Chancellor faces reckoning from constituents in Surrey

Locals in Godalming tell Archie Mitchell why they’ve turned

- Archie Mitchell

If the polls are to be believed, Jeremy Hunt’s Godalming and Ash constituency should still be teeming with Tories despite five years of chaos under Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. The chancellor is plotting a narrow course to victory in the trueblue Surrey seat, which has been Conservative since its creation as South West Surrey in 1983.

But on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, with just over a week until polls open, The Independent struggled to see how Mr Hunt can avoid the humiliation of the infamous “Portillo moment” – when the then defence secretary was unseated at the 1997 election in stunning fashion.

After spending the afternoon strolling the leafy streets and wandering along the waterways, we were unable to find a single openly Conservative voter. Mr Hunt’s rivals in the race are Lib Dem Paul Follows, Labour’s James Walsh, Reform UK’s Graham Drage, Ruby Tucker for the Greens and Harriet Williams for the Women’s Equality Party.

In a sign Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey’s strategy of winning over so-called Surrey shufflers may be working, this newspaper encountered a series of voters enthusiastically backing his party’s bid to smash the southern blue wall on 4 July.

Residents of Godalming, the 10,000-strong market town just a 30-minute train journey from Waterloo, said scandals including Partygate, Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-Budget and the general election betting allegations currently engulfing the Conservatives had pushed them over the edge.

On a quiet residential street a short walk from the town centre, The Independent met Steven, a retiree and former Conservative voter, including for Mr Johnson in 2019, who said he was sympathetic to Mr Hunt personally but would be voting for the Lib Dems.