“I think we are going to win,” says Monica Harding. The Lib Dem candidate in Esher and Walton is confident of ousting Dominic Raab – despite the foreign secretary’s healthy 23,298 majority.
She would say that, of course. But Harding’s cautious optimism has been boosted by a series of interventions that suggest a huge upset on election night is not totally out of reach.
An analysis of YouGov data put Raab on the watchlist of Tories who could be ousted by tactical voting. The Surrey seat has been solidly Conservative since its creation in 1997, but 58% voted to Remain. Raab is a prominent Brexiteer who, during his Tory leadership campaign, first floated the idea of proroguing parliament.
“We are breathing down his neck,” Harding says in an interview with HuffPost UK. “We’ve got two and half weeks to go and it’s all perfectly possible. I am not taking anything for granted. We are taking one day at a time.
“But from what we are finding on the doorstep and from the huge amount of support we are getting from not only Lib Dem supporters, but Tory and Labour Party members that are coming over to us, we think we have got a really good chance of unseating him.”
On Wednesday evening YouGov released its MRP constituency poll. The same survey in 2017 accurately predicted a hung parliament. This time it showed the Lib Dems would only pick up one more seat – far fewer than the “hundreds” predicted by party leader Jo Swinson at the start of the campaign. It was not Esher and Walton.
The poll suggested the Conservatives are on 48% in the seat, while the Lib Dems are on 38% with Labour in third on 11%. In 2017, the Lib Dems came third here with 10,374 votes, just behind Labour in second on 11,773. Raab won with 35,071.
But Harding says the YouGov poll is “actually good news” for her campaign. “It shows that Labour can’t win. Any kind of fear that they [voters] would be letting Jeremy Corbyn in by not voting Conservative is completely gone.”
At a feisty hustings this week, Raab was told by shouting voters “we don’t want it done” when he delivered the party’s “Get Brexit Done” campaign slogan.
The friends and family of Harry Dunn, the 19-year-old killed in a car crash involving an American who claimed diplomatic immunity, confronted Raab on his way into the event, branded him a “coward” and called for him to be ousted from parliament.
Ian Taylor, Raab’s predecessor as the Tory MP for the seat, has also publicly encouraged his former constituents to vote Lib Dem.
Harding insists: “The momentum is with us here. We have the more sophisticated ground campaign. We’ve got the surge here. Raab has had a dreadful week. And that [YouGov] polling was done prior to his week beginning.
“A vacancy has opened here for a moderate voice and I am filling that vacancy.”
Swinson made a point of taking her battle bus to the seat on the southern outskirts of London on her first full day of campaigning.
Since then, the party’s national campaign appears to have faltered, with Swinson conducting a sharp pivot from claiming she could become prime minister to presenting the Lib Dems as the best chance of stopping a Tory majority.
Harding says the expulsion of the 21 Tory MPs who voted to block a no-deal Brexit on October 31 “went down like a lead balloon” in the seat.
“There is a feeling the way the government is behaving amid this distortion of truth, this dishonesty, it also doesn’t play well,” she says.
“This is a very moderate One Nation Conservative constituency traditionally. What is going on at the moment does not land here well at all.”
Harding, a first time parliamentary candidate originally from south-west London, says Labour voters are tactically deciding to back her.
“Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party will not get traction,” she says. “We have a lot of Labour Party supporters that are coming over to us because they dislike Raab and they dislike the Boris Johnson government and they want to get rid of that – so they are coming over to vote for me.”
More than 50% of the voters in the leafy seat work in big business or finance in central London, and Harding says hard Brexit is seen by those voters as “an act of economic self sabotage”.
Harding reckons at the last election Remain voters were willing to give the Conservatives the chance to deliver a “softer or more practical Brexit” but that “sympathy” has now gone.
“I am not represented here,” she said. “I am one of the 60% who voted Remain and we have a hardline Brexiteer MP and he hasn’t moderated his position one little bit.”
She adds: “The only way to stop the Conservative majority, which is looming and big, is by winning seats like Esher and Walton.”