Post by Robert Waller on Sept 25, 2023 13:11:05 GMT
The All England Lawn Tennis (and Croquet) Club: strawberries and cream, Henman Hill and Murray Mount, the purity of predominantly white clothing on court against the lush green of the impeccably manicured grass; the name Wimbledon conveys to many in Britain and beyond an epitome of genteel tradition and conservatism. What is more, the statistics of this constituency also hardly sound at the marginal end of the political spectrum. According to the most recent available Census (in 2021), among all 575 seats in England and Wales Wimbledon (on its new boundaries) has the 4th highest proportion in managerial and professional employment, the 6th lowest in routine or semi routine jobs, the 9th highest with degrees. A tour of ‘Wimbledon Village’ and the fringes of the eponymous Common suggests not the habitat of humble Wombles but of denizens of great wealth and privilege. Yet all of this is, in electoral terms at least, highly misleading. The Wimbledon constituency has been a highly marginal seat, in which all the three leading English parties have had a strong interest in recent decades, and following the 2024 general election looks for the time being at least like a Liberal Democrat stronghold.
After being held by the Conservatives since 1950, from 1997 to 2005 Wimbledon was one of the many apparently unlikely seats gained and held by Tony Blair’s brand of Labour party, the MP being Roger Casale. It was narrowly regained for the Conservatives by Stephen Hammond in 2005, and held more comfortably in 2010 and 2015, until the majority over Labour was halved to 5,000 in 2017. However in 2019 the Conservative share dropped from 46.5% to a shaky 38.4%. This time it was the Liberal Democrats who surged to provide the main threat. Their candidate Paul Kohler (previously known as the victim of a savage attack in his own home in 2014) received 37.2%, an increase of a massive 22.7% since 2017, and cut Hammond’s majority to a mere 628 votes. Therefore Wimbledon was close to providing his party with what would have been their most spectacular positive performance in the whole election. In 2024 Kohler advanced by nigh on a further 7%, while Labour stalled and the Tories plummeted. The Liberal Democrat vote surpassed twice that of that of the Conservatives, with a numerical majority of over 12,000.
The main reason for this spectacular advance is not hard to detect. Those demographic figures themselves suggest Wimbledon’s response to the dominant issue of the 2019 campaign. The estimate for its preference in the 2016 referendum is over 70% for Remain. The Conservatives did not do well in 2019 or 2024 among well educated metropolitan voters. In the former year they lost Richmond Park, a somewhat similar seat in London’s south western quadrant, to the Liberal Democrats, by well over 7,000 votes, though the actual changes in share were far more modest than in Wimbledon, where the Labour share had previously been much higher. This was not ideal territory for either Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn. Paul Kohler came much closer to success than some well-publicised defectors to his party who also stood in the capital.
It should also be borne in mind that Wimbledon has not been solidly Conservative in local elections either for a very long time. It consisted in 2019 of roughly the western half of Merton, a London borough that has been outside their control since 1989 and held with a majority by Labour since 2014. Nor is this solely due to the progressively greater Labour strength in the other half of Merton (the Mitcham and Morden constituency). In the most recent local elections in May 2022 the Conservatives only won one of the Wimbledon wards outright. This was the highly affluent Village ward, sprawling up the hill from different directions towards the common. They also retained two of the three councillors in Hillside. But they lost the other wards they had won in 2018, Raynes Park and Wimbledon Park, to the Liberal Democrats.
‘Down the hill’ towards the flatter lands of the Wandle valley, sometimes known as ‘South Wimbledon’, are to be found Abbey, Wandle and Wimbledon Town & Dundonald wards. These still have very high rates of over 50% professional and managerial residents, but the housing is in more tightly packed grids and more likely to be terraced. In May 2022 the first named two of these three-member wards voted in split representation on Merton council between Liberal Democrat and Labour– three apiece overall but in both cases with a Lib Dem at the top of the poll. Abbey with Labour at the top over Conservatives, but the latter two led by Liberal Democrats. Wimbledon Town & Dundonald was newly drawn and facing its first contest. It may be of relevance that it was Paul Kohler who topped the poll; and, well, if the Liberal Democrats could win in the ward containing Dundonald, they were truly competitive throughout this seat.
