The East Devon constituency has been Conservative since its inception in 1997 and returned Mr Parish to the last election with an overwhelming majority of more than 24,000, making it one of Boris Johnson’s safest seats in the country. But a majority of North Shropshire’s 23,000 Tories ousted a landslide 37 percent turnaround in the Liberal Democrats in December after the embarrassment of longtime MP Owen Patterson, who resigned after a report found him guilty of paying private’s defense for two. And Liberal Democrats said today that the party would “do it” in Tiverton and Honiton, in a bid to repeat the historic upheaval in the traditional rural Torres hinterland they describe as the Blue Wall. A date has not yet been set for the by-elections triggered by Mr Parish’s resignation, with possible months in June or July. It will come long after another awkward by-election for Mr Johnson in Wakefield, where Labor will seek to snatch a seat back at the Red Wall after Tory MP Imran Ahmad Khan was convicted of sexually assaulting a teenager. As in North Shropshire, Labor took second place in Tiverton and Honiton in the 2019 election, comfortably ahead of Ed Davey’s party in third. However, a Lib Dem source said the party hoped his surrender to the Tories’s main challenger in the West would help him jump into the race to find Mr Parish’s successor. The Liberal Democratic candidates regularly held second place in the constituency until 2015, losing the seat with just 1,653 votes in 1997. In North Shropshire, the Lib Dems campaigned hard on the issue of poor ambulance availability in the constituency, and their hopes for success in Tiverton and Honiton may be based on identifying a local issue of similar impact. A party source said: “At the moment we are completely focused on the local elections. But the Liberal Democrats have already shown that we can take rural positions from the Conservatives. “People all over the West have a strong tradition of voting for the Liberal Democrats as the main opposition to the Conservatives. “As we have seen in North Shropshire, there is a real backlash against Boris Johnson from rural communities that are tired of being taken for granted.”
