Oliver Cooper: How to win a safe Lib Dem ward. Twice.

Cllr Oliver Cooper is the Leader of the Conservative Group on Three Rivers District Council.

The Conservatives have gained a net 24 council seats in by-elections since last July.

The very first gain was in Abbots Langley & Bedmond in August. Then, Three Rivers Conservatives broke our record for the largest ever swing to us in any election in the last 50 years: winning a previously safe Lib Dem ward on a 22 per cent swing.

Last month, we broke that record again with a 22.4 per cent swing – despite Reform standing. And I want to share how we did it.

Three Rivers in Hertfordshire has been led by the Lib Dems since 1986. Even within the district, Abbots Langley & Bedmond has been the Lib Dems’ most prized ward.

It remained yellow even in 2015. The ward votes Conservative at general elections. But in local elections, it has long been distinctly jaundiced – until now.

Much could be said of the circumstances of the by-elections: caused by the resignation of a married couple who were Lib Dem royalty.

That was a dramatic exclamation point to simmering infighting within the Lib Dems. But that alone doesn’t explain how we won such a previously impregnable stronghold.

I’m not mad enough to share everything we did on ConHome for the world to read – if you want more details, email me at oliver@oliver-cooper.com. But what would I point to, that others can copy?

Prove you’re local

When you’re in opposition, people care most about who you are. I’ve been group leader on two councils, and our winning councillors – Vicky Edwards and Ian Campbell – are two of the most qualified I’ve ever encountered.

But candidates’ credentials don’t speak for themselves – we needed to prove their local credentials to voters. Show, don’t tell.

Everything we said mentioned which road they lived on. Everything mentioned the fact both are parents. And so on. By contrast, last week, the Lib Dems claimed their candidate was ‘the only local choice’, when he lives miles away. So we were precise about where they lived: not saying ‘local’, but ‘lives on [road name]’ and ‘lives two miles away’. The Lib Dem leaflets were dishonest in far more substantive ways – such as bizarrely pretending that Rayner’s new planning rules are good for protecting the Green Belt. But residents were furious the Lib Dems would lie about something as simple as where their candidate lives.

And we kept repeating where our candidate lives until people got tired of hearing it – and then we said it some more. It’s all about repetition, repetition, repetition.

We also proved we were local through relentlessly local leaflets. We even had a series of dozens of road-specific leaflets: emblazoned with the road name and a map of what we had done locally, so residents immediately understood it was relevant to them. Some roads had as few as 12 households – they got their own leaflets. Email me to find out how to do it.

Prove you’re effective

Proving we’re effective is hard in opposition. But it’s essential, because opposition without solutions can’t win residents’ trust.

Instead of moaning about problems, we presented solutions – and then linked the fact we could solve problems back to our candidates being local and having serious problem-solving careers. Vicky is a solicitor. And Ian is an engineer – so, like Kemi Badenoch, someone you can trust to solve a problem. We decided to major on that after Lib Dems pretended they didn’t have the power to tackle several problems locally when they clearly did.

The Council Leader claimed they had to remove a village from the Green Belt – until I quoted verbatim in a council meeting the law saying the exact opposite. We wrote up detailed briefing, with input from planning lawyers, proving the Lib Dems could have blocked 74 squalid shoebox slum flats opening – but refused to act. By contrast, the singular purpose of our leaflets was to say only that our candidates could and would solve problems for them. They were absolutely precise about what we would do.

No “We’ll take better care of your money” vagaries. We cited precise powers to solve precise problems and precise roads that would benefit.

Be straight-talking

Such vagaries make it impossible to win people’s trust or vote. So we had a distinctive, clear vision of what was going wrong and how to fix it – and we relentlessly focused on that.

Just like our repetition of our candidates’ personal credentials, our message discipline was crucial. Every leaflet repeated the same message: so by election day, everybody knew what we stand for – and we now have a mandate to deliver it.

Not everyone agreed with us, but we had a distinctively and unapologetically Conservative message.

We didn’t back down when the Lib Dems mocked us for questioning those squalid shoebox slum flats. We didn’t flinch when they criticised us for stopping them reserving the best parking spaces for electric vehicles. We wore it as a badge of pride that the Lib Dems attacked us for proposing ideas to make our streets cleaner and safer.

Being proudly Conservative meant many Reform supporters turned out for us – even with Reform on the ballot paper last week. It meant those who had voted Conservative nationally but Lib Dem locally switched to us too.

We also footnote our leaflets – with QR codes and URL shorteners (e.g. www.threerivers.team/Shannon) linking people to trusted news sites or more detailed explanations. Publishing our thinking earns residents’ trust.

Lib Dems obviously struggle with being honest and straight-talking. Their schtick is to say all things to all people. So you can beat them by having a distinctive message, prove that you mean it and can deliver it, and be trusted as the party that will get stuff done.

Build real connections

Like many places, the Lib Dems deliver the equivalent of War and Peace in leaflets in the ward. It’s a fool’s errand to try to match that. You need a depth of connection that only a conversation offers.

We canvassed almost every day. Even if it’s just the candidate with one or two people, get that rhythm going. Team morale stays up more with canvassing than delivering too.

We decided early on that we needed trust more than we needed VI data. If you want to overcome decades of deficit, have a real conversation – invest 30 or 60 minutes if that’s what residents want. Make them remember you came – so they see you’re the one on their side.

We buttressed both being receptive and being problem-solvers by taking casework to the top. I dealt personally with dozens of pieces of casework that came up – and we took up several issues with the County Council Leader personally.

That showed that our party might not have campaigned much in the ward for decades, but we take local issues seriously – and it showed that Vicky and Ian are part of an effective team (nobody votes for loners!).

Huge thanks for all that belongs to our whole team, most of all Ian and Vicky. But also the help we got from nearby associations like Hemel Hempstead and as far away as North East Hampshire.

If you want to discuss it, let me know at oliver@oliver-cooper.com, and I’d be happy to share more. Because across the country, our supporters and the public deserve Conservatives to fight and win like we did in Three Rivers.