For all of the squabbling between Reform and Restore, the Right’s best chance at a by-election win on 18 June may not be in Makerfield, but 300-odd miles further north – in Aberdeen. The beneficiary wouldn’t be Nigel Farage or Rupert Lowe, but Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives.
The Tory candidate is now ‘quietly confident’
It’s unsurprising that this contest has been largely overlooked. My Westminster colleagues treat the suburbs of Manchester as being almost unfathomably distant, so the North Sea coast seems like an alien planet. But Aberdeen is also a city used to being ignored.
According to the Centre for Cities, between 2010 and 2020, household incomes in the city fell by almost 7 per cent; between 2010 and 2023, it was one of only two cities in the UK to lose jobs. Even more worrying for the city’s prospects, Aberdeen also lost 14,400 residents between 2010 and 2020, with 16 per cent of local 20-29-year-olds leaving. The culprit is not hard to find: the North Sea oil and gas industry’s decline. But what was once an unfortunate side effect of America’s shale gas and oil boom is being turbocharged by Ed Miliband’s Net Zero zealotry and SNP neglect.
Following Stephen Flynn’s election to Holyrood, the voters of Aberdeen South are being asked to elect his Westminster successor. The constituency’s recent political history is volatile. The only Tory gain from Labour in 1992, it then went back to Labour from 1997 to 2015, and the Lib Dems were the major challengers. But the SNP won it in their post-referendum sweep. Only two years later, it was by taken by Ross Thomson, a Tory. But he stood down in 2019; Flynn turned it it yellow again. He was narrowly re-elected in 2024, as the Conservatives plummeted from second to fourth. But last month they came only 1,244 votes behind Flynn in the near-equivalent Holyrood seat.
Reform were in third. Squeeze their share, and a win for Douglas Lumsden – the Tory candidate – looks plausible. Indeed, he told me he is now ‘quietly confident’. I spoke to Lumsden while coming back from the Shetland Islands. An affable local on the ferry back had told me to visit the Granite City’s maritime museum and gallery; the café of the latter was the perfect place to meet the man hoping to be Badenoch’s newest MP.
Lumsden is an Aberdeen lifer: born in the city, a graduate of Robert Gordon University, and co-leader of the council from 2017 to 2021, upon which he was elected to Holyrood. But while it was the 2014 referendum that first drew Lumsden into politics, he was plain that the big thing in Aberdeen’s politics it not ‘independence’ but ‘the future of the oil and gas industry’, with ‘so many employed by it’ But it is an industry losing 1,000 jobs a month, with Aberdeen bearing the brunt.
Even so, Lumsden hadn’t originally intended to stand in the long-mooted by-election. But speaking to local people ‘worried about their sons’, on the verge of tears about their families’ and city’s future, he felt compelled to. May’s elections weren’t a triumph for the Scottish Tories. Russell Findlay lost more than half his MSPs, going from second to fifth.
But they advanced in Aberdeen amid a Labour ‘collapse’. Locals blame ‘Westminster’ for the city’s state, where Miliband’s moratorium on North Sea exploration means doom for the industry’s future, and the SNP, who, despite occasional warm words still have a ‘presumption against’ further drilling.
Whatever the Tories’ standing in the rest of Scotland, turning this by-election into a referendum on those parties’ policies gives Lumsden a shot. The precedent is Uxbridge. The Tories clung on in 2023 due to local opposition to Sadiq Khan’s ULEZ.
The reception on the doorstep has been positive. ‘People are keen to vote’, Lumsden believes. Reform were 4,000-odd votes behind last month; while canvassing, their voters have told Lumsden that they are switching from Farage to the Tories so as ‘to not let the SNP back through’. Badenoch has been keen to visit. She has a personal interest in the seat; on her first trip up, a local took her aside and implored her to help. But a win would vindicate her break from Net Zero and blunt Reform’s momentum.
Channelling Mrs Thatcher, Lumsden declared he ‘can’t just let this decline in Aberdeen happen’. The first thing he would do if elected would be to invite Miliband up to see the impact of his policies. Since Tony Blair’s recent missive, there has been speculation that abandoning Miliband’s decarbonisation crusade might be Labour’s next U-turn. Wes Streeting has come out for more drilling. But he is unlikely to hold much sway in a party in which Miliband tops the LabourList rankings and is mooted as Andy Burnham’s Chancellor.
Exploring aforementioned gallery and museum, the pride that locals have in the North Sea is clear. Oil and gas has not only brought the city great wealth but provided it with a role on the world stage. Aberdeen was a city with a future; the contrast to the shuttered shops and empty housing estates that Lumsden had told me to look for en route to the airport was stark. Sending him to Westminster won’t change much for this city alone. But it would be a start.
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