of Liberals per se, but we had to reassure her there were plenty of Lib Dems who felt the same! And she had family worries - about Tony, whose health was failing and would need a lot of nursing, and about their son Ben who kept going off to dangerous places. Yes it was that Ben Brown!

We persuaded Sheila to stand but I would have to hold her hand a lot through the process.

With three high profile targets in Rural West, we would go easy on the other 5 seats, we thought . We decided not to run a second candidate in Charing, hoping all cross voting would then come to Bob. Clearly we weren't going to run a candidate against Reg Harrington in Kingsnorth, andthere was  a similarly easy decision in Bethersden where the chairman of the parish council, Robin Draper, was standing as an independent against the Tory. The other two we did intend to put up a reasonable fight- they were not to be paper candidates, certainly, but not full targets either. John Longshaw would stand in Great Chart, being surplus in Singleton, and that was complicated by the fact that B ill Miller was also standing there, as an Independent this time. A very interesting man in Hothfield had emerged and caused me huge headaches! Stuart Hammond was keen to stand but he had some shadowy job in Intelligence and it wasn't very clear whether he was free  to stand or not. He assured me his commanding officer had cleared him to stand and he got energetically stuck in, so that we were beginning to think this was a fourth winnable target in   the division, and then mid-campaign he came back and said permission had been rescinded- his bosses had somehow thought this was a non-political parish council election and when they realised he was standing for a political party and a Lib Dem at that all hell broke loose. Too late to take his name off the ballot paper but for the last two weeks no political activity was possible at all.

The Tories of course had a full complement of candidates (except Kingsnorth - Reg Harrington was heading for a free pass) and were relieved to have a more acceptable person than last time in Great Chart. Tony Maltby certainly looked the part and yet before long he was to be another Tory to go down the Independent route- more of that anon. Labour only put up three paper candidates ,in Great Chart  Hothfield and Smarden- did they also sniff an opportunity there ?- but fortunately not Charing, or our planning there would have gone awry.

Bethersden
R Oliver (Con)       305 (55.2%)
R Draper (Ind)     248  (44.8%)

Charing(2)
D Gillard (Con)       550 (53.2%)
M Patterson (Con) 488
R Rawlings (LD)      484 ( 46.8%)

Great Chart
A Maltby (Con)       409 (48.1%)
CW Miller (Ind)       196 (23.0%)
WJ Longshaw (LD)  141  (16.6%)
A Fagg (Lab)             105  ( 12.3%)

Hothfield
P Patten (Con)          273  (54.2%)
S Hammond (LD)     134   (26.6%)
E Johnstone(Lab)       97   ( 19.2%)

Kingsnorth
R Harrington (Ind)      unopposed

Pluckley
E English (LD)               411 (69.1%)
J Grebby(Con)              184 (30.9%) 

Smarden
S Brown(LD)                  434 (47.5%)
I Scaife (Con)                 401 (43.9%)
A Howlett(Lab)                 79 (8.6%)
 
We finished therefore with 5 Conservatives , 2 Lib Dems and 1 Independent, but with the heartache of missing the second Charing seat by just 4 votes.  Did we make a mistake only putting up one candidate or was the strategy right, just not able quite to deliver?

Eileen now joined the ranks of the established councillors , with a majority to match. Sheila was delighted if a bit shell-shocked to find herself beating the Tory in one of the Conservative party's flagship wards and one previously held by the Leader of the Council. She only served one four-year term as councillor because of her domestic situation,  but she proved a very good councillor and quickly made her mark.  We were left mourning what had happened in Hothfield -still a respectable score with campaigning completely suspended for the last two weeks.  Bill Miller was sufficiently impressed to apply to join the Lib Dems and we welcomed him with open arms.

[yellowperil]

Ashford Borough Council wards by county division 1991- Ashford Rural East

Given the strong campaigning in North and in Rural West, the careful targeting in South, and the total dominance in South East, it may come as a surprise that the Liberal Democrats had completely retreated from Rural East- no candidates at all, not even paper. This left the Conservatives in total command , taking all 7 seats, 2 of them unopposed(Chilham and Mersham this time) The 4 Labour candidates were mostly paper, maybe slightly more than that in Hamstreet, but not really challenging anywhere.That left the most serious challenges coming from the Greens in Wye (no surprises there) and from a trio  of independents in Brabourne, Hamstreet  and Aldington. The latter was the one significant surprise development because the Indy was no less than Peter Boulden , the former Conservative councillor for the ward and a former leader of the Council. Given what was happening in Smarden at the other end of the borough, 1991 was the year of the revolting ex-leaders, and maybe a hint that something really wasn't quite right within the ranks of the Ashford Tory party.

Aldington 
J  Underwood (Con)    389   (61.2%)
P Boulden (Ind)            168   (26.4%)
R Allen (Lab)                   79    (12.4%)

Boughton Aluph
J Nicholson(Con)            459  (73.1%)
A Lawrie(Lab)                 169   (26.9%)

Brabourne
J Dean (Con)                       483 (53.7%)
W Jeanes (Ind)                   284 (31.6%)
S Bland(Lab)                       132  (14.7%)

Chilham
N Williams (Con)                  unopposed

Hamstreet
M Rogers(Con)                    400 (50.3%)
R Davis(Ind)                          203 (25.5%)
H Cook (Lab)                        193  (24.2%)

Mersham
J Simpson Con)                    unopposed

Wye 
JC Coey (Con)                          475 (53.2%)
CA Porter (Green)                   418 (46.8%)

On the face of it, 7 easy Conservative wins. Why were the Lib Dems missing? I think it was simply that they were so thin the ground they had very little available as potential candidates and other areas weren't prepared to release key workers to go off and do missionary work as Dorothy Buckingham had done in Aldington last time. The small number of active workers in Brabourne and Hamstreet, the two most likely wards up to now , weren't available this time. What Rural East needed of course was a by-election to galvanise the party to going in in strength into these apparently hopeless villages and pull off a victory from nowhere, the rabbit out of the hat. Could that ever happen ? Well, keep reading this thread, folks.

[yellowperil]

Ashford Borough Council wards by county divisions 1991- Tenterden

By comparison with Ashford Rural East, at least, the 10 Tory-held wards in the Tenterden division were quite vigorously contested-no free passes going this side of the Borough, even if the Conservatives started favourites here everywhere now the Independents had been ruthlessly crushed last time in fact no independents stood this time so the opposition had to come from Lib Dems and Labour. 8 of the 10 seats had LibDems standing, while Labour had a presence everywhere, so all but two were 3-way fights, and by hindsight it might have been better if any seats were to be snatched from the Tories for the two opposition parties to have come to some seat sharing agreement and then concentrated resources each say in 5 wards= 3-way contests were easy pickings for the Tories. But then of course many in Labour hated the Lib Dems more than they did Labour, and many Lib Dems hated Labour, etc... so it was never going to work. It is perhaps worth pointing out that in the event Lib Dems finished ahead of Labour in all wards where they both stood (except Appledore where it was a dead heat!).

