South West Norfolk

[matureleft]

Apr 12, 2024 8:12:41 GMT andrewp said:

I’m not saying that Truss is or isn’t an assiduous MP, but ‘ we never see our MP’ is an irritating statement to me. Where do the people who say that expect to see their MP? Do they expect them to be standing in the high street on a Saturday morning to be seen? An otherwise very poor MP could do that and tick that box. Most MPs are pretty good at sharing what they’ve been doing and photo opportunities.

In my adult life, I’ve had 7 MPs- 3 Labour, 2 Conservatives and 2 Lib Dems. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of them more than about twice so I could say I never see them. ( apart from when I lived in a flat and the MP rented, as his constituency home, the flat next door for 2 years, and I only saw him about 3 times) . People say we never see them about my current MP, but she does all the remembrance day etc things and my dad is involved in an organisation in which she is involved and she turns up to most of the meetings. When anyone says we never see them or they are barely seen, I would always ask where do you expect to see them?

There’s a lot in that, particularly in a geographically large constituency like hers. In these there are also opportunities - fetes and carnivals etc. But if you have a family they have call on your time when these are on. 

[East Anglian Lefty]

There is also a distinction between people who have a reputation for not being seen in the constituency and those who have a reputation for being useless or disinterested if you contact them. The former is more likely to be generic grumbling, the latter is more of an issue.

[bsjmcr]

Apr 12, 2024 11:34:56 GMT East Anglian Lefty said:

There is also a distinction between people who have a reputation for not being seen in the constituency and those who have a reputation for being useless or disinterested if you contact them. The former is more likely to be generic grumbling, the latter is more of an issue.

I sometimes wonder if it’s even easier to be more ‘visible’ in a rural sprawling constituency where, as long as you have a car, there are many small villages that you can tour, door-knock, appear at village halls and cover more communities in a space of time, than an anonymous urban one with large estates or high rises which are harder to canvass. Tim Farron comes to mind as the ‘ideal’ constituency MP with high recognition in what is a rural area.
Yet I don’t expect to be bumping into Lucy Powell in Piccadilly Gardens, besides in somewhere like Manchester Central a lot people you would meet probably don’t live there, I assume most of her name recognition would come through work in surgeries in some still pretty deprived areas.

[batman]

Apr 12, 2024 8:12:41 GMT andrewp said:

I’m not saying that Truss is or isn’t an assiduous MP, but ‘ we never see our MP’ is an irritating statement to me. Where do the people who say that expect to see their MP? Do they expect them to be standing in the high street on a Saturday morning to be seen? An otherwise very poor MP could do that and tick that box. Most MPs are pretty good at sharing what they’ve been doing and photo opportunities.

In my adult life, I’ve had 7 MPs- 3 Labour, 2 Conservatives and 2 Lib Dems. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of them more than about twice so I could say I never see them. ( apart from when I lived in a flat and the MP rented, as his constituency home, the flat next door for 2 years, and I only saw him about 3 times) . People say we never see them about my current MP, but she does all the remembrance day etc things and my dad is involved in an organisation in which she is involved and she turns up to most of the meetings. When anyone says we never see them or they are barely seen, I would always ask where do ou expect to see them?

I have met every MP I have had here since Jeremy Hanley inclusive, but only recently met Sarah Olney for the first time. I happened to see her near Hammersmith Bridge. It's the third time I've just bumped into my MP by chance in the last 40+ years. I sometimes see Jenny Tonge around, but of course we are on bad terms now. 

[matureleft]

Apr 12, 2024 18:13:36 GMT batman said:

Apr 12, 2024 8:12:41 GMT andrewp said:

I’m not saying that Truss is or isn’t an assiduous MP, but ‘ we never see our MP’ is an irritating statement to me. Where do the people who say that expect to see their MP? Do they expect them to be standing in the high street on a Saturday morning to be seen? An otherwise very poor MP could do that and tick that box. Most MPs are pretty good at sharing what they’ve been doing and photo opportunities.

In my adult life, I’ve had 7 MPs- 3 Labour, 2 Conservatives and 2 Lib Dems. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of them more than about twice so I could say I never see them. ( apart from when I lived in a flat and the MP rented, as his constituency home, the flat next door for 2 years, and I only saw him about 3 times) . People say we never see them about my current MP, but she does all the remembrance day etc things and my dad is involved in an organisation in which she is involved and she turns up to most of the meetings. When anyone says we never see them or they are barely seen, I would always ask where do ou expect to see them?

I have met every MP I have had here since Jeremy Hanley inclusive, but only recently met Sarah Olney for the first time. I happened to see her near Hammersmith Bridge. It's the third time I've just bumped into my MP by chance in the last 40+ years. I sometimes see Jenny Tonge around, but of course we are on bad terms now. 

David Lane and then Robert Rhodes James (much less comfortably) used to do Q&A sessions in Cambridge market place on Saturdays, I doubted the value. They were of course exposed to political activists of every kind and needed to have some moral support. But they were noticeable in a constituency where (at that time - the 1970s and early 1980s) that mattered. Rhodes James wasn’t much good at it but Lane was pretty sharp.