Further south are three more wards which are – and feel - even less close to Wimbledon Village and Common. Merton Park is largely a planned ‘model suburb’ development on the lines of Bedford Park, developed by the property developer and philanthropist John Innes between 1870 and 1904, and now a conservation area. At municipal level It has long been a stronghold of the Merton Park Residents group, who gained all three seats from the Conservatives in 1990 and have held them ever since. West Barnes and Cannon Hill are typical of swathes of outer London inter-war suburbia, with around 40% professional and managerial residents and more like 35-40% educated to degree level, close to the Greater London average. The Liberal Democrats took all three in West Barnes in 2022, which had between in the period 1994 and 2014 been the only Merton ward where they had any representation at all. In a Cannon Hill increased too three seats, Labour had taken the two available in 2018 but in 2022 the Liberal Democrats gained one, topping the poll here as well.
Cannon Hill ward, however, will no longer be in the Wimbledon constituency at the next general election. In the ‘2023’ boundary changes it is transferred to the other Merton division, Mitcham & Morden. As both the Wimbledon seat and Merton borough are over-represented at present, Wimbledon has to gain a larger number of electors than it loses. After some false starts in the review process, which at one point included a prospective Wimbledon & Coombe constituency, the Commission eventually settled on taking two wards from across the Kingston borough boundary: St James and Old Malden. St James straddles the A3 and included the southern portion of New Malden and the Motspur Park area. There have been local government ward changes since the Commission’s work was done, but in both the successor wards, Old Malden and Motspur Park & Old Malden East, in 2022 the Liberal Democrats won, fairly closely followed by the Conservatives, with Labour a distant third with shares of between 10% and 15%. With Kingston borough being an area of great LD strength (they won the 2022 council election here with 44 of the 48 seats, the Tories taking three, Residents one, and Labour zero) there was undoubtedly an attempt to corral the anti-Conservative vote here as in the rest of the Wimbledon constituency, despite Labour’s parliamentary victories within loving memory.
Despite its overall demographic statistics, Wimbledon is a varied constituency. If we return to the sporting connections with which this profile started, the atmosphere around Plough Lane, to which AFC Wimbledon returned in November 2020, is very different from that of Church Road, the site of the All England Club (and, indeed, the very strong and up-market Wimbledon Cricket Club). Before the split which created the MK (Milton Keynes) Dons, Wimbledon had been a notably rumbustious team, whose best known exponent had probably been the scowling Vinnie Jones. The electoral politics here may also again be highly competitive at some point, even if at present the standing is 'advantage Lib Dem'.
2021 Census, new boundaries
Age 65+ 14.6% 452/575
Owner occupied 61.6% 373/575
Private rented 29.6% 70/55
Social rented 8.8% 548/575
White 68.8% 473/575
Black 3.5% 166/575
Asian 17.6% 72/575
Managerial & professional 53.0% 4/575
(Higher Professional & managerial 28.1% 5/575)
Routine & Semi-routine 11.1% 570/575
Degree level 60.5% 9/575
No qualifications 9.9% 565/575
Students 6.4% 212/575
General Election 2024: Wimbledon
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Liberal Democrats Paul Kohler 24,790 45.1 +6.8
Conservative Danielle Dunfield-Prayero 12,180 22.2 –17.6
Labour Eleanor Stringer 11,733 21.3 +0.5
Reform UK Ben Cronin 3,221 5.9 +5.7
Green Rachel Brooks 2,442 4.4 +4.2
Workers Party Aaron Mafi 341 0.6 N/A
Independent Sarah Barber 129 0.2 N/A
Independent Amy Lynch 80 0.1 N/A
Heritage Michael Watson 69 0.1 N/A
LD Majority 12,610 22.9 N/A
Turnout 54,985 72.0 −4.2
Registered electors 76,334
Liberal Democrats gain from Conservative
Swing 12.0 C to LD
General Election 2019: Wimbledon
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative Stephen Hammond 20,373 38.4 -8.1
Liberal Democrats Paul Kohler 19,745 37.2 +22.7
Labour Jackie Schneider 12,543 23.7 -11.9
Independent Graham Hadley 366 0.7
C Majority 628 1.2 -9.7
Turnout 53,027 77.7 +0.5
Registered electors 68,232
Conservative hold
Swing 15.4 C to LD
Boundary Changes
Wimbledon will consist of
90.0% of Wimbledon
16.3% of Kingston & Surbiton
Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/london/London_183_Wimbledon_Landscape.pdf
2019 Notional results on new boundaries (Rallings and Thrasher)