Appledore
M Gray (Con)         265   (61.2%)
C Anthony (LD)         84  (19.4%)
F Smith (Lab)             84  (19.4%)

Biddenden
G Raffe (Con)           429  (56.4%)
P Harras (LD)            262  (27.9%)
B Roberts  (Lab)       120  ( 15.8%)      

High Halden
H Apps (Con)             379  (76.7%)
J Howlett (Lab)          115 (23.3%)

Rolvenden 
AJ Hoad(Con)              597 (76.4%)
J Knight (Lab)               184 (23.6%)

Tenterden St Michaels
E Barrows(Con)            400  (53.5%)
M Jordan (LD)               274  (36.6%)
D McNicholas (Lab)       74    (9.9%)

Tenterden East
E Blake (Con)                   562 (73.0%)
M Berry (LD)                    123 (16.0%)
M  Honeysett (Lab)           85 (11.0%)

Tenterden South-East 
A Hale (Con)                      367 ( 65.3%)
C Singer (LD)                        99 (17.6%)
V Wheatley (Lab)                 96 (17.1%)

Tenterden West
C Rosson (Con)                     357 (69.6%)
E J Miller (LD)                         83  (16.2%)
J Tilbury (Lab)                         73  (14.2%)

Wittersham 
M Burgess (Con)                 410 (59.2%)
E Wright ( LD)                      264 (33.6%)
D Wenham(Lab)                   112 (14.2%)                    

Woodchurch
G Weller (Con)                       576 (65.8%)
E Anthony (LD)                      155  (19.8%)
G Ruckcliff (Lab)                     113 (14.4%)

Very little to cause surprise here and the Conservatives had indeed held all 10 seats pretty comfortably. From a Lib Dem perspective there were a number of really excellent candidates but the effort was spread too thinly to make as much impact as perhaps they should have made. Eileen Anthony who was the  Tenterden branch chair  at the time spent a lot of her time helping other candidates in Tenterden and neglecting therefore her own chance in Woodchurch where her vote went backwards. For anyone reading this from an area voting by thirds, understand how difficult all out elections on a 4 year cycle can be - this Borough is a classic example.

Across the Borough the final outcome was  Cons 29, LibDems 11, Labour 7 and others 2, a very slight weakening of Conservative  control but still a majority over the combined Lab/LD/Indy forces of 9 seats. Another  5 gains from somewhere were required next time to move back to NOC,but unless Labour and Lib Dems could find a way to put together a coalition that would still look like Conservative minority rule.  Overthe next four years we need to plan where we could find another 5 or more gains , and we had to start building some rapport with Labour, difficult though that might be, as the prospect of beating the conservative machine single-handedly looked pretty nigh impossible. 

[Pete Whitehead]

[yellowperil]

Lovely Pete. If you look at that spreading yellow stain on the western side of the Borough you may begin to see where my username came from!

[yellowperil]

Smarden Ward

This may be the time to add a little pen portrait of Smarden ward, which is now becoming as central to the story unfolding as was the Pluckley ward a little earlier. The correct name for the ward, I insist, is Smarden, and not Weald North, which Election Centre insist on calling it. The change of name came much later and over my dead body. It was a much larger ward than Pluckley in that it comprised the two villages of Smarden and Egerton each  of which were larger than Pluckley village, whereas the second village in the Pluckley ward, Little Chart, was quite tiny. Obviously the exact numbers vary over the period in question but roughly Smarden was about 1400 population, Egerton say 1100, Pluckley 1000 and Little Chart 200, so Smarden ward was about twice the size of Pluckley - Pluckley was the second smallest ward in Ashford (after Appledore), while Smarden ward was rather above average size and particularly big for its rather scattered population.

Smarden was a typical Wealden village with a big high street (precious few shops remaining though-post office, butchers , Sheila's antiques shop- the one general store just gone)  and once had had some pretensions to urban status  dominated by its massive square-towered church, and still had a medieval Cloth Hall (now a private house) as a relic of its former importance as a centre of the wool trade. It has stood in for a village in Midsomer in some episodes and has in the centre that sort of picture-postcard prettiness beloved of the producers of that show. In spite of the dominant big church it was a strong centre of nonconformity and had at least 4 still flourishing chapels,mainly out in the very distinctive hamlets in the outer parts of the parish.

Egerton by contrast was a ridge top village like Pluckley, astride the Greensand ridge, but with a separate hamlet of Egerton Forstal down on the Weald clay vale.Like Smarden it had a big square-towered church and up on the ridge so you could see it for miles, but like Smarden it had a strong nonconformist tradition away from the village centre. Neither village had the feudal character of Pluckley or Little Chart- no grand house or estate, no aristocratic pretensions.  Nevertheless Pluckley and Egerton shared any services  and that included sharing a vicar and several village societies. There were few such links between Egerton and Smarden , actually more between Pluckley and Smarden, who nowadays share their school management and the ownership of the two butcher's shops. I had become a governor of Smarden  village school before that merger and was for a number of years chair of the governors there.

What was certainly true of both the Smarden ward villages was that politically they seemed both to be strongly Tory in sympathy- if anything Smarden even more determinedly so than Egerton. Every election I could remember Smarden came out with enormous blue posters everywhere, not just the inevitable ones in farmer's fields- Pluckley always had those- but big ones in front gardens of private houses, especially on the main road between Pluckley and Smarden. It had been quite surprising to find little pockets of anti-Tory feeling under the radar when you went canvassing for June Tower in 1987 and for Sheila Brown in 1991, and we still felt it was only the exceptional local circumstances of the fallout about the Conservative candidate in 1991  made it possible to snatch an unlikely victory. It would take a lot of determined work to hold on once that particular cause celebre died away. My feeling was that although Sheila's particular strengths and links lay in Smarden, and when Sheila first encountered Egerton she got a pretty cool response, there was more chance of making actual conversions on the Egerton side of the ward.
The other consideration was that even from the start it was more likely than not Sheila would only serve one term. She enjoyed the work - could she be persuaded? In case not, I was always on the lookout for a realistic successor to Sheila ,but without any success.

[matureleft]

This is a lovely, wistful, human, loving and self-deprecating thread. It sets out beautifully the base level of politics within a microcosm. I look for new instalments each time I log in.

