Election 2017: May hopes Brexit vaccine will hold off Lib Dems in South West
If the PM succeeds in framing the election through the Brexit prism, the Lib Dem threat in the South West will be neutralised.
Monday 24 April 2017 11:51, UK
That most famous Torquay resident, Basil Fawlty, was in fact, a eurosceptic.
In one episode of the BBC sitcom, referring to the European Economic Community vote in 1975, he told a group of stunned Germans staying at his hellish hotel: "I didn't vote for it myself quote honestly, but now that we're in, I'm determined to make it work, so I'd like to welcome you all to Britain."
So basically "we're going to make a success of it"- the Prime Minister would approve.
And if she's going to get a big majority in this election, she has to hope Torquay will vote, as Basil did, with Europe in mind.
Torquay (or Torbay as the constituency is confusingly called) was Lib Dem for nearly 20 years until the Tories took it back in 2015, part of a cataclysmic election result which saw the party lose 49 of its 57 seats.
It had taken the party the best part of seven decades or so to build up to that level of representation in Parliament. Many thought it would take a similar length of time to repeat the trick.
Yet some in the Lib Dems think they've been gifted a political Lib Dem yellow golden ticket.
In being the unequivocal Remain party, the only party to say unambiguously that they want a second referendum on the nature of the deal and to stay in the single market, they are able, in the minds of some, to absolve themselves of the sin of the coalition.
They can build a new coalition which can soak up pro-EU Tory and Labour voters who feel they have nowhere else to go.
That's how they overturned a Tory majority of over 20,000 in Richmond, did well in the Witney by-election and have scored some spectacular by-election results in councils up and down the land recently.
But there's a sting in the tail. That strategy should work fine and dandy in seats which voted Remain last year like Richmond or Bath.
But what about those Lib Dem seats which didn't? And it's far more than you might think.
Of the 47 seats the Lib Dems won in 2010 in England and Wales (many of which are now on its target list for this election) 20 did indeed vote to stay in the EU but a majority, 26, voted to leave.
Many of these former Lib Dem Leave seats are in that vital political region of the South West of England.
It's the party's former heartlands where liberalism never quite died as a political creed and where crucially David Cameron essentially won the 2015 election by picking off a score of Lib Dem seats, like Torbay where I spent Thursday canvassing the views of local voters.
After Mr Cameron's 2015 triumph you can travel from this jewel of the English Riviera all the way to Lands End in an uninterrupted sea of Tory blue. And Theresa May is determined to keep it that way.
The Lib Dems are only about 2,500 votes behind the Tories in this seat, it should be ripe for the taking. But it voted by a whopping 63% to leave the EU last June.
It seems unlikely in this June's vote that those same voters will be rushing to a party which puts Remain at the heart of its campaign.
UKIP also came a respectable third place here in 2015 with 6,000 votes. If the Tories can absorb much of that then they're home and dry.
In seats like this and all over the South West the answer will be determined by how much Brexit has changed the calculus of British politics.
If Mrs May is successful in channelling this election's light through the prism of the referendum then the Lib Dem threat here will be neutralised.
If, however, she loses control of the campaign, and the Lib Dems can fight a traditional battle in their Leave seats on local issues and re-assume their dubious prize of being the "none of the above" party than they may make a comeback.
Studies show that counterintuitively lots of people who voted Lib Dem in 2010 voted UKIP in 2015, which demonstrates perhaps that that "plague on all their houses" vote is at least as strong as the Brexit impulse.
That's why those 2015 UKIP votes will be crucial in the South West.
Either way, the South West will again be crucial.
Mrs May doesn't just want to win, she's set herself to win big. To do so, with Scotland out of the picture, she has to dominate in England.
Every southwestern seat she loses to the Lib Dems is another seat she must make up for in harder to reach more urban Labour seats in the Midlands and North, less fertile Tory territory than tranquil Torquay.
A Conservative MP once described the Lib Dems to me as "an infection - you think you've got rid of them but leave just one in place and they'll be swarming all over you before you know it".
Mrs May has to hope that the Brexit vaccine will inoculate her southwestern candidates against a renewed Lib Dem surge. If it does there's no doubt she can win big.