Candidate selections have recently taken place across several Conservative-held seats. Caroline Newton has been chosen to replace John Howell in Henley, Jane MacBean to follow Dehenna Davison in Bishop Auckland, and Mike Newton (no relation) to succeed Stuart Anderson, who stood down from Wolverhampton West – containing his previous constituency – for South Shropshire.
Both MacBean and the latter Newton are previous ConservativeHome contributors. MacBean has been a councillor in Buckinghamshire and runs a small financial services firm. She has done well to buck the general trend of choosing hyper-local candidates. By contrast, Newton runs an economic consulting business, previously worked for the Bank of England, and volunteers with young adults.
The other Newton has an eye-catching CV. Having studied History at Cambridge (nobody’s perfect), she served as a district councillor from 2017 to 2023, a county councillor from 2012 to 2014, chaired South Oxfordshire Conservative Association, and served as a special adviser to Boris Johnson for seven months in 2022. Like Rupert Harrison, a fellow Oxfordshire candidate, she combines local with national experience.
Newton beat out Lincoln Jopp, a pension fund director who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, Lucy Demery, an investment banker, and Meg-Powell Chandler, a former Downing Street special adviser who fought Birmingham Northfield in 2017. The latter two were previously linked with Bicester and Woodstock, whilst Jopp was on the short-list for Weald of Kent.
Earlier speculation linked the seat to two rather high-profile names: James Cracknell, the former Olympic gold-medalist rower, now selected for Colchester, and one Boris Johnson, who served as the constituency’s MP from 2001 to 2008 and has recently moved back to the constituency. The original selection process had to be abandoned after multiple complaints and leaks to the press.
Local constituency members have described Newton as a “fantastic local campaigner”, whilst Newton says she is passionate about the constituency where she lives, especially “supporting our environment, local businesses, and the most vulnerable people in our community”. ConservativeHome wishes Newton – and the other two candidates – the best.
Since Howell had a majority of 14, 053 at the last election, the seat last voted for a party other than the Tories in 1906, and has played host to both a former Prime Minister and former Deputy Prime Minister, one would assume that Newton has a pretty good chance of being elected. Even in during 1997 defeat, Michael Heseltine still managed to attract a majority of 21.7 per cent.
Readers won’t be that surprised to hear that both Bishop Auckland and Wolverhampton West – two seats which, albeit for the latter in a slightly different form, were only won from Labour in 2019, the former for the first time – and predicted to be lost by both Electoral Calculus and the YouGov MRP poll of a month or two ago by substantial margins. No wonder Anderson has moved.
Unfortunately for Newton, the MRP poll predicts Henley will be lost to the Liberal Democrats. Electoral Calculus has it staying blue by a narrow margin of 2.1 per cent. But if more polls show the Tories doing as badly as yesterday’s in the Evening Standard, then one doubts whether Newton has much of a hope.
Nor does the party as a whole, if both the Red Wall and the Blue Wall look increasingly lost.