[yellowperil]

General Election April 1992

I have put this post after the May 1991 local elections, for obvious reasons, but of course the lead up to it began well before the 1991 locals or even before the preparations for those elections. We might say that we started work for April 1992 on the day after the last general election result was announced- isn't that always the case. Not least the little matter of finding a new PPC.  I have already indicated that Neil MacMillan had almost run himself( and his business) into the ground during the last election and he made it clear he was not going to be around for anther try. Indeed he did try sounding me out as a possible successor and as I have already related so did Clive Dennis, so I would have had the support of the two most successful previous PCCs from the predecessor parties ( maybe I would not have expected one from Jo Hawkes!), but I was quite clear Westminster (or even pretending to try for Westminster) was not for me. So we had been back looking at a wider net of would-be MPs for Ashford not from within the local party but the big wide world outside.

So we went through the advertising/selection process and top of our shortlist was someone who though no longer living in the constituency wasan Ashford name through and through. Early on in this thread Carlton remembering his early days in Ashford talked about the  importance of the Quaker families embedded in old Ashford, and there was a long overlap between Liberalism and Quakerism in the town and between Quakerism and the town's commerce.  Of all  the families involved, by far the best known were the Headleys, who owned (through different branches of the family)a well known firm of printers (they print a large part of school exam papers), a big grocery shop, and a high class stationery/book/gifts shop- a sort of WH Smiths on stilts- the reason why there was no Smiths in Ashford until Headleys closed its doors.But it was about this time that the shops closed and the big stationers converted into a vast McDonalds!  Anyway , Christine Headley was on our shortlist. She had moved away, was married , a young Mum, and pregnant again at this point, and had an occupation reasonably conducive to home working - she was a professional book indexer. And although married she had always hung on to her maiden name for professional and political purposes, so for all old Ashfordians the name was one to conjure with - though for newcomers to the area,now in a large majority, probably they couldn't have given a stuff. Christine was duly adopted, so our first PPC of the Liberal Democrat era was technically a Liberal by origin rather than SDP ,if anyone cared to think on those lines anymore.When we did the adoption meeting Neil and Imogen Macmillan turned up to hand on the baton, so to speak,which was nice -we never saw  them again after  that.

Christine busied herself with all the things PPCs do and was reasonably effective, though I don't think there was ever quite the level of the somewhat manic drive we had had from Neil. Her campaign photo that we used a lot over that time showed her standing in front of her old shop/McDonalds which probably chimed with a handful of old Ashfordians but for others was probably just cheap publicity for Macs. We did have a lot of her doing all sorts of things in different parts of the constituency but it was the Mcdonalds one that stuck.She was able to move into the town and bought a little cottage close to the town centre so she was now an Ashford Central voter! There was one bit of the campaign that got going much earlier and with far more success than either of the two last elections. We had a really good campaign office on Middle Row, absolutely in the centre of town - a ground floor shop, with shop windows onto Middle Row at the front and more shop windows facing on to the churchyard (and the parish church was a polling station) at the back., plus a vast upstairs room with space for meetings, storage of literature and all the basic facilities. We had come a long way from a caravan in a car park and we could hardly have done better short of taking over McDonalds.

We spent every Saturday of that campaign swamping the town centre and pouring out in numbers from our smart shop and I seem to find myself in the role of the prat with the hand-held microphone terrorising the poor passers-by ( A sort of poor man's Bill Rodgers if you can conceive of such a thing) Don't know how many votes that lost us.

We did have to cope with the problem of having a young mum as a PPC though and poor Christine was always in a rush and often a bit late for things as she juggled to fit it all in. Worth bearing in mind in relation to the debate about AWS - there are some near-inevitable problems with having a youngish  woman as a PPC you might have been able to avoid with a man. That said, our next two PPCs were men and caused us far more angst about timekeeping than ever Christine did!

And then come April...

K Speed (Con)              31,031   (54.6%)
C Headley (LD)             13,672    (24.1%)   
D Cameron (Lab)          11,365    (19.9%)
 CA Porter (Green)             773     (1.4%)

No, not that D Cameron, silly! Doreen Cameron was Ashford's first black parliamentary candidate as far as  I'm aware, and she did pretty well even though still coming third. We were pretty disappointed with Christine's result which was a slight step back from Neil's achievement, or Jo's or Clive's for that matter. We felt we had had a better campaign and a worse result. Yet we had hung on to second place which in later years was to feel more of an achievement than it felt at the time, we had honed our campaigning skills and there was to be some benefit locally from that in later years

Soon after, Christine, Adrian and family departed Ashford and set off to try their political fortunes elsewhere. Well, Stroud, to be precise. There must be somebody else better placed to say how that went. I used to bump in to Christine from time to time after at Lib Dem conferences and was never quite sure what she thought of the Ashford experience.

[yellowperil]

By-elections in the 1991-5 council

I am afraid I am struggling to find the details of the by- elections again for the next period so I may have to go back to Ashford electoral services and see if now they have located their handwritten notes for the 80's, they can also do that for the nineties. At the time I did my search for the eighties ones I actually had a printed newsletter from this era in my hands with details of the most interesting by election on it, so where did I then put it?! In any case I think I have now remembered another significant one (i.e. wards changing hands) and there may be others less significant that I have forgotten about completely. At least I'm pretty sure now of one LibDem gain from Labour and a much more important one from Conservatives and they must come in this council period because the winners are displayed as sitting councillors in the 1995 records and they hadn't been there in 1991! So I have put down this post as a marker where these results can be displayed when I find them!

Edit:  I now have all the details of what I think is the later of these two by-elections : Boughton Aluph , 4/8/1994. The other, a second Stanhope by- election must I think have taken place some time after the 1991 election and before the Boughton one, but exact date and polling figures still elude me at present. I will tell now the full story of the Boughton Aluph by election which is probably the most significant one of my political career, for what that's worth. I hope to be able to insert Stanhope 2 some time soon


Boughton Aluph 4/8/1994
This by election was sadly triggered by the death of the long time Conservative councillor Julian Nicholson,a lovely man and one of the least tribal Conservatives I have ever known,so that it came upon us suddenly with very little warning in the summer of 1994. We had never stood a candidate in this ward,in part because we would have not really wanted to fight against Julian,so there had never been any campaigning there and it was unknown territory,very weak even by the standards of Rural East which was by a long way our weakest division.It was formed from four villages, Boughton Aluph and Eastwell, two villages at the foot of the North Downs escarpment, which shared a parish council, Challock quite  a bit bigger village up on top of the Downs and Molash a smaller and quite self contained village on the road towards Canterbury. We had as far as I can remember just four  members in the ward all of them in Boughton itself,but one of those was currently chair of the parish council, Rita Hawes,but she kept her political affiliations fairly quiet. She was the senior teacher (i.e.the no 3 after Head and Deputy) at the Highworth School, Ashford's Girls Grammar school (yes we not only had retained Grammar Schools but single-sex ones at that).She had good contacts with a lot of young people,mostly just left school, including Louise Fish who had just become our youth representative on our local executive, and shortly afterwards in the same role on the party's national executive, the highest profile youth person I had been working with since Rick Nye. Louise was to play a useful role in this by-election, but the person we wanted as candidate was of course Rita.

