Three things about Helen Morgan perhaps had national cut-through during the North Shropshire by-election.
Unfortunately for the seat’s Liberal Democrat candidate, all of those were historic social media posts. Three times in the last couple of years, the 46-year-old has compared the Conservatives to Nazis: Priti Patel to Goebbels, Boris Johnson to Hitler and Tory party policy to that which led to Auschwitz.
“It’s not been helpful,” one Lib Dem activist told The Independent shortly after the missives surfaced. “We’re trying to flip 23,000 Conservative voters and you don’t do that by effectively telling them they’re Nazi supporters.”
Morgan apologised, moved on and refused to be derailed.
And, in doing so, perhaps showed the steely focus – as well as the willingness to admit a mistake – that led to one of the most astonishing moments in British political history on Friday morning: her victory over the Tories here.
She was ultimately, that same activist said, the local asset that – following a campaign that oft-focused on the government’s incompetence – got “the party over the winning line”.
Morgan – an accountant by profession – is personable, energetic and self-evidently loves the area. Because she lives here – with her husband and teenage son – she has an acute grasp of the rural issues that, say, a barrister from Birmingham does not.
For her, indeed, many of those issues are personal. When voters complained about appalling ambulance waiting times, she knew exactly what they were talking about: five years ago, while suffering with severe norovirus, she was left waiting 90 minutes with ambulance paramedics because an overly-stretched A&E department had no-one to treat her. “That meant,” she said, “that ambulance couldn’t be getting to other people.”
Likewise, when voters on the doorstep spoke about limited public transport, she could entirely sympathise: her home village of Harmer Hill has just two buses in a morning and two in an afternoon.
Along similar lines, she is known for campaigning on rural road safety.
The new MP has her weaknesses too, of course. Apart from some disquiet over the Nazi comments, many voters appeared to feel she was too inexperienced.
Although she is a parish councillor, she has never sat on the larger Shropshire Council.
While she and her team quickly identified a strong attack line against the Tories – that they had taken this safe seat for granted for too long – Morgan then appeared to offer only vague soundbites and fence-sitting about how she might change things.
Asked by The Independent if she would like to see the A5 arterial road dualled – a divisive topic in the constituency – she said the matter wouldn’t affect her personally (“I hardly drive on it”) so she would recommend another consultancy. There have been such consultancies going on, in one form or another, since 1997.
Similarly on farming issues. A series of post-Brexit trade deals had, she said, sold the region’s farmers short, yet offered no practical suggestion on what might be done better.
Nonetheless, while many commentators are already putting this victory down to a flailing government, Morgan’s own role should not be forgotten.
Midway through the campaign, she said she wanted to “scare” the Tory government into paying greater attention to the area. Mission accomplished.