[East Anglian Lefty]

Would be pretty pointless these days, as most people in the market don't live in the constituency anyway.

[mrtoad]

How is one to pronounce 'Bagge'? Is it 'bag' or 'beige' or some imaginative squirearchical alternative?

[batman]

I'm sure it's Bag. I used to know a Ragge whose surname was pronounced Rag.

[LDCaerdydd]

Story from yesterday's Sunday Times

Why Norfolk’s true-blue Tories are on a mission to unseat Liz Truss

James Bagge looks like a Tory. The retired army officer, barrister and former high sheriff of Norfolk sounds like a Tory. He cheerfully confirms that he is a Tory and he drives a deeply Tory car, a beaten-up silver Volvo A70 with 160,000 miles on the clock and a quietly farting golden retriever recumbent on the back seat. His great-great-grandfather was a Tory MP. But at the next general election Bagge, 71, wants to destroy the Conservative Party.

He is standing as an independent candidate in rural South West Norfolk, the seat where blink-and-you-missed-her ex-prime ministerial disaster zone Liz Truss commanded a majority of 26,195 votes in 2019.

Usually independents are beleaguered axe-grinding no-hopers involved in some sort of bitter dispute with a magistrate. Bagge is not like that.

He has amassed 100 volunteers, and built a surprisingly slick digital operation while appointing a treasurer and an agent. Bagge says that since January he has met 800 voters in the constituency at meetings in Downham Market, Swaffham and Thetford. “About five said they were voting for Truss”.

Bagge is unlikely to be queuing up for a copy of her political memoir, Ten Years To Save The West. Frank admissions of failure and folly pepper the text, which is being serialised by the Daily Mail this weekend. Truss cries on a visit to Indonesia, predicts the “brutal turbulence” that greeted her attempts to save Britain’s economy, struggles to cope with the death of Queen Elizabeth II and is assailed by an infestation of fleas in her Downing Street flat.

Life there was the opposite of glamorous. Truss found herself booking her own appointments with hair stylists. She had promised in her first speech as Prime Minister to “deliver” for Britain — but she could not get Ocado to deliver her shopping. Truss’s husband, Hugh O’Leary, predicted that her time in office would “end in tears”.

At one point Truss compares herself to Brian Clough, the polarising former Leeds United and Nottingham Forest manager. In 1974 Clough tried to shake up Leeds and was sacked by the club after 44 days.

Truss writes, “In the final days of my premiership, I had said to my private secretary, Nick Catsaras: ‘If the Conservative Party bin me after six weeks and I’m the Brian Clough of prime ministers, then so be it.’ I lasted 49 days.”

Kwasi Kwarteng, Truss’s chancellor for most of her 49 days in Number 10, has read sections of the book before publication, though he would not be drawn on what he made of them. For her work, Truss reportedly received a tiny £1,512.88 initial advance from Biteback, her UK publisher.

Ten Years to Save the West is being more lucratively received in the United States, where Truss is said to have bagged an initial advance of £6,161.40. She wheeled around American television studios and political conferences in February, including the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) where Donald Trump gave the keynote address.

Her speech, which accused a “deep state conspiracy” of blockading her efforts to return Britain to economic growth, along with a breezy, bantering appearance alongside Steve Bannon, energised her critics and dismayed her allies.

One ex-cabinet minister who worked under Truss described CPAC as “the moment where a lot of people who were close to her were like ‘what is that about?’”. The “slightly bizarre” chat with Bannon and “completely unrestrained” address left them with no doubts about her future: “Liz is not going to shut up.” This, they added, was both her strength and her weakness. The speech was unrestrained but also “there was something almost magnificent about it. She just won’t back down.”

Her former speechwriter, Asa Bennett, was less surprised. He recalls Truss’s fascination with the United States, and right-wing think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Telling a Trumpist audience that pan-Atlantic conservatives “needed a bigger bazooka” to fire at their left-wing foes was simply a sign, according to Bennett, that Truss was “freed from having to take orders from the No 10 machine and able to do what she wants”.

Other Truss era aides tended to fall back on one word to describe her US jaunt: desperation. She will return to Washington in April to launch Ten Years to Save The West with an event at the Heritage Foundation.

A Wednesday night political meeting in Marham village hall at the northern end of Truss’s constituency could not be further from CPAC. The cream walls are flecked and scratched, the wooden parquet floor is dusty, and an audience of 30 is huddled together beneath glowing orange heaters clamped to the walls. They are country folk with dog-hairs on their jeans, filth on their boots, and fleece gilets on their backs. Inevitably, a vicar sits in the front row. For an hour they grill Bagge about his candidacy.

He bills himself as a “Rory Stewart Conservative” — another way of saying: “I promise that I’m a nice, affable Tory gentleman and not completely insane”. The attendees want to know what Bagge will do about select committees, the NHS, and Ofsted. There is one unbelievably comprehensive, bullet-point-stressed, two-minute question about sand production.

The cosmic battles against the deep state that obsess Truss are not mentioned. Nor does anyone demand Bagge locate a Trussian bazooka to fire at South West Norfolk’s enemies. Whenever Truss is mentioned the crowd laughs or pantomime hisses. Not a single person in the room plans to vote for her.