I remember  Eileen and I going to interview Rita in her little cottage by the Pilgrim's Way in Boughton Aluph. I had scarcely known her as she kept a very low profile in the party though I knew her husband quite well as John had sometimes helped me with deliveries in Central. Rita was quite willing to fly the flag for the party at this by-election. Great. But it was clear she was assuming we were talking of a paper candidacy, whereas we really wanted to go for it. But of course there was no chance of her actually winning, was there? And then she dropped the bombshell. The election was likely to be on the first Thursday in August? Then she was already booked for a family reunion with her daughter in Boston, Massachusetts, and her stay in the States would not only cover election day itself but also a week or more either side of that date. What to do? No other possible candidate looked anything like as appealing and we thought she would bring on board a core vote in Boughton itself  of maybe 200 votes- say half of those who might vote for her in a non-political parish council election. We swallowed hard and negotiated a deal. She would do her best to work hard for 3 weeks or so before she went off to the States, and we would get a good team out to support her and we would try hard to keep the momentum going through the last week or so and on election day itself - not that that bit was going to be easy given that it would be August andRita would not be the only one to be going away on holiday. Still, Eileen and I were going to be there throughout, and a lot of the legwork would be down to us, and on election day we might be able to call in help from neighbouring local parties in Folkestone and Maidstone, say.

And so we went for it, through the long hot days of that July. Rita was as good as her word and really worked her socks off for three weeks, and was a natural, very good on the door step, and really tried to get herself known on the doorstep -especially in Challock , where we found she had more contacts than we thought, and Molash, where people were friendly but very reluctant to commit.  I helped Rita with the literature, but she also  had her own ideas and was good at that too.We had a number of Rita's friends in Boughton now helping and covering much of that village. By the time Rita and John departed for the States our assessment was that Rita was marginally ahead in Boughton and Eastwell, though we had of course alerted the diehard Tories there and they were fighting back. We had found some support in Challock but we were behind there we thought, more than cancelling out any lead in Boughton, and Molash was still a mystery, which meant in all honesty we had to put it down to Tory. Overall close but maybe not quite good enough, and now we had to keep the fight going without Rita and John.  I was of course remembering the fiasco of Hothfield 2 years previously where promising beginnings were snuffed out by 2 weeks of inactivity at the end, and we kept a small team hard at it with more canvassing and delivering right up to polling day- I never knew whether the Tories had spotted that there was no sign of our candidate! There was of course also a Labour candidate and Labour had polled quite well last time as the only alternative to the Tories - no sign of activity this time and we knew we had picked up quite a few former Labour voters, but never quite sure what was happening under the radar.

We got to polling day, another glorious August day. The hoped-for help from outside proved pretty thin on the ground -well it was August and anyone from outside might have looked up the ward history and concluded that any suggestion from Ashford that this was winnable was hopeless ramping. The only person from outside as far as I can remember was Mary Done the vastly experienced , but partly disabled, secretary of the Shepway party, who turned up with packed lunch and her own chair and was prepared to sit telling at any polling station all day. We sent her to Molash! She did not enjoy her day. The opposition tellers were surprised to see anyone other than their own, a new revelation for them , and were friendly enough. but Mary had to sit and listen all day to Tory tellers exchanging village gossip  with all the voters coming in and obviously knowing everyone, and even then those were few and far between -after all , 100 voters in a day in Molash would indicate a high turnout. Mary thought she had wasted a lovely August day and was pretty depressed by it all by the end, but having spent her day there she decided to hang on and come to the count. I have a feeling that it was only at that point we explained to her our candidate was in the States.....

Nevertheless Mary had decided to wait and see the boxes opened and was particularly looking out for the Molash box, out of a sense of masochism, I guess.  Then her eyes widened :only about 100 votes, but they were overwhelmingly (about 80% we guessed), for Rita. We learned later that quite a few of Mary's Tory fellow-tellers had voted Liberal Democrat for the first time in their lives.  As I had thought, Molash was the sort of village that makes up its collective mind and they had liked what they saw of Rita and were not overly impressed with the ex-policeman who was her Conservative opponent. And in villages like that being in the Tory party was a purely social thing and had little to do with how they voted. 

Still , that was still only about 100 votes  and the real battle lay elsewhere . We were clearly behind in Challock -maybe 40%? And ahead in Boughton and Eastwell- another election to close to call! And then the final tally:
R Hawes (LD)      332
R Dowley (Con)  303
? (Lab )                   39   ( I still have no record of the name of  almost invisible Labour candidate for this election!)

So I was putting in a call to Boston,  Mass.  to  pass on a piece of good news to the Hawes family out there. Rita was to be a huge asset to the Lib Dem group and in due course was to be an outstanding mayor and chair of scrutiny among other things.  I now had the reputation of somebody who could mastermind a famous by-election victory in the absence of the candidate, which was hardly deserved - Rita had won the election, we now reckon, before she left -all we had to do was prevent it unravelling in the final week. Of course it would not be that long to the May 1995 all-out elections, and Rita would have to do it all again with Robert Dowley swearing revenge for his unexpected defeat when the Lib Dems couldn't pour in lots of helpers from everywhere and when all the good Tories in Challock had gone on holiday...

[Pete Whitehead]

May 16, 2018 9:47:47 GMT yellowperil said:

Smarden Ward The correct name for the ward, I insist, is Smarden, and not Weald North, which Election Centre insist on calling it.

