Harriet Gould: Bristow successful mayor contained plenty of lessons for the party

Harriet Gould is Deputy-Chair Membership for South Cambridgeshire.

I sat for just a moment to reflect on weeks of writing applications, of being assessed and interviewed. Now back at Sir Harry Smith school in Whittlesey to select our mayoral candidate, I felt vague relief that the selection committee had found the other wannabe-candidates more suitable than me.

I could thus enjoy this, their final performance, from the cosy confines of the auditorium. After four rousing speeches and Q&As, the votes were counted and the winner, local boy, Paul Bristow, was announced the winner

We assembled for the photo and that was it. The whole process was over – or so I thought.

In fact, that wildly windy day in Whittlesey in November last year was the beginning of my involvement in what turned out to be one of the most successful Conservative election campaigns of this election cycle.

“How’s the campaign coming together” I asked Paul via WhatsApp two days after his selection. “I’ve met with CCHQ”, he answered, “do you want to be on the team?”

On 29th November 2024, I joined the inaugural campaign meeting which set the tone for what, in my opinion, became a masterclass in executing a winning campaign. In that first meeting, the only obvious things were who the candidate and the campaign director were, the campaign pledges, and how good they all appeared to be.

Everything else felt fluid. Simon, the director told us how much the dream campaign would cost. You could almost feel the brains wracking through the screen. Prioritising people and places from eight parliamentary constituencies hits a little different. We quickly recalibrated to the scale of the task.

There are around a million people who live in Cambridgeshire; that translated to a lot of canvassing and delivering. We started immediately.

Every physical effort was matched with a digital one; thanks mainly to James who filmed the “Paul cooking” series, a “This is Your Life” style tour of Paul’s childhood haunts, Paul himself voxpopp-ing his way around the county, and asking people if they knew who the sitting mayor is (because the Labour mayor had an undeniably low-profile). My own contribution was the campaign podcast: “Get Cambridgeshire Moving”.

Each element of content making it’s way into the lives of the people who would soon be turning out to vote and giving those people a window into the world of the person we wanted them to vote for.

Winter, Christmas, New Year, rain, county candidate selections, Annual Supper(s), donor dos, Easter, Cup Final, opposition onslaught, heatwave – through it all, we advanced with relentless consistency as though operating to the beat of a steady march. With that focus, the disciplined commitment created a swell of enthusiasm, pride and fun.

Nominations made the runners official and, significantly, there would be a Reform candidate. Despite their tactic – mimicking other protest parties – of making claims that bore limited resemblance to the powers relevant to the office up for election, we began to feel quietly confident. Possibly because of the calamity of the Labour Mayor’s term plus the disturbing lack of credibility from the other contenders.

So on we marched until, finally, we had the election and we knew the result. I have purposely left a crescendo out of this part of the piece so that you might feel, as I do, the sense of incompleteness. Perhaps similar to having a baby: the win (or the birth) simply gets you to the start.

Obviously, it’s is a thrilling relief to win, especially against national odds. Now we move from campaigning mode into delivering mode.

This side of the win, it’s easy to say we did x, y and/or z and that’s why we won, and there are the specific mechanics I’ve pointed out. But it’s the intangible that I believe seals the deal and provides what I refer to as the essence of the campaign.

Paul has energy, authenticity, stamina, dedication, humility, and grace, and I’m not convinced that the same exact campaign with another candidate would have generated the same result. The formula can be repeated, but the essence? That’s something we as a party will have to work on.

I can’t even attribute Conservative mayoral success to the county we’re in, because Cambridgeshire County Council was run by a Labour/LibDem coalition before this election and Liberal Democrats won total control in this election, taking a clean sweep of seats in the south of the county where the Tory mayoral vote still held strong.

I obviously hoped beyond measure to return a Conservative mayor. So much so that I had stood for selection myself. I know a Conservative approach to any layer of governance will provide the best outcomes in any county.

My great expectation henceforth is that, now we have returned a Conservative mayor, we will take the opportunity to show why it’s so good to be a Conservative. Mayor Bristow will lead us into a Conservative renaissance that none of us can help but be excited by!