“There is a perception that she spends all her time in America with fascist groups,” says Andrew Steven, a retired teacher. Her “money making” abroad meant that she had in effect “vanished” from the constituency: “She hasn’t been seen for dust.”

Before she had the questionable privilege of becoming prime minister, Steven remembers, Truss was a solid campaigner for the area. In nearby Barton Bendish, she had helped him with efforts to fund a new village hall. Now he “can’t believe” that the local Conservative association reselected her. (Several senior Tory landowners in the area were said to be “devastated” when Truss stayed on as their MP after Downing Street.) And no, Steven won’t be buying her book.

“Truss says she has ten years to save the West,” says Bagge. “Well, we have six months to save Norfolk.” Campaigns are exhausting. Bagge, a pensioner with a hearing aid, should probably be bobbing around the Caribbean on a liner.

Instead he has made a tiring promise to walk around dozens of the constituency’s villages: Snetterton, Gasthorpe, Blo Norton, Ickburgh, Hockwold cum Wilton, Crimplesham and Sporle. What motivates him?

The straightforward human answer is revenge. In 2009, Bagge’s brother, Sir Jeremy, headed a local Tory revolt against Truss, whom they had chosen as their candidate while in a state of ignorance about her affair with Mark Field, a fellow MP. The uprising, which earned them the nickname the “Turnip Taliban”, was squashed by David Cameron. But its memory lingers.

“It would have saved this country a lot of trouble if people had listened to the Turnip Taliban,” says Marcus Hawkins. The thickset sixth-generation auctioneer welcomes me into his office in Downham Market. Outside the door a 24lb, wall-mounted pike stands guard.

Hawkins wears lime green tweeds, a blinding pink shirt and pheasant cufflinks. His father, Sir Philip, was the Conservative MP for South West Norfolk from 1964 to 1987, when he retired. Hawkins says his father took work calls on Christmas Day. His family have known the Bagges for East Anglian aeons.

Truss, a middle-class, Leeds-born, Cameron-backed parachute candidate, had little appeal to these shire Tory patricians in 2009. She has even less now. “She cut her teeth fighting the Turnip Taliban,” says Bennett. “I think she will feel she has their number.” Was this a hive of backwards Norfolk sexism? Probably not. Gillian Shephard, a former Conservative MP, won every election here between 1987 and 2005. Gillian was not a bloke. Maybe, as one of the current MP’s old aides suggested, “There’s just never been a love affair between Liz Truss and Norfolk.”

In the book, Truss reveals that her political agent in Norfolk told her “I should run [for the Conservative Party leadership] — but he thought it would be best if I came second”.

The Labour candidate this year, Terry Jermy, says Truss has no real connections anywhere. Her spell as prime minister was not a source of local pride. Jermy says the voters care more about the fact that she educated her children in London and not in Norfolk. Bennett dismisses this: “I found she had a lot of love for her constituency and was proud to be a rural MP.” He points out that her favourite cheese is made in South West Norfolk.

Whether Truss ever lived in the constituency is a constant source of speculation. People in Thetford said she lived in Downham Market. People in Downham Market said she lived in Thetford. There was a reluctance in either town to admit to having Truss as a resident.

In Norfolk, some wonder if they still want Truss as a Conservative MP. But in Westminster, they wonder if one day Truss will be wanted — this is not a joke — as a future Conservative leader. “She thinks she can lead the party,” says the ex-cabinet minister. “She’s not self-aware, and she’s a bit crazy. Her driving mission will be to come back and prove something to her enemies. If that happens, exactly the same thing will happen as the last time she was in charge.”

Bennett dismisses the idea that Truss wants to mount a dramatic comeback. When I ask Thérèse Coffey, the MP for nearby Suffolk Coastal, whether it was possible, she replies in an email: “No”.

But Truss has spent far more time since she left office laying the groundwork for a potential future leadership challenge than she has in Norfolk.

Two Trussite organisations — the Growth Commission (a think tank) and Popular Conservatism (an activist group) — are designed to generate influence over the Tories after the next election. The former will supply ideas for the latter to popularise.

Still, her old colleagues disagree about what she wants. To be a “kingmaker or a queenmaker” in the party, says one. “Trussism without Truss,” says another, who suggests these operations will remain strictly backroom.

Such considerations seem abstract on the streets of Swaffham. The market town is surrounded by bungalows and rapeseed fields and shooting clubs. It feels like a free range, open-air retirement home — South West Norfolk is one of the oldest constituencies in the country. Some in Swaffham say they will vote “for the Conservative Party”. No one says Truss’s name.

The national punchline is fading, but the local embarrassment remains. “I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her,” cackles Paul Foley, a retired lift engineer. He is sitting on a canvas chair outside his wife’s vape shop, next to two silent, elderly men saddled on their mobility scooters.

“People around here don’t realise what she is,” says Foley, as if Truss might secretly be left-wing, or a lizard. He thought the “older generation” would guarantee Truss continued as South West Norfolk’s MP.

Foley is probably right. This is such a Conservative seat that the most effective opposition to Truss looks likely to come from Bagge, a man who could have been a Tory in any century for the past 400 years. In last year’s local elections, the Conservatives bucked national trends to beat the Labour Party by 20 points. Truss voters are shy in Norfolk, but that does not mean they will not re-elect her at the next election.

