For all of the squabbling between Reform and Restore, the Right’s best chance at a by-election win on 18 June may not be in Makerfield, but 300-odd miles further north – in Aberdeen. The beneficiary wouldn’t be Nigel Farage or Rupert Lowe, but Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives.
The Tory candidate is now ‘quietly confident’
It’s unsurprising that this contest has been largely overlooked. My Westminster colleagues treat the suburbs of Manchester as being almost unfathomably distant, so the North Sea coast seems like an alien planet. But Aberdeen is also a city used to being ignored.
According to the Centre for Cities, between 2010 and 2020, household incomes in the city fell by almost 7 per cent; between 2010 and 2023, it was one of only two cities in the UK to lose jobs. Even more worrying for the city’s prospects, Aberdeen also lost 14,400 residents between 2010 and 2020, with 16 per cent of local 20-29-year-olds leaving. The culprit is not hard to find: the North Sea oil and gas industry’s decline. But what was once an unfortunate side effect of America’s shale gas and oil boom is being turbocharged by Ed Miliband’s Net Zero zealotry and SNP neglect.
Following Stephen Flynn’s election to Holyrood, the voters of Aberdeen South are being asked to elect his Westminster successor. The constituency’s recent political history is volatile. The only Tory gain from Labour in 1992, it then went back to Labour from 1997 to 2015, and the Lib Dems were the major challengers. But the SNP won it in their post-referendum sweep. Only two years later, it was by taken by Ross Thomson, a Tory. But he stood down in 2019; Flynn turned it it yellow again. He was narrowly re-elected in 2024, as the Conservatives plummeted from second to fourth. But last month they came only 1,244 votes behind Flynn in the near-equivalent Holyrood seat.
