Finally the sun is out after the dullest of Junes in southern England. It is Sunday afternoon, Father’s Day, in the garden of the Hollybush pub on the semirural western fringes of Bristol.
To an outside eye the scene is quintessentially English. The pub roasts served at picnic tables in the sun. The panting dogs whose leads are tied to the tables. The verdant backdrop of Somerset’s rolling hills. The talk of the July 4th election in this constituency of Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Tory aristocrat and Boris Johnson ally, and the danger posed to his seat by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
Everything about the setting is English except for the local Reform UK candidate sitting at one of the picnic tables eating a feast of roast pork, Yorkshire pudding and gravy. Paul MacDonnell, a chatty, mildly eccentric 63-year-old policy geek, is from Dún Laoghaire in Dublin.
“I’ve never had so much fun in my whole life,” says MacDonnell of his first-time election run. “For me it’s like the Hubble telescope. It’s all data, data, data.”
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If the latest polls are to be believed, the tech think tank executive MacDonnell could be on course to cost Rees-Mogg his seat, which could deliver one of the biggest “Portillo moments”, a high-profile Conservative Party casualty, in the election, which Labour is expected to win easily.
Did you hear the one about the Irishman who ran for election to the House of Commons under the banner of an insurgent party steeped in English nationalism? MacDonnell politely acknowledges the novelty. Everything about him is polite, including his jaunty advocacy for free speech absolutism and extreme small-statism that would put most libertarians in the shade.
“There are quirks of being Irish in Britain that can annoy some Irish people. One is that in Britain, the Irish are not seen as foreign. They see us as Domesticus Hibernicus. It never even crosses their mind that the Irish are foreign. We are completely integrated.”
Rees-Mogg and MacDonnell are candidates in Somerset North East and Hanham. The constituency is newly formed by electoral boundary changes. This is partly the root of the arch Brexiteer Rees-Mogg’s problems.
Rees-Mogg was elected as Tory MP for the local area in 2010 under the old boundaries. That constituency of North East Somerset was mostly rural and a stomping ground of well-to-do conservatives, fertile territory for Rees-Mogg, who last time won a majority of almost 15,000.
The new boundaries have seen roughly half the rural voters hived off into a new constituency, replaced by a chunk of more urban and working-class wards from around Kingswood that are, traditionally, more open to Labour. The wry upper-class wit of Rees-Mogg seems less of a natural fit.
MacDonnell is unlikely to win but he could shave enough votes off Rees-Mogg to hand it to the Labour candidate, Dan Norris. The latest YouGov poll out this week has Norris on just below 41 per cent. Rees-Mogg on 35 per cent and MacDonnell on 11 per cent.
If Farage’s party didn’t exist to steal right-wing votes from the Tories, candidates such as Rees-Mogg might be home and dry.
Reform is often pilloried by its opponents for the vehemence of its anti-immigration rhetoric, which critics allege is adjacent to dog-whistle racism. This is not MacDonnell’s game at all. He simply believes the UK government has become too powerful over its citizens and must be rebuffed, and that free speech is threatened in our age of identity politics.
MacDonnell’s father was a publican who owned the Rathfarnham Inn on the main street of the affluent south Dublin village; the pub was later called the Sarah Curran.
MacDonnell held various policy roles in Ireland, where he worked for an insurance lobby group, and abroad. He lived for a period in the UK in the late 1980s, and latterly in Brussels. He was there for Brexit in 2016, which he didn’t support. But at around that time he decided to move to England.
“I said England just suits me. I got a map. Where is near Dublin, London and Brussels, where I was doing a lot of business [at the time there was a direct flight from Bristol]. I settled on Wells, Somerset.”
He joined the Tories but resigned four days after the first Covid lockdown in 2020, which he saw as a science-free affront to liberty. He mentions, twice, that Covid lockdowns somewhat “radicalised” him and accelerated his entry into politics.
Knowing an election was due this year, he joined Reform and applied online to be a candidate. He did an interview with senior party figures, although not Farage, whom he has never met.
“They wanted to know my politics, where do I stand on stuff. I said: ‘Look I know you’re busy. Do you know Javier Milei [the radical president] of Argentina?’ They said yeah. I said: ‘Him. I believe in that.’ They said: ‘Cool. You’re in.’”
Milei is a follower of the Austrian economic theorist Friedrich Hayek, whom MacDonnell quotes liberally. Within 10 minutes of meeting him, he has also mentioned the philosophers Karl Popper, Iain McGilchrist, Daniel Dennett and René Descartes.
The political novice mostly canvasses alone, although there are about six or seven local Reform supporters who volunteer to help him distribute leaflets. “I arrive somewhere at 10am with a map and just start doing it. If I bump into people I talk to them, and they might talk to me.”
We finish the pub lunch and head off to some of the nearby working-class estates that have moved over from Kingswood. Many residents don’t answer their doors. Some do but are non-committal, although they seem intrigued at the novelty of this urbane, floppy-haired Irishman seeking their vote for Reform UK.
A few openly and enthusiastically promise MacDonnell their support, saying how sick they are of Tory “broken promises”, while they also mention their admiration of Farage. MacDonnell rarely refers to his party leader, except to liken him to the “rostrum” ramrod on the front of a Roman boat.
At one stage he gets excited by the sight of St George’s flags hanging out of the windows of several houses. MacDonnell believes the flags mark houses that are likely Reform voters. Later, I remind him that England are due to play Serbia in the Euros that night. It may explain why many people are not answering their doors. It also might explain many of the flags.
Rees-Mogg declined to speak to The Irish Times or to be accompanied while he courts voters. In Keynsham, the Somerset town where he has his constituency headquarters, there is no sign of anybody at the Tory office, which is down a lane at the side of a Bargain Booze outlet.
A half-hour’s drive away is the pretty little village of West Harptree, where Rees-Mogg lives in a £3 million (€3.5 million) country pile. In the Crown Inn pub across the road, some of the locals sitting at the bar sound jovially affectionate towards the man they call “Moggsy”. But they also seem more interested in the Serbia game about to start than in politics.
Rees-Mogg has subsequently warned in the UK’s Independent newspaper that polls cannot be relied upon to predict everything correctly. If he is to keep his Westminster seat in the face of the challenge from Reform’s MacDonnell, the Tory heavy hitter had better hope he is right.
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