Bagge remains upbeat. He says he wants “to show that turnips do have brains”.

[right]

Apr 15, 2024 8:22:39 GMT LDCaerdydd said:

Story from yesterday's Sunday Times

Why Norfolk’s true-blue Tories are on a mission to unseat Liz Truss

James Bagge looks like a Tory. The retired army officer, barrister and former high sheriff of Norfolk sounds like a Tory. He cheerfully confirms that he is a Tory and he drives a deeply Tory car, a beaten-up silver Volvo A70 with 160,000 miles on the clock and a quietly farting golden retriever recumbent on the back seat. His great-great-grandfather was a Tory MP. But at the next general election Bagge, 71, wants to destroy the Conservative Party.

He is standing as an independent candidate in rural South West Norfolk, the seat where blink-and-you-missed-her ex-prime ministerial disaster zone Liz Truss commanded a majority of 26,195 votes in 2019.

Usually independents are beleaguered axe-grinding no-hopers involved in some sort of bitter dispute with a magistrate. Bagge is not like that.

He has amassed 100 volunteers, and built a surprisingly slick digital operation while appointing a treasurer and an agent. Bagge says that since January he has met 800 voters in the constituency at meetings in Downham Market, Swaffham and Thetford. “About five said they were voting for Truss”.

Bagge is unlikely to be queuing up for a copy of her political memoir, Ten Years To Save The West. Frank admissions of failure and folly pepper the text, which is being serialised by the Daily Mail this weekend. Truss cries on a visit to Indonesia, predicts the “brutal turbulence” that greeted her attempts to save Britain’s economy, struggles to cope with the death of Queen Elizabeth II and is assailed by an infestation of fleas in her Downing Street flat.

Life there was the opposite of glamorous. Truss found herself booking her own appointments with hair stylists. She had promised in her first speech as Prime Minister to “deliver” for Britain — but she could not get Ocado to deliver her shopping. Truss’s husband, Hugh O’Leary, predicted that her time in office would “end in tears”.

At one point Truss compares herself to Brian Clough, the polarising former Leeds United and Nottingham Forest manager. In 1974 Clough tried to shake up Leeds and was sacked by the club after 44 days.

Truss writes, “In the final days of my premiership, I had said to my private secretary, Nick Catsaras: ‘If the Conservative Party bin me after six weeks and I’m the Brian Clough of prime ministers, then so be it.’ I lasted 49 days.”

Kwasi Kwarteng, Truss’s chancellor for most of her 49 days in Number 10, has read sections of the book before publication, though he would not be drawn on what he made of them. For her work, Truss reportedly received a tiny £1,512.88 initial advance from Biteback, her UK publisher.

Ten Years to Save the West is being more lucratively received in the United States, where Truss is said to have bagged an initial advance of £6,161.40. She wheeled around American television studios and political conferences in February, including the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) where Donald Trump gave the keynote address.

Her speech, which accused a “deep state conspiracy” of blockading her efforts to return Britain to economic growth, along with a breezy, bantering appearance alongside Steve Bannon, energised her critics and dismayed her allies.

One ex-cabinet minister who worked under Truss described CPAC as “the moment where a lot of people who were close to her were like ‘what is that about?’”. The “slightly bizarre” chat with Bannon and “completely unrestrained” address left them with no doubts about her future: “Liz is not going to shut up.” This, they added, was both her strength and her weakness. The speech was unrestrained but also “there was something almost magnificent about it. She just won’t back down.”

Her former speechwriter, Asa Bennett, was less surprised. He recalls Truss’s fascination with the United States, and right-wing think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Telling a Trumpist audience that pan-Atlantic conservatives “needed a bigger bazooka” to fire at their left-wing foes was simply a sign, according to Bennett, that Truss was “freed from having to take orders from the No 10 machine and able to do what she wants”.

Other Truss era aides tended to fall back on one word to describe her US jaunt: desperation. She will return to Washington in April to launch Ten Years to Save The West with an event at the Heritage Foundation.

A Wednesday night political meeting in Marham village hall at the northern end of Truss’s constituency could not be further from CPAC. The cream walls are flecked and scratched, the wooden parquet floor is dusty, and an audience of 30 is huddled together beneath glowing orange heaters clamped to the walls. They are country folk with dog-hairs on their jeans, filth on their boots, and fleece gilets on their backs. Inevitably, a vicar sits in the front row. For an hour they grill Bagge about his candidacy.

He bills himself as a “Rory Stewart Conservative” — another way of saying: “I promise that I’m a nice, affable Tory gentleman and not completely insane”. The attendees want to know what Bagge will do about select committees, the NHS, and Ofsted. There is one unbelievably comprehensive, bullet-point-stressed, two-minute question about sand production.

The cosmic battles against the deep state that obsess Truss are not mentioned. Nor does anyone demand Bagge locate a Trussian bazooka to fire at South West Norfolk’s enemies. Whenever Truss is mentioned the crowd laughs or pantomime hisses. Not a single person in the room plans to vote for her.

