SEASIDE resort Skegness has been so dyed-in-the-wool Conservative that locals joke you could put a blue rosette on a donkey and it would get elected.
But that is all changing in what was the Government’s second safest seat in the country.
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Reform UK candidate Richard Tice believes it is now “neck and neck” between him and the incumbent Tory MP Matt Warman.
If the challenger, leader of Reform until Nigel Farage took over this month, does win on July 4, then this traditional North Sea town of fish and chip suppers would have delivered a huge political earthquake.
Today, the overriding message from the Lincolnshire resort, famous for its Jolly Fisherman telling holidaymakers “Skegness is so bracing”, makes grim reading for PM Rishi Sunak.
People are mainly saying they will either not vote, because they have lost faith in all politicians, or they will put a cross beside Reform.
READ MORE ON THE ELECTION
Defence Secretary Grant Shapps has said he fears that so many of the Government’s MPs will lose their seats that Labour will end up with a “super-majority”.
If the Tories cannot hold on to the constituency of Boston and Skegness, where more than three-quarters of votes went their way at the 2019 General Election, that would surely be true.
But Labour only have a microscopic chance of winning the seat.
On Wednesday their candidate did not even turn up for an end-of-the-pier debate in the swirling wind with the Conservatives, Reform and the Lib Dems.
Tice, 59, a former MEP, is taking the opposite approach.
‘Two-horse race’
He is doing everything possible to win over the community — a constituency I know well having grown up there — to boost his profile.
The Brexit-backing businessman has a lot of work to do as locals start to think like miner-turned-cabbie Gary Hutchinson, 65, who says: “I won’t vote for anybody, but I might have voted for Nigel Farage if he was standing here.”
Having lived in a village in this constituency and enjoyed Skegness’s neon arcades, sandy beaches, boozy nightlife and family orientated Butlin’s holiday park, I know how true blue the area really is.
This largely rural community, dominated by powerful farmers, has chosen a Conservative to represent them since the constituency was formed in 1997.
The only time Skegness, which attracts more than four million visitors a year to its sandy beaches and funfairs, did not go Tory was in 1922, when a Liberal Democrat snuck in.
Tice, though, claims: “We think we have got a fantastic chance, it is neck and neck.
“It is a two-horse race between the Tories and Reform UK.”
This is no idle boast.
A YouGov poll put Reform on 17 per cent of the vote, just two percentage points behind the Conservatives.
The local MP, former journalist Warman, 42, concedes: “I can’t be complacent for a second.”
The message the Tory is hearing on the doorstep is that people do not trust politicians.
He reveals: “If there is one thing people are talking about it is that sense of trust, it is wanting politicians to do the things they said they were going to do.”
That was something I heard over and over again outside the shops selling plastic buckets and spades.
Unemployed Dave Marsh, 61, told me: “It’s all lies.
“I haven’t voted in 40 years.
“Nobody does anything.”
Failure to tackle migration
Andrew Yule, 72, who used to work for security firm Securicor, agrees: “I am not going to vote.
“They are all as bad as each other.
“They promise things and don’t do them.”
Tice argues that the people of Boston and Skegness mostly feel let down by the Conservatives’ failure to tackle immigration.
In 2023, net migration figures showed that 685,000 extra people had come into the country.
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The year before, the total was 764,000.
Tice says: “The thing people most complain about is immigration.
“Nobody voted for mass immigration.
“The great constituents of Boston and Skegness voted hugely for Brexit, well over 70 per cent, and part of that was to control borders.
“And the Tory party lied and betrayed the trust of voters across the country.”
Almost 94 per cent of Skegness’s 20,701 population are British-born, according to the 2021 census.
However, the amount of people in neighbouring Boston born outside of the UK is 23 per cent, seven per cent higher than the national average.
While the London-based politician, who started out in a property company founded by his grandfather, pledges that Reform will “freeze immigration”, he also admits that migrants will be let in.
They would include asylum seekers arriving via approved means and workers in the health and care sector.
Skegness has felt the influx of migration first-hand, at one point housing 300 migrants in hotels.
Quell the anger
It led to holidaymakers cancelling bookings, according to locals in the hospitality trade.
They complained that if too many hotels were filled with asylum seekers there would not be enough rooms for the visitors who support the town’s £200million tourist industry.
Some migrant hotels were last year boarded up to protect them from protesters.
And following an outcry, the Government scaled back the migrant housing to a single hotel.
MP Warman claims he acted to quell the anger.
He says: “Making sure migrant hotels here were closed down, that local record is an example of politicians keeping their promises.”
Warman, first elected to the seat in 2015, did not endear himself to the local population by campaigning to remain in the European Union in the Brexit referendum.
More than 70 per cent of Skegness residents and 76 per cent of Boston voters chose Leave.
Danny Brookes, owner of the Indulgence cafe in the centre of Skegness, says: “Dissatisfaction with the Conservatives all started when Matt Warman campaigned to remain in one of the most Leave parts of the country.”
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The businessman will be voting for Reform, which came out of the ashes of the Brexit Party in 2021 and pledges in its manifesto to get “Brexit done properly”.
Danny, 58, thinks the way the Government negotiated its divorce from the EU was “ludicrous”.
He says: “We were told they had oven-ready deals and it turned out they didn’t have any deals.”
But Brexit and immigration were not the main issues from the locals we spoke to.
Danny had to stop selling hot food in his cafe because his electricity bill tripled, while plant shop owner Wachisa Matthews is not happy about the state of the roads.
A number of people claimed Warman took no interest in their problems when they wrote to him.
Lincolnshire is one of the poorest areas in Northern Europe.
Child poverty in Skegness’s local authority area stands at 30 per cent.
And more than half of the town’s working-age residents are economically inactive.
For that reason Skegness, and neighbouring seaside resort Mablethorpe, are receiving almost £82million in levelling-up funds.
Sitting on part of the recently redeveloped front near the town’s clock tower, Warman says: “They are now getting what was promised in the 2019 manifesto”.
Two lifelong Conservative voters, Derek Cole, an 80-year-old retired court clerk, and his wife Christine, 77, a former accounts clerk, will be backing him come polling day.
Derek’s reaction to Tice is “oh God no”, and he adds: “I won’t have anything to do with Farage, they’re too cranky.”
And it is true that Reform’s oddball and most right-wing members could be a turn-off for many.
This week it was revealed that their candidate in Bexhill and Battle, in East Sussex, said Britain should not have opposed Adolf Hitler’s Nazis during World War Two.
But Tice dismisses those concerns, commenting: “Every party has issues with a few daft candidates.”
How many voters are put off by the “cranks” could prove to be crucial in Skegness’s tight race.
Even more so when the rest of the nation finds their pen hovering over the ballot paper in three weeks.
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