Sir Roger Gale
Member of Parliament for Herne Bay and Sandwich (including West Thanet)
 

Gale's Election View

4th July 2024

July 13th 2024

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July 4th Result                                                    

 

Roger Gale (Conservative)                        17,243

Helen Whitehead (Labour)                      14,744

Amelia Randall (Reform)                          10,602

Thea Barrett (Green)                                  3,529

Angie Curwen (Lib Dem)                           2,709

 

Conservative Majority                                2,499

 

First, my heartfelt thanks to the 17,243 voters who placed their trust in me and returned me as the Member of Parliament for the newly-created Herne Bay and Sandwich parliamentary seat. My duty now, as following every election that I have fought, is to represent all of my constituents irrespective of how they may have voted and that I shall seek to do to the best of my ability. 

Second, my thanks to those of my political opponents who took the time and trouble to attend the hustings held in Sturry, Herne Bay, and in Sandwich. Together we have, I hope, shown that it is possible to express political differences with courtesy and respect and without rancour. I wish them all well in their respective futures. 

Third, as I expressed on election night, my thanks to my stalwart agent, Debi Hill, who as always has been meticulous in her administration of all electoral matters, to my brilliantly determined and dedicated Campaign Director George Kup and the small but dedicated team of volunteers that he led to steer us to ultimate success after six weeks of tireless canvassing . 

And  my thanks to the one person who, in the heat and emotion of the moment I forgot to mention following the announcement of the result , my wife and soul-mate Suzy without whom I could not have done the job as I would have wished over so many years. It will take more than a bunch of flowers to repair the omission, but Suzy knows just how much she really means to me! 

Finally, I have said during this and the last two General Elections, that I would not wish to be re-elected with the support of anyone who subscribes to the populist and singularly unpleasant views of Reform.  I appreciate  that many decent , honest,  hardworking and patriotic people, fed up with what they have perceived to  have been a Conservative Government running out of steam but not wishing to support a Socialist party , will have turned to Reform to reflect their frustration but the idea of offering comfort to a party led by a man who supports an enemy of this nation with whom we are in conflict, the Dictator Putin, is  abhorrent to me. As abhorrent as are the views of the AfD in Germany, Madame Marine Le Pen and her party in France, Viktor Orban in Hungary and ex-President Trump in the United States of America.  I am gratified that in Herne Bay and Sandwich at least we were able to achieve electoral success cleanly, decently and without pandering to the dog-whistle politics of the extreme right.

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With inflation and interest rates falling, with the standard of living once again on the rise and with hospital waiting lists expected to reduce dramatically by the end of the year, all positives arising directly from Conservative Government policies and for which a new Labour administration will now no doubt claim credit, it seems extraordinary that Prime Minister Sunak should have bounced his  Party into a snap election in July.  Given that peculiarly British attitude that says “It`s time that we allowed the other lot (whoever they are) to have a go” it is highly likely that Labour would have won an Autumn election but not with anything like the majority that Keir Starmer now enjoys. So why rush off to see the King without even consulting his Cabinet?  History may eventually reveal the answer when the story is finally told but for the moment we can only speculate.  

To succeed in politics you need to have luck as well as ability on your side. Rishi Sunak has not been lucky.  As the Chancellor of the Exchequer throughout the Covid pandemic he courageously introduced the `furlough scheme` that indubitably saved tens of thousands of jobs and precedented hundreds of businesses from going bust. He was then wholly unjustly embroiled in Johnson`s `Partygate` scandal and having warned against the follies of `Trusseonomics` found himself in the hot seat when the music stopped. As a Prime Minister he faced the financial and cost-of-living backlash arising from the need to repay debts incurred during his pandemic bailout and the fuel cost spike arising from wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. 

I did not vote for Sunak or Truss as Premier (and I have the unused ballot papers to prove it!)  because I pulled out when my own horse (Penny Mordaunt) fell at the penultimate fence but I do believe that Mr. Sunak inherited a chalice poisoned by the only Prime Minister to lose her seat in a General Election. 

The decision to call a snap General Election (see above) was premature, ill-advised and catastrophic for Britain`s `Natural Party of Government`. That the Number Ten Chief of Staff, Liam Booth Smith, should have been given a life peerage in the dissolution honours list says much for Sunak`s sense of loyalty but beggars belief.  This is the man who, presumably, allowed the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to go out unshielded I onto the steps of Downing Street in the pouring rain and to try to sell himself to the British People soaked to the skin when there was an expensive and Boris-built press facility in the dry and warm indoors just waiting to be used. What kind of clown permits that sort of thoughtless and unmanaged incompetence?   