“There is a perception that she spends all her time in America with fascist groups,” says Andrew Steven, a retired teacher. Her “money making” abroad meant that she had in effect “vanished” from the constituency: “She hasn’t been seen for dust.”

Before she had the questionable privilege of becoming prime minister, Steven remembers, Truss was a solid campaigner for the area. In nearby Barton Bendish, she had helped him with efforts to fund a new village hall. Now he “can’t believe” that the local Conservative association reselected her. (Several senior Tory landowners in the area were said to be “devastated” when Truss stayed on as their MP after Downing Street.) And no, Steven won’t be buying her book.

“Truss says she has ten years to save the West,” says Bagge. “Well, we have six months to save Norfolk.” Campaigns are exhausting. Bagge, a pensioner with a hearing aid, should probably be bobbing around the Caribbean on a liner.

Instead he has made a tiring promise to walk around dozens of the constituency’s villages: Snetterton, Gasthorpe, Blo Norton, Ickburgh, Hockwold cum Wilton, Crimplesham and Sporle. What motivates him?

The straightforward human answer is revenge. In 2009, Bagge’s brother, Sir Jeremy, headed a local Tory revolt against Truss, whom they had chosen as their candidate while in a state of ignorance about her affair with Mark Field, a fellow MP. The uprising, which earned them the nickname the “Turnip Taliban”, was squashed by David Cameron. But its memory lingers.

“It would have saved this country a lot of trouble if people had listened to the Turnip Taliban,” says Marcus Hawkins. The thickset sixth-generation auctioneer welcomes me into his office in Downham Market. Outside the door a 24lb, wall-mounted pike stands guard.

Hawkins wears lime green tweeds, a blinding pink shirt and pheasant cufflinks. His father, Sir Philip, was the Conservative MP for South West Norfolk from 1964 to 1987, when he retired. Hawkins says his father took work calls on Christmas Day. His family have known the Bagges for East Anglian aeons.

Truss, a middle-class, Leeds-born, Cameron-backed parachute candidate, had little appeal to these shire Tory patricians in 2009. She has even less now. “She cut her teeth fighting the Turnip Taliban,” says Bennett. “I think she will feel she has their number.” Was this a hive of backwards Norfolk sexism? Probably not. Gillian Shephard, a former Conservative MP, won every election here between 1987 and 2005. Gillian was not a bloke. Maybe, as one of the current MP’s old aides suggested, “There’s just never been a love affair between Liz Truss and Norfolk.”

In the book, Truss reveals that her political agent in Norfolk told her “I should run [for the Conservative Party leadership] — but he thought it would be best if I came second”.

The Labour candidate this year, Terry Jermy, says Truss has no real connections anywhere. Her spell as prime minister was not a source of local pride. Jermy says the voters care more about the fact that she educated her children in London and not in Norfolk. Bennett dismisses this: “I found she had a lot of love for her constituency and was proud to be a rural MP.” He points out that her favourite cheese is made in South West Norfolk.

Whether Truss ever lived in the constituency is a constant source of speculation. People in Thetford said she lived in Downham Market. People in Downham Market said she lived in Thetford. There was a reluctance in either town to admit to having Truss as a resident.

In Norfolk, some wonder if they still want Truss as a Conservative MP. But in Westminster, they wonder if one day Truss will be wanted — this is not a joke — as a future Conservative leader. “She thinks she can lead the party,” says the ex-cabinet minister. “She’s not self-aware, and she’s a bit crazy. Her driving mission will be to come back and prove something to her enemies. If that happens, exactly the same thing will happen as the last time she was in charge.”

Bennett dismisses the idea that Truss wants to mount a dramatic comeback. When I ask Thérèse Coffey, the MP for nearby Suffolk Coastal, whether it was possible, she replies in an email: “No”.

But Truss has spent far more time since she left office laying the groundwork for a potential future leadership challenge than she has in Norfolk.

Two Trussite organisations — the Growth Commission (a think tank) and Popular Conservatism (an activist group) — are designed to generate influence over the Tories after the next election. The former will supply ideas for the latter to popularise.

Still, her old colleagues disagree about what she wants. To be a “kingmaker or a queenmaker” in the party, says one. “Trussism without Truss,” says another, who suggests these operations will remain strictly backroom.

Such considerations seem abstract on the streets of Swaffham. The market town is surrounded by bungalows and rapeseed fields and shooting clubs. It feels like a free range, open-air retirement home — South West Norfolk is one of the oldest constituencies in the country. Some in Swaffham say they will vote “for the Conservative Party”. No one says Truss’s name.

The national punchline is fading, but the local embarrassment remains. “I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her,” cackles Paul Foley, a retired lift engineer. He is sitting on a canvas chair outside his wife’s vape shop, next to two silent, elderly men saddled on their mobility scooters.

“People around here don’t realise what she is,” says Foley, as if Truss might secretly be left-wing, or a lizard. He thought the “older generation” would guarantee Truss continued as South West Norfolk’s MP.

Foley is probably right. This is such a Conservative seat that the most effective opposition to Truss looks likely to come from Bagge, a man who could have been a Tory in any century for the past 400 years. In last year’s local elections, the Conservatives bucked national trends to beat the Labour Party by 20 points. Truss voters are shy in Norfolk, but that does not mean they will not re-elect her at the next election.

