As one big Conservative monster after another comes face to face Hunger Games On election night, one escaped the carnage: the former Conservative leader, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, stood on the podium with former and current Labour candidates who had done him a great service by their bitter infighting.
The electoral officer for Chingford and Woodford Green appeared pleasantly surprised when he announced a total of 17,281 votes, understandable since the exit poll had predicted he had less than a 1% chance of winning. And yet there he was, the great survivor who had more than doubled his majority and was the beneficiary of one of the greatest mistakes in modern campaigning history. He appeared to have been saved by a miracle from IDS. “I live for the fight,” he says. “The campaign is a test.”
It would be easy to assume that Duncan Smith was on borrowed time in 2019. The Conservative enthusiasm that came with Boris Johnson’s 80-seat majority had waned in the north-east London and Essex borders. Duncan Smith, now 70, who took over the constituency from Norman Tebbit in 1992, was 1,762 votes behind Labour’s Faiza Shaheen, and as the 2024 election approaches, those who will consider the Conservatives’ chances of winning power are as rare as the happy Scottish Nationalists. Such an outcome is made even less likely by a boundary change that adds parts of Labour-leaning Ilford South and Upper Walthamstow to the constituency.
Even Duncan Smith admits: “My seat should have been cleared long before this election. The reason we kept it was because people were angry with the government but were still going to vote for me.”
Unbeknownst to anyone outside the Byzantine world of the local Labour constituency, all was not well. In scenes reminiscent of many internal power struggles since Sir Keir Starmer became Labour leader, the Corbynite faction struggled to maintain its influence as dictates and new priorities were passed down from the new regime at Labour HQ.
Shaheen, 42, was an avowed Corbyn supporter and a disciple of former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell: she backed Rebecca Long-Bailey in the leadership race and controversially fought against allegations that Jeremy Corbyn laid a wreath at the graves of members of the terrorist group responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
In another mysterious incident that his opponents described as “casual racism”, he mocked former home secretary Sajid Javid, claiming he “definitely orders lemon and herb chicken at Nandos”, mocking his authenticity as a man of Pakistani origin.
In fact, the bad feeling dates back to the 2019 election campaign, when Corbyn was still Labour leader. Moderates in the party in the constituency felt Shaheen had been imposed on them. Then, in 2022, Shaheen, an economist, was re-elected on the grounds that he had given Duncan Smith a close race in 2019.
This was despite spending most of his time at New York University. And when Rishi Sunak announced the election on May 22 this year, he was still Labour’s presumptive parliamentary candidate.
But over the next seven days, during which Labour’s top management reviewed candidates, Shaheen was summoned to a last-minute National Executive Committee panel and asked to explain a series of social media posts downplaying accusations of anti-Semitism; Shaheen seemed amused.
She was notified on May 29 that she had been removed from the candidacy. Shaheen said the decision left her “in a state of shock” and prompted largely sympathetic reactions on social media.
Owen Jones tweeted: “Labour is an institutionally racist political party.” Fifty local activists left with him and helped him coordinate his campaign as a new Independent candidate, under the impression that Shaheen was dumped simply because he liked one of his own candidates. Daily Show US satirist Jon Stewart said of Labour’s actions: “This is the stupidest thing Britain has done since it elected Boris Johnson.” For several days, Chingford was the most famous British parliamentary constituency in the world.
A local Labour activist told me: “He was always running as an independent anyway. It was always about himself, not the party. So after he was dropped, it was just a more exaggerated version of what he always was.”
On hearing the news that Shama Tatler, 41, had been appointed as her replacement, Shaheen wrote: “Really? Wow, a Brent councillor with no background here? They would rather lose than a left-wing pro-Palestinian candidate. This is offensive to the community.”
Shaheen wrote a column on May 31 Guard He claimed that hundreds of people would not vote for Labour because of the way he was treated. He was right about that.
On the same day, the Labour Party office in Chingford was vandalised and covered with anti-Israeli graffiti, including “Israel”. [sic] “lobby” and “UK MPs for Britain, Not for Israel”.
Tatler condemned what some of Shaheen’s supporters claimed was a smear against local residents, an attack on the whole community. Tatler, who is Hindu and a member of the Jewish Labour Movement, was met with general disapproval. On 5 June, Shaheen was supported by the We Deserve Better group, a coalition of hard-left activists who put Gaza at the centre of their politics.
Shaheen’s campaign was aggressive and dynamic, with his own YouTube channel and a strong social media presence. Local seven-time world snooker champion Ronnie O’Sullivan gave him his unconditional support. In his heartland of Highams Park, Shaheen’s supporters were highly visible, handing out flashy leaflets at train stations and schools, and putting stickers on children’s jackets before they entered the pitch. His team did much of their own campaigning, which always put them ahead of Duncan Smith and the Labour Party.
A Labour volunteer who voted every day in the week leading up to election night told me: “We didn’t publish anything directly challenging Shaheen. He’s been saying from day one that he’s been wronged by Labour and that we’re very bad people, but we’ve done nothing to challenge that or deny it. I’m glad they sacked him – but we needed a better, clearer explanation of why this was done.”
Rather than addressing the real threat to Labour, the local party’s message and literature was generic, attacking Rishi Sunak and mocking his decision to abandon D-Day celebrations early. Not fielding their own candidate at the start of the campaign, six weeks before the election, gave Labour a mountain to climb. With an easy-to-dismiss replacement as an “outsider”, Shaheen effectively presented himself as the victim of a set-up.
Shaheen was well-known, while Tatler struggled to gain recognition. “When the Labour split happened, we didn’t know what had happened to him,” says Duncan Smith. “But I was able to keep the protest vote against Reform to a minimum because people knew my record. And I told my team, ‘Don’t get involved in anything to do with Labour.'”
“A lot of people at the door said to me, ‘What you did to that woman wasn’t very nice, was it?’ The woman was very good at exploiting that,” the volunteer says.
Meanwhile, Duncan Smith’s team were busy with their own business. Shaheen was playing the ultra-local card to the full, but it takes two to play that game. The former Conservative leader is known as a highly conscientious constituency MP and has three decades of local networks to call on. This was crucial in keeping his vote above those of his two rivals.
“We never stopped working in the constituency after the last election,” says Duncan Smith. “That was critical. We were very local – it was about me and what I did. I have about 90% recognition in the area.”
“We didn’t do enough to expose Shaheen’s policies,” says a Labor volunteer. “We weren’t aggressive or passionate enough.”
As the candidates lined up on stage in the early hours of July 5, Shaheen kept staring at Tatler, who had shrunk visibly as the result became clear. When the results were read out, Shaheen shook his head and snarled at Tatler. But Duncan Smith was the winner. Tatler got 12,523 votes; Shaheen 12,445. Both sides blamed each other.
“Some bad things were happening between their campaigns,” Duncan Smith says. “I had to sit between them at a campaign meeting to keep them apart.”
Not only had IDS won, but it had also reduced its majority by 4,758. Until Shaheen’s removal, Chingford and Woodford Green was the tenth most likely seat to change in the order of Labour’s targets.
One Labour activist told the Politico website: “He’s like the Terminator. He can’t be defeated.”
On the night of Labour’s landslide victory they had somehow managed to screw things up in Chingford. It was a terrible election for the Tories, but here was a minor miracle to witness. Norman Tebbit was no doubt chuckling somewhere.