It's strange - the error goes all the way back to 1973 on the dedicated Ashford page www.electionscentre.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Ashford-1973-2011.pdf
But the error does not appear in the actual Election Handbooks which were published (indeed it would be surprising if they had been able to accurately predict the future renaming of a ward in that way. I have the 1999 Election Handbook in front of me, the last set of results before the boundaries and names did actually change and sure enough it is Smarden. And it remains correct on the online pdf version of the same www.electionscentre.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Local-Elections-Handbook-1999-complete.pdf
It might be worth contacting Michael Thrasher about it as the error only affects a single document and would be relatively easy to rectify

[yellowperil]

County Council Elections 1993

 I will crack on with the next county council elections while I wait for those borough by-elections to turn up, and 1993 was  a very important point in my whole political career, as anyone who has been around long enough to remember my earlier thread about recounting recounts might remember ( oh, nobody does? oh, never mind). Still the six divisions (some time yet before they notice Ashford is growing and raise that to 7) and stlll 4 Tory held and one each for LibDems and Labour. Much of the growth was on the periphery of the old Ashford urban area  and much of it spilling over into four rural parishes Great Chart, Kingsnorth, Mersham and Boughton Aluph so two of those in Rural West and two in Rural East, so the balance of those two rural divisions was changing towards being more suburban. My impression, somewhat counter-intuitively, was that seemed to make the safer for Conservatives but we liked to think it made them more unpredictable.

The Lib Dem lineup was I thought more determined  and serious about challenging  the Conservatives than ever on previous County elections. We had Fred Winslade  of course defending his seat in South-East, and we could be confident by this time that that would be a shoo-in. I was standing in Rural West and going flat out on a decapitation strategy against Sir John Grugeon, the council leader, and  Paul Burnham had switched his fire to Rural East, where we knew he would do very well in Wye at least. So our new -and very serious- candidate for North was none other than Bill Miller, the one-time Continuing SDP-er.. Only slightly less seriously, we had Bob Smith, our by now long term councillor for Singleton, who was at least a highly plausible candidate to go against Labour, and in Tenterden we had Barry Wright, Tenterden town councillor , professional psychologist and long-serving local JP.  Compared with previous lists this looked a formidable line-up, but maybe somebody should have been saying "hang on , where's your target- do you really think you are going to clean-sweep all six?"  In normal times that would probably have been my role, but I was a lead candidate this time and probably suffering a severe dose of candidatitis myself..

What about the Tories? There was a feeling about that all was not well in the ranks of the Conservatives at County Hall, just as there was a lot of dissatisfaction among  the Conservatives at  Ashford Civic Centre -and for that matter at Westminster too by this time, if truth were known. A certain tiredness was creeping into the administration at all levels, and the opposition parties could sense that. As far as the six county seats were concerned,  two sitting councillors were seeking re-election, one having just finished his first four-year stint (Bob Balicki in Rural East) and one who was vastly experienced and very senior member of the Tory party nationally as well as locally(Grugeon in Rural West) but as I have said before Grugeon was perhaps respected, certainly feared, but not altogether liked even on his own side.They had two new candidates in wards they were defending as sitting councillorsfor North and Tenterden had retired, but of course in Tenterden their candidate wasn't really new at all,it was Jo Hawkes relocating from South. In the two opposition held divisions they had two fairly low profile candidates and who seemed to be little more than paper. 

Labour on the other hand were definitely  bouncing back from the doldrums of recent years and were up for it in much the same way as the Lib Dems were, but with different tactics. They no longer feared a hard battle to hold South as neither the Tories'  Neil Bell nor our Bob Smith  really looked likely to seriously challenge their new candidate Richard Allen.That meant the main Labour work went into North, and Bill Miller was not best pleased (remember he had been a Labour man for years before) to find that Mick Hubert the Labour candidate far outgunned  him in terms of workers on the ground. The seeds of Bill's eventual return whence he came were being sewn. The difference of course was that Labour could put up just paper campaigns in South,both Rural seats and Tenterden.

[yellowperil]

Ashford Rural West 1993

I intend to follow my campaign in Rural West in a bit more detail. Looking back I wonder where I found the time to run the campaign I did while still ostensibly in full time paid employment! However I was coming to the end of that- I was a Senior Lecturer with by now a fairly light teaching commitment because I normally carried quite a heavy admin load (departmental head, college exams officer, etc) but because I was about to retire some of that load was in the process of being transferred, so though I was nominally responsible for this a lot of the heavy lifting which might have justified  the reduced timetable was actually being done by somebody else! It was a quite unique few months of my professional career. I think I can safely explain all that a quarter of a century later as they can hardly make me come back and do more work now, can they?Of course, the Easter holidays came in the middle of the election campaign and whereas in the past I would have had a big admin responsibility at that time particularly, I could now happily delegate it all to my eventual successor, well, they needed the experience didn't they?

Because of all that and at a time when mornings and evenings  were light and weekends were long, I was getting something like a 50 hour week for some 8 weeks  to devote to the election, and that was on top of the fact that I had been working towards it for years and I had done a lot of the work ( writing literature, planning deliveries, actually doing a lot of the legwork, in two of the wards concerned, Pluckley and Smarden for the past 6 years or so. One of the results of all that is that we had a good team of helpers in those two wards, headed of course by Eileen and Sheila our two councillors. Then in Charing, we also had a pretty good team of senior Lib Dems headed by Bob Rawlings, the Thomsons and the Sherwoods so largely I could leave that ward to them as long as I kept them supplied with literature. That left 4 other wards, Great Chart which included the allegedly "rural" part of Singleton; Kingsnorth,   which was a vast rambling ward including Shadoxhurst, Stubbs Cross and other far flung places, as ell as the new estates on Park Farm , much the size of Stanhope;Bethersden the one ward with just one village; Hothfield, which also included another village, Westwell. The whole thing well over 10 miles across and with approaching 14,000 electors and really only an effective delivery system for the first three wards mentioned which took in maybe 5000 electors if we were lucky.

Given all that, I set out to attempt several deliveries across the whole division and to attempt to canvass  (at least one call, we had to be realistic and doubt we could achieve multiple calls in much of the division), and that across the whole division, including the low density areas of winding country lanes with isolated cottages. Mad or what?And for large chunks of the division no organised help, just me.

 Largely, it worked. As we covered the denser patches, we picked up helpers and deliverers as we went , so subsequent deliveries were covered,but  the most rewarding bits though were the deeply rural areas, where nobody never delivered or canvassed before and that's where I continued to specialise.  I found that Shadoxhurst was good , the most remote and scattered village in the division - I looked at the canvass returns and they looked better than Charing or Pluckley where we now had several years of working. Nobody had ever tried out there before and assumed it was too difficult.(When we saw the box numbers at verification this was indeed confirmed- Shadoxhurst was better for us than Pluckley). As we continued, we began to think the unthinkable - could we really win this?This was Conservative heartland, we were going for the Leader of the Council , the permanent constituency headquarters of the Tory party was in the heart of this division in Bethersden, they had a legendary GOTV machine.  What could  we be thinking of?