Rishi Sunak was in my view unfairly and improperly accused of `leaving the D-Day commemorations early` when it would appear that having done their respective duties the Prime Minister and his Monarch left France at more or less the same time. Nobody would wish to embarrass the Palace – King Charles clearly had good reasons for needing to be elsewhere – but the fact is that Rishi Sunak, unlike President Macron or Joe Biden,  is not the Head of State and should not, properly, have featured in the `quad` photo in which Great Britain was represented by the Foreign Secretary. Had the Number Ten Downing Street Press Office had the wit to quietly brief the press about the protocol there would have been no story. But in that vacuum the solids hit the fan and the Prime Minister was left bearing the brunt of unjust criticism. 

Then came the ludicrous exposure of alleged `insider betting` based upon information about the date of the General Election.  On the ground in the constituencies the poor bloody infantry had enough to contend with without fresh allegations of `Tory Sleaze`.  The matter is the subject of possible criminal proceedings so I cannot comment much further but the headlines were to say the least `unhelpful`.  

Since Archie Norman, a former supermarket supremo turned occasional  politician became the Chairman of the Conservative Party under the Leadership of William Hague and overnight culled most of the `0ld and Bold` party professionals the Party Headquarters has been run by inexperienced pro-am enthusiasts with limited experience. You cannot run a voluntary body like a supermarket – a fact that Mr Norman failed to grasp. 

Calling a snap election may have been an error in itself but to then try to parachute possibly able but outside candidates into seats against the will of local activists was an act of crass stupidity presided over by the Party Chairman.  That the Party Chairman, in need of a seat himself because of boundary changes, was then allowed to inflict himself upon the Association of Basildon and Billericay, to the anger of Party Members and electorate alike, added insult to injury. A Party Chairman should not have had to spend his time hanging onto his own seat, in the end by the thread of a recount, is outrageous. In more honourable days Chris (now Lord) Patten sacrificed his own seat to deliver the 1992 victory for John Major but times, it seems, have changed. When the dust has settled the stables in Conservative Campaign Headquarters are going to have to be mucked out. 

Meanwhile, down here at Herne Bay and Sandwich (with West Thanet ) level we were getting on with the task of trying to win a new seat created at the idiotic whim of a Boundary Commission that is independent of Government and impervious to the benefit of local knowledge and opinion. 

I and my stalwart team – and I don’t doubt those of other parties as well – spent much of the early days of the campaign trying to explain that “Yes, North Thanet and South Thanet have ceased to exist, and you are now part of East Thanet or Herne Bay and Sandwich”

This was particularly difficult in our case because a third of the new constituency (and formerly part of North Thanet) including the Towns of Birchington-on- Sea, Westgate-on-Sea, Westbrook , Garlinge and all of the Thanet Villages that go to make up `West Thanet` do not feature in the title of the seat at all. When we raised this with the Boundary Commission, they said that “We like to include the names of the main towns in the title”.  Fact: The population of Birchington is larger than that of Sandwich!  The time has clearly come for some light to be shone into the clubbable dark corners of the Boundary Commission. 

In the course of six weeks I and my small band of loyal and merry men and women tried to reach out into the furthest corners of a seat that is, geographically but not numerically, five times the size of East Thanet.  Inevitably about ninety per cent of the electorate will say “they did not bother to call here” because even in the dawn-to-dusk operation that we mounted it was physically impossible to call upon even that proportion of the households that we visited  when the occupants were at home. 

I thought that I knew even the new bits of Herne Bay and Sandwich quite well but I found myself visiting settlements the names of which I had previously only seen on road signs while driving by. But it was, in heat and rain, informative and fun and Team Gale worked, up until the close of poll, on a high. 

Winning is emotional but so much easier than losing and I have great respect for those of my colleagues who attended the hustings knowing that they were unlikely to score more than four figures in the ballot box. 

Looking to the future the Conservative Party has to regroup and re-build . If we lurch off to the hard right as some of my re-elected colleagues would have us do then we shall be out of power for a generation if we survive at all. And although we have taken a battering Mr Starmer needs to remember that while he has lots of MPs who may at least at first do his bidding he is forming a government with the support of barely a third of the people of the United Kingdom.  I do not generally agree with Mr Johnson, but he was right to say that Castle Starmer is built on sand a mile wide and an inch deep. 

Time, I think, for us all to set aside hubris and work together in the interests of the British people.