Bagge remains upbeat. He says he wants “to show that turnips do have brains”.

Although a lot of this is obviously a journalist hoping to be able to show they've predicted the next election's Portillo Hamilton moment, I think Truss is in genuine trouble here even if she's still more likely to hold on.

The route to a Labour victory involves Bagge only getting otherwise diehard Tory votes, which this piece doesn't seem to indicate, and Labour sweeping everything else up (including Tory switchers).

The route to a Bagge victory involves all the other non Tories either collapsing or not bothering, and its clear from the Labour posters on this thread that this is not the current plan.  And if I were Starmer having Truss doing an incredible sulk in the next few Parliaments is not the worst outcome.

So this is more likely to be classified as one of the sharpest fall in the Conservative majority, rather than the most unlikely Tory loss.

[batman]

Labour are going to be very wary of a decapitation strategy. They will be much keener to maximise their gains ranging from the relatively bread-and-butter to the realistic outside bets. In Norfolk there are better chances elsewhere even though only Norwich North looks doable other than in a complete Tory meltdown

[right]

Apr 15, 2024 9:59:13 GMT batman said:

Labour are going to be very wary of a decapitation strategy. They will be much keener to maximise their gains ranging from the relatively bread-and-butter to the realistic outside bets. In Norfolk there are better chances elsewhere even though only Norwich North looks doable other than in a complete Tory meltdown

On the other hand the local party will put in an effort and they do have a presence in Thetford and a memory of winning that seat (albeit years and years ago).

There seems to be an energetic young candidate with some local roots.

If Bagge takes off, Truss will probably need Labour to lock up enough of their own voters.

[East Anglian Lefty]

Apr 15, 2024 9:59:13 GMT batman said:

Labour are going to be very wary of a decapitation strategy. They will be much keener to maximise their gains ranging from the relatively bread-and-butter to the realistic outside bets. In Norfolk there are better chances elsewhere even though only Norwich North looks doable other than in a complete Tory meltdown

I think Great Yarmouth will probably also be targeted to some extent - it's got an outsized Tory majority right now, but it has big concentrations of a lot of the voter types that polling shows swinging hardest to Labour.

[right]

Apr 15, 2024 10:52:19 GMT right said:

Apr 15, 2024 9:59:13 GMT batman said:

Labour are going to be very wary of a decapitation strategy. They will be much keener to maximise their gains ranging from the relatively bread-and-butter to the realistic outside bets. In Norfolk there are better chances elsewhere even though only Norwich North looks doable other than in a complete Tory meltdown

On the other hand the local party will put in an effort and they do have a presence in Thetford and a memory of winning that seat (albeit years and years ago).

There seems to be an energetic young candidate with some local roots.

If Bagge takes off, Truss will probably need Labour to lock up enough of their own voters.

The decapitation strategy in this case would be to give Bagge a free run

[graham]

Apr 15, 2024 9:59:13 GMT batman said:

Labour are going to be very wary of a decapitation strategy. They will be much keener to maximise their gains ranging from the relatively bread-and-butter to the realistic outside bets. In Norfolk there are better chances elsewhere even though only Norwich North looks doable other than in a complete Tory meltdown

Great yarmouth should be Labour in a good year for the party. Brexit is likely to have exaggerated Tory strength in 2019.

[ricmk]

First Past the Post really helps Liz Truss here, doesn't it?
It doesn't seem at all clear as an outsider whether to vote Labour or Bagge if you want to shift her, and that's probably just how she wants it.

[greenhert]

Apr 15, 2024 8:22:39 GMT LDCaerdydd said:

Story from yesterday's Sunday Times

Why Norfolk’s true-blue Tories are on a mission to unseat Liz Truss

James Bagge looks like a Tory. The retired army officer, barrister and former high sheriff of Norfolk sounds like a Tory. He cheerfully confirms that he is a Tory and he drives a deeply Tory car, a beaten-up silver Volvo A70 with 160,000 miles on the clock and a quietly farting golden retriever recumbent on the back seat. His great-great-grandfather was a Tory MP. But at the next general election Bagge, 71, wants to destroy the Conservative Party.

He is standing as an independent candidate in rural South West Norfolk, the seat where blink-and-you-missed-her ex-prime ministerial disaster zone Liz Truss commanded a majority of 26,195 votes in 2019.

Usually independents are beleaguered axe-grinding no-hopers involved in some sort of bitter dispute with a magistrate. Bagge is not like that.

He has amassed 100 volunteers, and built a surprisingly slick digital operation while appointing a treasurer and an agent. Bagge says that since January he has met 800 voters in the constituency at meetings in Downham Market, Swaffham and Thetford. “About five said they were voting for Truss”.

Bagge is unlikely to be queuing up for a copy of her political memoir, Ten Years To Save The West. Frank admissions of failure and folly pepper the text, which is being serialised by the Daily Mail this weekend. Truss cries on a visit to Indonesia, predicts the “brutal turbulence” that greeted her attempts to save Britain’s economy, struggles to cope with the death of Queen Elizabeth II and is assailed by an infestation of fleas in her Downing Street flat.

