Not many people thought we could actually win in Clacton. At the 2019 election, when Boris Johnson led the Conservatives, it was their fifth safest seat. Clacton voters had sent the UK’s first ever Ukip MP to Westminster at a 2014 by-election. Clacton’s predecessor constituency, Harwich, had returned a Labour MP for only two brief terms in over 100 years. By any measure, when I stood for the party in 2025 it was not fertile Labour territory. On the doorstep we kept hearing “not round here mate”, and the familiar “I used to vote Labour but…” And yet there we were, knocking on doors, listening to residents and putting forward a counter-argument to the emerging forces of a nationalist right.
Unlike Nigel Farage, who was helicoptered in the moment Rishi Sunak called the general election, I’d been selected some months earlier. That gave me time to get to know the constituency better. I made it my mission to reach as many people in the community as I could. I met people who were worried about elderly social care, pensioners isolated by unreliable bus services, veterans priced out of London and publicans who, even then, barely turned a profit on a pint. A middle-aged mum in Great Bentley told me how frustrated she was trying to find her son a school place. “It [the country] just doesn’t work,” she said, “so there’s no point voting.”
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