I saved up the best bit of the literature  for the eve of poll and that was the one which got Sir John boiling over with rage as it did remind everyone I was the only candidate living in the division -which was true as Sir John had relatively recently moved from Charing Heath to Tenterden.  I noticed the Thomsons had that one up on display on their front window of their home on Charing High Street- nice to have your literature up in the window of a former cabinet minister. 

So we got to the count and at the verification stage , desperately weary and anxious   and soon learned we were well ahead in South East, so no worries there,  doing well but not well enough in North, Rural East ,and Tenterden.....and Rural West? 

Too close to call.

[yellowperil]

Recounting Recounts Revisited

As I said, I have said something about this before but I will briefly retell it here before giving all the county results
 
The first count for Rural West put Grugeon ahead but with a miniscule majority- can't remember exactly, but fairly sure  it was single figures. Barbara Simmons was our agent and unsurprisingly asked for  a recount. A this distance I cannot remember the exact circumstances of each count that followed- some were just bundle counts some were full recounts. The first recount had me in front, by a similar single figure margin the other way. Conservative agent then , again unsurprisingly, asked for a second recount -I don't think Grugeon would have let him live if he hadn't.  Result of first recount confirmed, and there is a case for saying that should have been the end of it. But the Tory agent asked for another recount and got his way- would that have happened if the candidate in question hadn't been Grugeon? Don't know. This was definitely a full recount and suddenly Grugeon was significantly ahead. The story was that they had discovered a bundle of Conservative votes with a single Lib Dem one on top. Barbara asked for another recount and the Tory lead lengthened further, so we gave up- I wanted to say we would now accept the original count  
Was there a genuine mistake or was someone trying to fix it? All I say is that Grugeon might just possibly been typically unpleasant to someone on the counting staff sometime before...

County election results 1993 in full
Ashford North
C Mullins  (Con)    2042  (37.8%)
M Hubert (Lab)     1688   (31.3%)
CW Miller (LD)      1667   (30.9%)


Ashford South
R Allen (Lab)           1801  (53.1%)
N Bell (Con)              861   (25.4%)
R Smith (LD)             729    (21.5%)

Ashford South-East
F Winslade  (LD)       2664  (63.8%)
G Dodwell (Con)         786  (18.8%)
R Tagg (Lab)                 725  (17.4%)

Ashford Rural West
J Grugeon (Con)         2095  ( 45.5%)
G English (LD)             2028  ( 44.0%)
F Ruby  (Lab)                 486   (10.5%)

Ashford Rural East
R Balicki  (Con)               2237 ( 50.0%)
CP Burnham (LD)           1717  (38.4%)
L Hewings (Lab)               518   (11.6%)

Tenterden
J Hawkes (Con)              2645  (53.0%)
B Wright (LD)                 1749  (35.1%)
F Smith (Lab)                    592  (11.9%)

In the end after all that excitement the end result was no change for Ashford where it mattered most- round the benches of County Hall. I suppose there was some consolation in the aggregate votes across Ashford Borough- but not much.

For what they were worth- Con 10,666, Lib Dem 10,554, Lab 5810

But across the county as a whole the Conservatives had lost control of Kent County Council and soon we had a new Lib-Lab administration with a former Ashford parliamentary candidate, Alison Wainman, as Lib Dem leader of the council. Grugeon may have hung on to his own seat, just, but was not a happy man - sounds of smashing furniture were heard from  the Leaders office. And he didn't hang around to fight me in Rural West again -he noted my last leaflet , perhaps, and decided to stand in his new  home division of Tenterden next time.

[yellowperil]

Given that quite a lot of this thread has been about the rise and fall of the SDP,it might be worth pointing out that three of the key players in this 1993 election were also significant players in the SDP saga- Jo Hawkes, Bill Miller and myself, each with a very different role within the SDP, Jo the party secretary early on and first parliamentary candidate, myself as the final party chairman before merger, and Bill with his role in the Continuing party post merger, but now each serious candidates in these county council elections.

[yellowperil]

Preparations for the 1995 Borough Election (and for government!).

Now that we were in government at County Hall, and we had the feeling we in Ashford had failed to make a significant contribution to that -the feeling now was that we certainly ought to have won Rural West, what incompetence to have missed out(!), so we immediately got stuck in on preparations for the next set of local elections in two years time. That was not just about sharpening up our campaigning and making sure everybody understood the significance of proper targeting, important though that was.  It was also about preparing for government, not just for winning elections.

In the past we had had a manifesto of sorts- a couple of sides of A4 , say, mostly culled from documents coming out of Cowley Street. This time, and it was my special baby, and we held a whole series of seminars over nearly 2 years,  open to all local party members and exploring exactly what we thought was important for Ashford at this time on all significant areas of policy , and at the end of the day we had a policy booklet with detailed pronouncements on each aspect of policy for Ashford which we had all signed up to- a couple of sides of A4 on each of about 10 or 12 themes. I was very proud of it (and I had written up the final version ), so when we reached the point that the officers came to us and asked us what we wanted to do (and they did) we handed our document over and they were impressed. I know they also went to Labour and they got a few glossy pages of waffle, nationally produced with lots of big pictures of national politicians, and were less impressed. However, for all our careful preparation, we hadn't really grasped the difficulty of coalition, which was where we were heading- all our pronouncements, whether we liked it or not, were to be  subject to a Labour veto.It was , to say the least, a serious impediment, just as it was proving to be at the same time at County Hall with the Lib/Lab administration there, not to mention national government in due course. 

But before we could get there, we had to win elections first. We had had 11 seats out of 49 at the end of last time's elections. We went into these next elections with 13 thanks to gains in Boughton Aluph and Stanhope.  Winning a lot of new seats on the all-out single member ward structure we had to work with  was always difficult, especially where councillors were established in their wards, so could we really hold our 13 and advance all the way to 25 to gain outright control? That was always going to be very difficult. Another 2 or 3 gains would be enough probably to take us definitely into NOC, and enough seats to form an administration with Labour, and it was important to finish up as the senior partner if that happened. Where were our most likely targets to be? Definitely now, I personally thought,  in Rural West-in  Charing, Hothfield,Great Chart, maybe even  Bethersden. Could we make a breakthrough in Tenterden  - maybe Biddenden, Rolvenden or StMichaels?In the urban area,maybe some more of the Kennington seats to add to Spearpoint? Actually taking seats off Labour would be good but not half as useful as taking them off the Tories in terms of wresting control. Of course we could not be  certain of holding on to our newest gains like Stanhope, Spearpoint, Smarden and Boughton Aluph. If we spread ourselves too thin would we end up going backwards? All was to play for and the debate about targeting was every bit as vigorous as the one about policy.