Life there was the opposite of glamorous. Truss found herself booking her own appointments with hair stylists. She had promised in her first speech as Prime Minister to “deliver” for Britain — but she could not get Ocado to deliver her shopping. Truss’s husband, Hugh O’Leary, predicted that her time in office would “end in tears”.

At one point Truss compares herself to Brian Clough, the polarising former Leeds United and Nottingham Forest manager. In 1974 Clough tried to shake up Leeds and was sacked by the club after 44 days.

Truss writes, “In the final days of my premiership, I had said to my private secretary, Nick Catsaras: ‘If the Conservative Party bin me after six weeks and I’m the Brian Clough of prime ministers, then so be it.’ I lasted 49 days.”

Kwasi Kwarteng, Truss’s chancellor for most of her 49 days in Number 10, has read sections of the book before publication, though he would not be drawn on what he made of them. For her work, Truss reportedly received a tiny £1,512.88 initial advance from Biteback, her UK publisher.

Ten Years to Save the West is being more lucratively received in the United States, where Truss is said to have bagged an initial advance of £6,161.40. She wheeled around American television studios and political conferences in February, including the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) where Donald Trump gave the keynote address.

Her speech, which accused a “deep state conspiracy” of blockading her efforts to return Britain to economic growth, along with a breezy, bantering appearance alongside Steve Bannon, energised her critics and dismayed her allies.

One ex-cabinet minister who worked under Truss described CPAC as “the moment where a lot of people who were close to her were like ‘what is that about?’”. The “slightly bizarre” chat with Bannon and “completely unrestrained” address left them with no doubts about her future: “Liz is not going to shut up.” This, they added, was both her strength and her weakness. The speech was unrestrained but also “there was something almost magnificent about it. She just won’t back down.”

Her former speechwriter, Asa Bennett, was less surprised. He recalls Truss’s fascination with the United States, and right-wing think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Telling a Trumpist audience that pan-Atlantic conservatives “needed a bigger bazooka” to fire at their left-wing foes was simply a sign, according to Bennett, that Truss was “freed from having to take orders from the No 10 machine and able to do what she wants”.

Other Truss era aides tended to fall back on one word to describe her US jaunt: desperation. She will return to Washington in April to launch Ten Years to Save The West with an event at the Heritage Foundation.

A Wednesday night political meeting in Marham village hall at the northern end of Truss’s constituency could not be further from CPAC. The cream walls are flecked and scratched, the wooden parquet floor is dusty, and an audience of 30 is huddled together beneath glowing orange heaters clamped to the walls. They are country folk with dog-hairs on their jeans, filth on their boots, and fleece gilets on their backs. Inevitably, a vicar sits in the front row. For an hour they grill Bagge about his candidacy.

He bills himself as a “Rory Stewart Conservative” — another way of saying: “I promise that I’m a nice, affable Tory gentleman and not completely insane”. The attendees want to know what Bagge will do about select committees, the NHS, and Ofsted. There is one unbelievably comprehensive, bullet-point-stressed, two-minute question about sand production.

The cosmic battles against the deep state that obsess Truss are not mentioned. Nor does anyone demand Bagge locate a Trussian bazooka to fire at South West Norfolk’s enemies. Whenever Truss is mentioned the crowd laughs or pantomime hisses. Not a single person in the room plans to vote for her.

“There is a perception that she spends all her time in America with fascist groups,” says Andrew Steven, a retired teacher. Her “money making” abroad meant that she had in effect “vanished” from the constituency: “She hasn’t been seen for dust.”

Before she had the questionable privilege of becoming prime minister, Steven remembers, Truss was a solid campaigner for the area. In nearby Barton Bendish, she had helped him with efforts to fund a new village hall. Now he “can’t believe” that the local Conservative association reselected her. (Several senior Tory landowners in the area were said to be “devastated” when Truss stayed on as their MP after Downing Street.) And no, Steven won’t be buying her book.

“Truss says she has ten years to save the West,” says Bagge. “Well, we have six months to save Norfolk.” Campaigns are exhausting. Bagge, a pensioner with a hearing aid, should probably be bobbing around the Caribbean on a liner.

Instead he has made a tiring promise to walk around dozens of the constituency’s villages: Snetterton, Gasthorpe, Blo Norton, Ickburgh, Hockwold cum Wilton, Crimplesham and Sporle. What motivates him?

The straightforward human answer is revenge. In 2009, Bagge’s brother, Sir Jeremy, headed a local Tory revolt against Truss, whom they had chosen as their candidate while in a state of ignorance about her affair with Mark Field, a fellow MP. The uprising, which earned them the nickname the “Turnip Taliban”, was squashed by David Cameron. But its memory lingers.

“It would have saved this country a lot of trouble if people had listened to the Turnip Taliban,” says Marcus Hawkins. The thickset sixth-generation auctioneer welcomes me into his office in Downham Market. Outside the door a 24lb, wall-mounted pike stands guard.

Hawkins wears lime green tweeds, a blinding pink shirt and pheasant cufflinks. His father, Sir Philip, was the Conservative MP for South West Norfolk from 1964 to 1987, when he retired. Hawkins says his father took work calls on Christmas Day. His family have known the Bagges for East Anglian aeons.

