The Conservative party offices in Welshpool was this week still proudly displaying the name of candidate Craig Williams, after he was dropped by Rishi Sunak for betting on the timing of the election.
The man who answered the door said the building remained Williams’ campaign headquarters. But a woman joining him moments later insisted that none of what had been said should be reported, and that there was in fact no comment.
Confusion in the Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr constituency extends beyond the white-painted Victorian building that may or may not be Williams’ base of operations.
What was once the safest Tory seat in Wales is now in flux, with Labour mounting a strong challenge to take the constituency, which spreads from upland farms to the outskirts of industrial town of Wrexham for the first time.
One thing is certain: the scandal has harmed Williams’ chances of returning as an MP.
“A lot of people I speak to, they just think he’s shot himself in the foot, really,” said Paul Alexander, whose ironmongers shop Alexanders of Welshpool sits on the High Street. “He had a pretty safe seat round here, I would have thought.”
Williams, with at least four other Conservatives, faces an investigation by the Gambling Commission after he successfully had what he has called “a flutter” with bookmakers on a July general election date.
Sunak suspended Williams, who had been one of his close parliamentary aides, on June 25, along with Laura Saunders, the candidate for Bristol North West. Russell George, the Conservative member of Wales’ devolved Senedd for Montgomeryshire, has also revealed he is under investigation over an election date bet.
Sitting at the Coco café a few yards down the High Street from the Conservative offices, Steve Witherden, the Labour candidate in the seat, insisted that the suspension “absolutely” would make a difference to voters’ willingness to support his Conservative opponent.
But Witherden also pointed out that Williams remains listed on the ballot paper as a Conservative candidate, while many postal votes had been cast before Tuesday’s decision to suspend him.
Montgomeryshire, the previous version of the seat before its boundaries were redrawn, had been the Conservatives’ safest seat in Wales. The party took 58.5 per cent of votes in the seat at the 2019 general election.
“He still has a chance of winning,” Witherden said of Williams.
Yet it looks likelier that the suspension will mean Montgomeryshire for the first time returns a Labour MP.
The addition of Glyndŵr to the constituency has added to the seat some large, historically Labour areas around the industrial town of Wrexham.
At Welshpool Methodist Church, near the Conservative offices, Pat Jones, a congregation member, said she would be voting for the Liberal Democrats. The Methodist Church has a strong tradition of opposing all forms of gambling.
“We do not gamble in this part of the church,” Jones said, standing in the main worship space. “But we do have occasional draws if we’re in the schoolroom.”
Jones nevertheless voiced a widespread assumption that Williams’ suspension opened the way for Labour’s Witherden, a secondary school drama teacher, to win.
“It’s pretty obvious that Labour will get in here now,” Jones said.
Witherden insisted he remained uncertain of his chances. In a nod to his current teaching role, and the uncertainty created by Williams’ suspension, he said: “This is quite a drama. It’s a drama that the people of Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr could have done without.”
Williams had been seeking before his suspension, however, to exploit local anger with the devolved Welsh government in Cardiff. Welshpool in February was the venue for one of a series of protests by Wales’s farmers, under the banner “No Farmers, No Food”. The protest was against the proposed “Sustainable Farming Scheme” that would increase pressure on farmers to devote land to non-food uses, particularly trees.
Both Witherden and Elwyn Vaughan, candidate for the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru party, said the discontent in the area was not only with the Cardiff administration but also with the central government in Westminster.
While there was irritation with Cardiff’s farming plans, there was also anger over the central government’s signing of new trade deals with Australia and New Zealand, which will intensify competition for the area’s livestock farmers.
Vaughan insisted that even wealthy farmers were considering voting for him, out of frustration with both big parties: “I know people I’ve always considered Conservatives are voting for me.”
Projections showing a Labour victory in the constituency were “dodgy polls”, he added, and there were “huge swings” among voters that meant he could still win.
Earlier this week, all the candidates gathered at the Welshpool Livestock Market for one of their regular hustings. Olivia Bennett Jones, county adviser for Montgomeryshire for NFU Cymru, the Welsh arm of the National Farmers’ Union, described it as a “lively and wide-ranging debate”.
Williams did not respond to requests to comment further on his position. Following his suspension as a Conservative candidate on Tuesday, he issued a video insisting his bet was an “error of judgment, not an offence” and vowing to continue contesting the seat as an independent.
Both Witherden and Vaughan, however, agreed that Williams’ ambiguous position had disrupted the election and made the choice facing voters less clear than it should have been.
“I think we’re all really deeply disappointed that our beautiful part of Wales is national news for the worst of reasons,” Witherden said.
At the ironmongers, Alexander declined to reveal his political preferences, citing the potential harm to his business.
But he reflected the widespread frustration over Williams’ bet and the subsequent furore: “He hasn’t endeared himself to many of the voters with what he’s done.”