[yellowperil]

Note for everyone interested in by-elections and that should be most of you, I have now inserted the full story of the Boughton Aluph by-election, 4/8/1994 in its correct chronological place in the thread. Don't miss it!

[yellowperil]

Final run-up to the 1995 Borough elections

After the Lib Dem success in  Boughton Aluph and therefore our first councillor in Rural East, we had the scent of victory in our noses. Might we be able to add a Tenterden seat or two, so then have councillors in all six divisions? Could we win control outright? It was difficult to contain the excitement and keep to realistic targeting. Now we had to finalise our candidate lists and realistically target where we thought we could really win, bearing in mind holding on to the two by-election gains would be hard enough.

In North we had 7 good candidates but thanks to a late withdrawal no running-mate for David Broughton, which was a bit of a blow. Bob Graham would defend his seat in Spearpoint. and a brace of other Bobs  (Packham and Cowley) had reasonable chances in Bockhanger and Bybrook respectively. We had a promising youngish couple, the Smiths,  who lived  in Warren and who had taken on Warren(Jackie)  and Queens  (Steve) respectively- certainly effective candidates and potentially excellent councillors, and these were wards we had not so long before thought unwinnable. Brian Medd-Sygrove took on Kennington Lees which had once been our main target but where John Kemp since winning the by election was making a Tory fortress and now looked the least likely to win. Central was also going to be difficult without the second candidate.In

In South we had to hold Singleton and with Ken Cornhill standing down, we had a really excellent running mate for Bob Smith in Mike Pickett, typical of the new breed of very accomplished candidates- the standard was definitely on the up. Stanhope was another question though;  Bob Gladwin would have a hard battle to defend his seat, and rightly or wrongly the decision was made not to oppose Palma Laughton ( if I ever get to tell the story of the second Stanhope by-election the reasons may become clear) Palma was certainly going to hold her seat, but there could be a real battle for the second place between Vicky Macdonald and Bob Gladwin. Would voters split their vote or would they simply back the Labour ticket and Vicky simply get in on Palma's coat tails? Elsewhere, we accepted that Labour would get in, so we had a  paper candidate in Guy Thorogood in Hampden (at least he had the name going for him!) . In Victoria Park,Brookfield, Musgrove and Woolreeds we left it to the Tories to
oppose what we (rightly) thought were safe Labour seats this time. There was no pact with Labour, though of course we knew they might be needed shortly as coalition partners, it was just a question of conserving our resources for where it was most needed and this time it was where Conservatives were on the defensive.. 

South East should be straightforward. All  6 sitting councillors (7 if you count Gordon Turner) were expecting to be comfortably returned in the present circumstances and the new boys from last time, Bob Davidson and Bill Heaton ,were now to be considered established councillors.

Rural West was where the biggest fight was likely to be. The immediate question mark was Smarden. Sheila had indeed decided to stand down, and our search for a suitable replacement in the ward had failed to find the ideal person. In the end , with some desperation creeping in, the decision was made that I would have to do it myself. I at least had done a lot of work in the ward, I was a governor of a local school.. but hang on,we had only gained the ward because the Tories had put up an unsuitable candidate last time, and this time with a new candidate , and without Sheila and with a candidate from outside the ward , so not just the wrong party but the wrong village, what hope was there of that working. Had not the strong lesson from Boughton Aluph, not to mention Pluckley, and Smarden last time, been that to succeed the first requirement was a strong candidate embedded in the community?  However, it was now a case that either I stood or we let it go uncontested, and that we just could not do. So I went out to get my nomination forms signed I went to one of our members in Smarden, somebody I had myself signed up to the party, and an old friend of Sheila's. And she refused to sign my nomination form! No, she said, sorry but it has to be someone from inside the ward. I nearly gave up there and then, but swallowed hard and went elsewhere to find my 10 signatures!

For the rest of Rural West, some better news. Pluckley looked absolutely safe now.We had decided to put a second name on the ballot paper this time in Charing, having ended 4 votes short for Bob Rawlings when he was our single candidate. The second man this time would be Bill Miller, who came from Great Chart(and who now surprisingly had taken over from Barbara as the party's agent) The hope was that it made it less likely that people voting for Bob would use up their second vote on the Tory; there was even the possibility if things went really well Bob would get elected and drag Bill up with him, but we weren't holding our breath for that over another "wrong village" candidate.  We didn't use the Green ploy of naming first and second choice candidates, but the inference was clearly there.And we had a really good candidate in Hothfield ward in David Hilliger, another bank executive like Bill Heaton and again like Bill another of Barbara Simmons's bosses. What was more, he lived in the ward's other village, Westwell, and we always reckoned we could win in Hothfield village but lost heavily to the Tories in Westwell. If David could pick up a lot more Westwell votes, that could be very interesting... we also had a new and very active candidate for Great Chart in Malcolm Eke, another Singleton man surplus to requirements there, but Great Chart and Singleton were so interwoven that really didn't make another wrong village candidate. We will hear a lot more about Malcolm before we are through. That only left Kingsnorth, where as always we would not oppose Reg Harrington the everlasting Indy. So that was 7 places out of 8 filled , and the only one not covered was a longstanding policy decision.

What about Rural East? Well at least it wasn't going to be a blank sheet this time - we obviously had our first outstanding priority to hold on in Boughton Aluph for Rita. For the other 6 wards,we would have candidates who were more or less paper , or we leave the ward to Labour to fight , and as we shall see, in some of those Labour left it to us! The result was some Tories returned unopposed,in Aldington,and Hamstreet, not a good idea as it meant some of their unemployed activists might come over to Boughton. Brabourne we also didn't fight, but at least there was a Labour candidate there. In Chilham, Mersham and Wye we had paper candidates who proved to be rather more than that. We were now at least genuine players in Rural East  - you might think we were one cycle behind Rural West but heading in the same direction.

And finally, what of Tenterden?There were a number of good candidates with a real chance, a pair of paper candidates and some left blank because if we were really going to win some we could not afford to run paper candidates everywhere The top target was Tenterden St Michaels where we thought Barry Wright had an excellent chance, while his wife Elizabeth was also in with a shout in Wittersham. Eileen Anthony after a couple of goes in her home village of Woodchurch, had handed that over to a promising new candidate in Derek Mansfield, and stood herself in Rolvenden where she was also very well known. Dinah Whittingham was a formidable candidate for Tenterden East. All of these were serious candidates but probably only Barry's seat was a full target. High Halden(Dorothy Buckingham our go-anywhere-do-anything candidate) and Tenterden West were our papers. The ones we left to Labour were Appledore , Biddenden and Tenterden South East, and as a result Biddenden became another uncontested ward.

