Mid Dunbartonshire: winner in 2019 of predecessor seat of East Dunbartonshire: Amy Callaghan (SNP)
MID Dunbartonshire, in its previous guise as East Dunbartonshire, produced the standout result of the 2019 General Election anywhere in the UK, bar none.
It’s incredibly rare for the leader of a major party to lose their seat, partly because there’s usually an inbuilt “leader’s bonus” caused by voters rather liking the idea of their local area being represented by someone important.
In the case of Jo Swinson, who was the leader of the Liberal Democrats in 2019, it seemed particularly unlikely that she would lose East Dunbartonshire, because her party had enjoyed an outstanding result in the European Parliament elections six months earlier, finishing ahead of both the Conservatives and Labour UK-wide. There was even excited chatter that she could become prime minister.
That hubris was dramatically exposed by the SNP’s young candidate Amy Callaghan, who defeated Swinson in East Dunbartonshire by just 149 votes.
It seemed that, in much the same way as is happening with Rishi Sunak in the present day, the reality of Swinson as leader hadn’t lived up to the earlier hype from commentators about how good she was. Far from enjoying a leader’s bonus, her vote in East Dunbartonshire fell by four percentage points, suggesting that the more voters had seen of her, the less impressed they were.
But an equally important factor was that the vacuousness of the LibDems’ strategic approach in Scotland, in which they had nurtured nominally “safe” seats on the basis of tactical votes, finally caught up with them.
In a tightly fought contest against a popular SNP campaign, they just didn’t have the reserves of genuine and deeply rooted support to call upon, because too many of their past voters were not LibDems at all and had only been won over by messaging along the lines of “even if you don’t like us, only we can beat the SNP in East Dunbartonshire”.
On paper, the LibDems shouldn’t be in contention in the constituency, because they are absolutely nowhere in the two overlapping Scottish Parliament seats.
In the 2021 Holyrood election, they took just 14% of the vote in Strathkelvin and Bearsden, and just 8% in Clydebank and Milngavie. They fared a little better in the 2022 East Dunbartonshire local elections, but were still in fourth place in terms of first preference votes, slightly behind both Labour and the Tories.
The story of how they’ve managed to defy that basic lack of popularity is a familiar one. They had what could easily have been a one-off good result in 2005, when Swinson first took East Dunbartonshire from Labour off the back of opposition to the Iraq War and Charles Kennedy’s popularity as leader.
She then used that breakthrough as ammunition when she switched to negative tactics in every election thereafter, arguing that she was the only effective anti-Labour tactical option in 2010, and the only effective anti-SNP tactical option from 2015 onwards.
Where that leaves this year’s contest in the renamed Mid Dunbartonshire is hard to judge, because for the first time in a quarter of a century, Swinson will not be the LibDem candidate, and that in itself could lessen the credibility of the LibDem campaign.
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But because her defeat last time was narrow, the LibDems can still produce the trusty bar chart leaflets to persuade Tory supporters that they have to vote tactically. Natural Labour supporters, on the other hand, may not be particularly bothered about the outcome of the local SNP v LibDem fight now that Keir Starmer is on the brink of power, and may drift back to their first-choice party.
That could potentially help the SNP, provided the recovery in Labour’s support isn’t strong enough to overtake the SNP in what was once Labour territory.
Boundary changes also provide a modest boost for Callaghan.
The notional results from 2019 suggest she starts with a 3.5 percentage point lead over the LibDems, compared with the barely-there 0.3 point margin she had on the old boundaries.
That can probably be explained by the introduction of Lennoxtown, which now becomes one of the most working-class parts of the constituency. But that will only partly offset the significant reduction of the SNP vote that is likely to occur in line with national polls, which means the LibDems could win by default unless there is slippage in their own support.
For Callaghan to be elected for a second term, she may require former tactical LibDem voters to decide that the time has finally come to move on.
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