Truss, a middle-class, Leeds-born, Cameron-backed parachute candidate, had little appeal to these shire Tory patricians in 2009. She has even less now. “She cut her teeth fighting the Turnip Taliban,” says Bennett. “I think she will feel she has their number.” Was this a hive of backwards Norfolk sexism? Probably not. Gillian Shephard, a former Conservative MP, won every election here between 1987 and 2005. Gillian was not a bloke. Maybe, as one of the current MP’s old aides suggested, “There’s just never been a love affair between Liz Truss and Norfolk.”

In the book, Truss reveals that her political agent in Norfolk told her “I should run [for the Conservative Party leadership] — but he thought it would be best if I came second”.

The Labour candidate this year, Terry Jermy, says Truss has no real connections anywhere. Her spell as prime minister was not a source of local pride. Jermy says the voters care more about the fact that she educated her children in London and not in Norfolk. Bennett dismisses this: “I found she had a lot of love for her constituency and was proud to be a rural MP.” He points out that her favourite cheese is made in South West Norfolk.

Whether Truss ever lived in the constituency is a constant source of speculation. People in Thetford said she lived in Downham Market. People in Downham Market said she lived in Thetford. There was a reluctance in either town to admit to having Truss as a resident.

In Norfolk, some wonder if they still want Truss as a Conservative MP. But in Westminster, they wonder if one day Truss will be wanted — this is not a joke — as a future Conservative leader. “She thinks she can lead the party,” says the ex-cabinet minister. “She’s not self-aware, and she’s a bit crazy. Her driving mission will be to come back and prove something to her enemies. If that happens, exactly the same thing will happen as the last time she was in charge.”

Bennett dismisses the idea that Truss wants to mount a dramatic comeback. When I ask Thérèse Coffey, the MP for nearby Suffolk Coastal, whether it was possible, she replies in an email: “No”.

But Truss has spent far more time since she left office laying the groundwork for a potential future leadership challenge than she has in Norfolk.

Two Trussite organisations — the Growth Commission (a think tank) and Popular Conservatism (an activist group) — are designed to generate influence over the Tories after the next election. The former will supply ideas for the latter to popularise.

Still, her old colleagues disagree about what she wants. To be a “kingmaker or a queenmaker” in the party, says one. “Trussism without Truss,” says another, who suggests these operations will remain strictly backroom.

Such considerations seem abstract on the streets of Swaffham. The market town is surrounded by bungalows and rapeseed fields and shooting clubs. It feels like a free range, open-air retirement home — South West Norfolk is one of the oldest constituencies in the country. Some in Swaffham say they will vote “for the Conservative Party”. No one says Truss’s name.

The national punchline is fading, but the local embarrassment remains. “I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her,” cackles Paul Foley, a retired lift engineer. He is sitting on a canvas chair outside his wife’s vape shop, next to two silent, elderly men saddled on their mobility scooters.

“People around here don’t realise what she is,” says Foley, as if Truss might secretly be left-wing, or a lizard. He thought the “older generation” would guarantee Truss continued as South West Norfolk’s MP.

Foley is probably right. This is such a Conservative seat that the most effective opposition to Truss looks likely to come from Bagge, a man who could have been a Tory in any century for the past 400 years. In last year’s local elections, the Conservatives bucked national trends to beat the Labour Party by 20 points. Truss voters are shy in Norfolk, but that does not mean they will not re-elect her at the next election.

Bagge remains upbeat. He says he wants “to show that turnips do have brains”.

A basic Wikipedia search would have told the Sunday Times that the Conservative MP for SW Norfolk from 1964 to 1987 was Paul Hawkins not Philip Hawkins.

[YL]

Apr 15, 2024 14:51:45 GMT ricmk said:

First Past the Post really helps Liz Truss here, doesn't it?
It doesn't seem at all clear as an outsider whether to vote Labour or Bagge if you want to shift her, and that's probably just how she wants it.

Though the question is whether it becomes clear to the insiders! A constituency poll here early in the actual campaign might be interesting, even bearing in mind the track record of such things.

Another question is to what extent people who would normally be voting Labour, Lib Dem or Green would be happy voting for someone like Bagge, who while he does have the major advantage of not being Liz Truss is still essentially a Tory.

[YL]

Apr 15, 2024 7:59:26 GMT mrtoad said:

How is one to pronounce 'Bagge'? Is it 'bag' or 'beige' or some imaginative squirearchical alternative?

The man himself says "bag" in this video.

[batman]

Apr 15, 2024 12:54:45 GMT right said:

Apr 15, 2024 10:52:19 GMT right said:

On the other hand the local party will put in an effort and they do have a presence in Thetford and a memory of winning that seat (albeit years and years ago).

There seems to be an energetic young candidate with some local roots.

If Bagge takes off, Truss will probably need Labour to lock up enough of their own voters.

The decapitation strategy in this case would be to give Bagge a free run

I don't agree. There is no evidence that Bagge has a greater ability to win the seat than do Labour. It's pure speculation as to how he would do unless & until someone does a constituency poll.