After being held by the Conservatives since 1950, from 1997 to 2005 Wimbledon was one of the many apparently unlikely seats gained and held by Tony Blair’s brand of Labour party, the MP being Roger Casale. It was narrowly regained for the Conservatives by Stephen Hammond in 2005, and held more comfortably in 2010 and 2015, until the majority over Labour was halved to 5,000 in 2017. However in 2019 the Conservative share dropped from 46.5% to a shaky 38.4%. This time it was the Liberal Democrats who surged to provide the main threat. Their candidate Paul Kohler (previously known as the victim of a savage attack in his own home in 2014) received 37.2%, an increase of a massive 22.7% since 2017, and cut Hammond’s majority to a mere 628 votes. Therefore Wimbledon was close to providing his party with what would have been their most spectacular positive performance in the whole election. In 2024 Kohler advanced by nigh on a further 7%, while Labour stalled and the Tories plummeted. The Liberal Democrat vote surpassed twice that of that of the Conservatives, with a numerical majority of over 12,000.
The main reason for this spectacular advance is not hard to detect. Those demographic figures themselves suggest Wimbledon’s response to the dominant issue of the 2019 campaign. The estimate for its preference in the 2016 referendum is over 70% for Remain. The Conservatives did not do well in 2019 or 2024 among well educated metropolitan voters. In the former year they lost Richmond Park, a somewhat similar seat in London’s south western quadrant, to the Liberal Democrats, by well over 7,000 votes, though the actual changes in share were far more modest than in Wimbledon, where the Labour share had previously been much higher. This was not ideal territory for either Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn. Paul Kohler came much closer to success than some well-publicised defectors to his party who also stood in the capital.
It should also be borne in mind that Wimbledon has not been solidly Conservative in local elections either for a very long time. It consisted in 2019 of roughly the western half of Merton, a London borough that has been outside their control since 1989 and held with a majority by Labour since 2014. Nor is this solely due to the progressively greater Labour strength in the other half of Merton (the Mitcham and Morden constituency). In the most recent local elections in May 2022 the Conservatives only won one of the Wimbledon wards outright. This was the highly affluent Village ward, sprawling up the hill from different directions towards the common. They also retained two of the three councillors in Hillside. But they lost the other wards they had won in 2018, Raynes Park and Wimbledon Park, to the Liberal Democrats.
‘Down the hill’ towards the flatter lands of the Wandle valley, sometimes known as ‘South Wimbledon’, are to be found Abbey, Wandle and Wimbledon Town & Dundonald wards. These still have very high rates of over 50% professional and managerial residents, but the housing is in more tightly packed grids and more likely to be terraced. In May 2022 the first named two of these three-member wards voted in split representation on Merton council between Liberal Democrat and Labour– three apiece overall but in both cases with a Lib Dem at the top of the poll. Abbey with Labour at the top over Conservatives, but the latter two led by Liberal Democrats. Wimbledon Town & Dundonald was newly drawn and facing its first contest. It may be of relevance that it was Paul Kohler who topped the poll; and, well, if the Liberal Democrats could win in the ward containing Dundonald, they were truly competitive throughout this seat.
Further south are three more wards which are – and feel - even less close to Wimbledon Village and Common. Merton Park is largely a planned ‘model suburb’ development on the lines of Bedford Park, developed by the property developer and philanthropist John Innes between 1870 and 1904, and now a conservation area. At municipal level It has long been a stronghold of the Merton Park Residents group, who gained all three seats from the Conservatives in 1990 and have held them ever since. West Barnes and Cannon Hill are typical of swathes of outer London inter-war suburbia, with around 40% professional and managerial residents and more like 35-40% educated to degree level, close to the Greater London average. The Liberal Democrats took all three in West Barnes in 2022, which had between in the period 1994 and 2014 been the only Merton ward where they had any representation at all. In a Cannon Hill increased too three seats, Labour had taken the two available in 2018 but in 2022 the Liberal Democrats gained one, topping the poll here as well.
