The only Tory in the village

Last Thursday, an old flatmate of mine stood for the Conservatives in a ward of the Rhondda Cynon Taff borough, in the local elections.

RCT is in south Wales. It is very Welsh, and covers an area of valleys, small towns and disused coal mines. Everyone votes Labour or Plaid. They have done so for as long as they can remember, and they don’t see any reason to change now. People aren’t ready to forgive the Tories for Thatcher quite yet.

My friend only found out he was standing a few weeks back. He had shown some interest in politics before but had done very little in terms of active participation. He had applied for some research jobs at the Welsh Conservatives, and someone suggested he stood in the elections. It would look good on a CV after all.

In the 75 wards of RCT, he was the only Conservative candidate. The Tories had never had a local councillor in RCT since it was formed in 1996, and not for many, many years in the area before that.

When the results were announced on Friday morning, he won.

Mike Smithson’s PoliticalBetting blog soon latched onto the result. One disbelieving pundit pointed out: “A Tory even got elected in the Rhondda!” while another wanted to know more: “does anyone know where I can find out which ward the Conservatives won in The Rhondda ?”

It was clearly a remarkable achievement, but what does it say about local politics?

Firstly, it is a clear indicator of the Tories’ strong showing across Britain, even in Wales where they are traditionally absent.

However, it also displays the importance of ‘hard graft’ in the lower political echelons. My friend knocked on practically every door in the ward in the couple weeks leading up to the election, whereas the incumbents, according to a comment on a BBC blog: “had become “invisible” bar the odd piece of junk mail landing on the welcome mat every now and then.”

After countless political debates with my flat mate over three years at university, I never really had him down as a Conservative. Indeed, he would often say that he is only, “conservative with a small c”. But perhaps on a local level, political parties are really not that important anymore. Interestingly the other victorious councillor in the ward was an independent.

When you can get elected with somewhere in the region of 500 votes, there is no substitute to making yourself known whoever you are standing for. Even in a region as politically set in its way as south Wales.

(Apologies for the Little Britain reference. It is a truly horrific programme.)