I will say a bit more about what the other parties did with the results posts!

[yellowperil]

Ashford Borough Council Wards by county division 1995- Ashford North

Bockhanger
M Levy (Lab)      467 (51.3%)
M Angell (Con)  254 (27.9%)
R Packham(LD)  189 (20.8%)

Bybrook
A Picking (Lab)   302 (44.5%)
N Green ( Con)     227 (33.4%)
R Cowley (LD)    150  (22.1%)

Central (2)
J Mackenzie(Lab)  481 (43.6%)
G Young (Lab)        444
M Claughton (Con)364 (33.0%)
R Kegos (Con)         331
D Broughton           257 (23.3%)

Kennington Lees
J Kemp  (Con)           263 (40.8%)
R Tagg (Lab)              259 (40.2%)
B Medd-Sygrove(LD)122 (18.9%)

Queens
M Beavis-Schiller (Lab)306 (47.7%)
H Lavender (Con)          181 (28.2%)
S Smith (LD)                   154 (24.0%)

Spearpoint
R Graham (LD)               374 (73.6%)
H Smith (Con)                134 (26.4%)

Warren
M Hubert( Lab)                260 (35.6%)
 G Ford (Con)                    238 (32.6%)
J Smith (LD)                       233 (31.9%)

The results in North came as a bit of a surprise, not least to the defending conservative councillors. 4 well established Conservative councillors  (Michael  Claughton, Rita Kegos, Harry Lavender and Gus Ford) all fell to a Labour onslaught, plus another Labour  gain in Bybrook, so Labour  went from 1 councillor to 6 in North, Conservatives from 6 to1 , and Lib Dems boringly stayed on 1. This sort of big shift doesn't usually happen in this system of all out single wards because usually once councillors were established in their  wards they stayed established-  they didn't this time. Maybe  a sign that the Tories might not be going to hold on to the council, but asking a question as to who might be leading a joint administration. I will make a few notes on some of the participants not mentioned in the previous post, which had concentrated on the Lib Dem entrants, who had all done a bit disappointingly here apart from  Bob Graham obviously (and note there he had no Labour opponent) and maybe Jackie Smith, who came within 4 votes of passing her sitting Conservative councillor. but with Mick Hubert ahead of both of them!  As far as the new Labour councillors were concerned the standout name was  probably Anne Picking who was to go on later to be a Labour MP, while  we were certainly going to see a lot more of councillors Hubert and Beavis-Schiller! Mike Angell, the Tory in Bockhanger badly beaten  in this Tory bloodbath, was to go on to have a distinguished career as the Conservative county councillor for this very division.

Edit- I noticed that my comment on Anne Picking was a bit cryptic so people may need a bit more help to identify her as after leaving Ashford to return back north and to become MP for East Lothian she divorced her husband and reverted to her maiden name as Anne Moffat, where she became notorious for a number of things not least the size of her expenses- and was eventually deselected. None of which surprises me, shall I just say.

[yellowperil]

Ashford Borough Council Wards by Council Division 1995 -Ashford South

If Labour were sweeping all before them in North, how would they manage on their own home turf which was always South Ashford? Their main priority was to regain the seat they had lost to the Lib Dems in Stanhope in the by-election, while gaining  Victoria Park from the Conservatives now that Jo Hawkes was gone looked a near certainty, Taking Singleton from the Lib Dems  might have been  a possibility, but they had been back in third place for some years, and they decided to only field a single candidate this time.

Brookfield
L Lawrie (Lab)           393 (84.9%)
H Henderson (Con)    70 (15.1%)  

Hampden
M Hayes (Lab)             306  (72.9%)
G Thorogood (LD)          64 (15.2%)
A Austen (Con)               59 (11.9%)

Musgrove
D Madgett (Lab)              398 ( 88.6%) 
E Green (Con)                     51  (11.4%) 

Singleton(2)
M Pickett(LD)                    357 (44.3%)
R Smith(LD)                       345 
E Sage (Lab)                       292 (36.3%)
PGrugeon(Con)                 156 (19.4%)

Stanhope (2)
P Laughton (Lab)              641 (66.3%)
V MacDonald (Lab)          461 
R Gladwin (LD)                  300 (31.0%) 
A Weighill (Con)                  26  (2.7%)

Victoria Park
B Naughton  (Lab)              351 ( 77.3%)
D Horn(Con)                        103  (22.7%)

Woolreeds
A Wells(Lab)                         401 (84.8%)
J Garrett (Con)                        72 (15.2%) 

So Labour had 2 gains, Vic Park from the Tories and the second Stanhope seat from the Lib Dems which of course was reversing a by-election defeat which means only the one gain in Vic Park counts if we are comparing across the full 4 year cycle, and the overall score this time on that cycle was

Lab 7 (+1) Lib Dems 2 (nc) Cons 0 (-1)

[yellowperil]

Ashford Borough Council Wards by County division 1995- Ashford South East

South -East was the division where there was least interest this year because there was little doubt about any of the results here, although in the event the resurgent Labour party was more active in Eastmead than we would have liked and even Gordon Turner might have had a bit of a scare in South Willesborough!

Eastmead
B Simmons(LD)          369  (59.3%)
A Young (Lab)             205  (33.0%)
P Powell (Con)              48  (7.7%)

Henwood
F Winslade (LD)             392  (85.8%)
J Finucane (Con)              65  (14.2%)

South Willesborough
G Turner (Ind)                    408 (55.0%)
F Ruby(Lab)                        295 (39.8%)
C Vavasour (Con)                 39 (5.3%)

Twelve Acres
D Weatherall (LD)             461  (75.8%)
B Moon(Lab)                      131 (21.5%)
R Balicki (Con)                      16 (2.6%)

Waterside
SG Koowaree (LD)               432  (82.9%)
 S Moon (Lab)                         57 (10.9%)
C Vavasour (Con)                    32 (6.1%)            

Willesborough Lees
W Heaton (LD)                          837 (83.0%)
G Carter (Con)                           172(17.0%)

Windmill
R Davidson (LD)                        530 (85.2%)
G Dodwell (Con)                         92 (14.8%)

All safely delivered in the end with the minimum of fuss and outside Eastmead and South Willesborough hardly any effort from Labour who were fully engaged elsewhere, and thoroughly demoralised Conservatives really struggling to find even paper candidates . Note the sitting County Councillor for Rural East as a paper candidate in Twelve Acres and getting 16 votes!


Remains 6 LD, +Gordon Turner now styled as Independent.