Cannon Hill ward, however, will no longer be in the Wimbledon constituency at the next general election. In the ‘2023’ boundary changes it is transferred to the other Merton division, Mitcham & Morden. As both the Wimbledon seat and Merton borough are over-represented at present, Wimbledon has to gain a larger number of electors than it loses. After some false starts in the review process, which at one point included a prospective Wimbledon & Coombe constituency, the Commission eventually settled on taking two wards from across the Kingston borough boundary: St James and Old Malden. St James straddles the A3 and included the southern portion of New Malden and the Motspur Park area. There have been local government ward changes since the Commission’s work was done, but in both the successor wards, Old Malden and Motspur Park & Old Malden East, in 2022 the Liberal Democrats won, fairly closely followed by the Conservatives, with Labour a distant third with shares of between 10% and 15%. With Kingston borough being an area of great LD strength (they won the 2022 council election here with 44 of the 48 seats, the Tories taking three, Residents one, and Labour zero) there was undoubtedly an attempt to corral the anti-Conservative vote here as in the rest of the Wimbledon constituency, despite Labour’s parliamentary victories within loving memory.
Despite its overall demographic statistics, Wimbledon is a varied constituency. If we return to the sporting connections with which this profile started, the atmosphere around Plough Lane, to which AFC Wimbledon returned in November 2020, is very different from that of Church Road, the site of the All England Club (and, indeed, the very strong and up-market Wimbledon Cricket Club). Before the split which created the MK (Milton Keynes) Dons, Wimbledon had been a notably rumbustious team, whose best known exponent had probably been the scowling Vinnie Jones. The electoral politics here may also again be highly competitive at some point, even if at present the standing is 'advantage Lib Dem'.
2021 Census, new boundaries
Age 65+ 14.6% 452/575
Owner occupied 61.6% 373/575
Private rented 29.6% 70/55
Social rented 8.8% 548/575
White 68.8% 473/575
Black 3.5% 166/575
Asian 17.6% 72/575
Managerial & professional 53.0% 4/575
(Higher Professional & managerial 28.1% 5/575)
Routine & Semi-routine 11.1% 570/575
Degree level 60.5% 9/575
No qualifications 9.9% 565/575
Students 6.4% 212/575
General Election 2024: Wimbledon
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Liberal Democrats Paul Kohler 24,790 45.1 +6.8
Conservative Danielle Dunfield-Prayero 12,180 22.2 –17.6
Labour Eleanor Stringer 11,733 21.3 +0.5
Reform UK Ben Cronin 3,221 5.9 +5.7
Green Rachel Brooks 2,442 4.4 +4.2
Workers Party Aaron Mafi 341 0.6 N/A
Independent Sarah Barber 129 0.2 N/A
Independent Amy Lynch 80 0.1 N/A
Heritage Michael Watson 69 0.1 N/A
LD Majority 12,610 22.9 N/A
Turnout 54,985 72.0 −4.2
Registered electors 76,334
Liberal Democrats gain from Conservative
Swing 12.0 C to LD
General Election 2019: Wimbledon
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative Stephen Hammond 20,373 38.4 -8.1
Liberal Democrats Paul Kohler 19,745 37.2 +22.7
Labour Jackie Schneider 12,543 23.7 -11.9
Independent Graham Hadley 366 0.7
C Majority 628 1.2 -9.7
Turnout 53,027 77.7 +0.5
Registered electors 68,232
Conservative hold
Swing 15.4 C to LD
Boundary Changes
Wimbledon will consist of
90.0% of Wimbledon
16.3% of Kingston & Surbiton
Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/london/London_183_Wimbledon_Landscape.pdf
2019 Notional results on new boundaries (Rallings and Thrasher)
| Con | 22617 | 39.8% |
| LD | 21778 | 38.3% |
| Lab | 11834 | 20.8% |
| Brexit | 139 8 | 0.2% |
| Green | 138 | 0.2% |
| Oth | 366 | 0.6% |
| Majority | 839 | 1.5% |
