Of the three by-elections that the Tories were defending last Thursday Uxbridge seemed to be the most challenging for the Tories. Yet the party ended up with a very narrow hold after a skilled campaign linked to the planned extension of ULEZ in the outer London boroughs.

In many ways the Tory defence was a classic LD by-election approach. Find an issue and then hammer it out like crazy and it certainly helped get the Tory vote out. Fortunately for the Tories the main opponent here though was LAB not the LDs.

Now I haven’t seen much of the Tory literature but it does appear that the impact of ULEZ was being very much overplayed given that getting on for 90% of the petrol cars in the constituency were too modern to be affected. The Tory position was not helped of course that the originator of ULEZ was the former mayor, Boris Johnson something which Labour could have made a lot more of.

Now since then we have had several very pro-motorist indications from the PM. It is as though he thinks he has found a solution to how he could remain at Number 10 after the election.

I’m not so sure. The polling in the next week or so will be interesting.

Mike Smithson