A popular MP, fighting David-and-Goliath causes considered taboo by the government but essential by the electorate, he had become a thorn in the Conservative government’s side, and he was expelled in April 2023. Facing ferocious opposition from his own party, he exposed the Horizon Post Office scandal, fought for recognition for the covid vaccine injured and bereaved, and highlighted the iniquity for those facing compulsory house purchases to make way for the HS2 rail link. He was forced to sell his family home to HS2 and personally lost £500,000.
Bridgen was first elected in 2010, in what was then a Labour stronghold considered ‘unwinnable’ by David Cameron, overturning a Labour majority of 4,477 to win with a majority of 7,511, 45 per cent of the vote. In the 2015 and 2017 general elections, he kept his seat and increased his margins to 11,373 (49 per cent) and then 13,286 (54 per cent). In 2019, his majority increased again to 20,400, 63 per cent of the vote, with 33,811 voters.
To drop from 63 per cent of the vote to 3.2 per cent with just 1,568 votes seems implausible. Bridgen said: ‘After the election people were coming up to me, and still are, saying, “I voted for you, my whole family voted for you. What happened?”’
Compare Bridgen’s 2024 result with that of former Labour MP George Galloway, now leader of the Workers Party of Britain. In 2003, Galloway left Labour to become independent and in March 2024 won a landslide by-election in Rochdale with 12,335 votes, almost 6,000 more than any other candidate. He lost the general election four months later to Labour’s Paul Waugh, by just 1,539 votes – Waugh 13,047 and Galloway 11,508, a 15 per cent decrease.
Bridgen’s competitors were virtually unknown in the area too, although Conservative candidate Craig Smith (who came second) does live locally. Both have a tiny social media presence compared with his own. Labour’s Amanda Hack, who won the seat, has just 840 followers on Facebook, Craig Smith who came second, fares marginally better with 2,200 followers, but nothing in comparison with Bridgen who currently has 28,000 Facebook followers. His rival MPs’ X presence is just as pitiful; just 2,431 follow Hack, a measly 1,366 follow Smith while 261,900 follow Bridgen.
So what happened? Bridgen thinks that the vote could have been tampered with, a suggestion strenuously denied by North West Leicestershire District Council (NWLDC) which has responsibility for collecting and counting the votes, and has highlighted what he sees as anomalies. A council spokesman said: ‘With the exception of the exit poll being cancelled, the allegations being made have no factual basis and are based on inaccurate assumptions.’
The contentious issues for Bridgen surround the exit poll, the opening of the ballot boxes and new electoral services staff. Is there any evidence to support him or are the inconsistencies coincidence or misinterpretation?
The market research company Ipsos-MORI conduct exit polls on behalf of the BBC, Sky Television and ITV. Just two weeks before the election, they cancelled the North West Leicestershire exit poll with no explanation, removing any chance to check voters’ candidate preference.
Political scientist John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, curates the information for Ipsos-MORI and confirmed that North West Leicestershire (and Rochdale for that matter) had no exit poll. He said: ‘The only exit poll was an exercise conducted at 134 locations across the UK and designed to estimate the outcome across the country in seats.’ There are 650 seats in the UK.
NWLDC also admitted the poll was cancelled and their spokesman said: ‘We were only informed at the very last minute.’
Bridgen questioned the time it took to count the vote. The ballot boxes took around 25 minutes to reach Whitwick and Coalville Leisure Centre, a central location in the constituency, where the ballot papers were counted.
Polling stations closed at 10pm and Allison Thomas, CEO of the council and returning officer for the constituency, said they would not begin the count until 2am – a four-hour time lag. ‘There was no explanation,’ Bridgen said. ‘The election officers were unnaturally nervous too. You’d have thought they were the ones standing for election. None of it stacked up. I’ve been through around 20 elections locally and I’ve never seen anything like that.’
Bridgen’s manager David Baggett confirmed: ‘The ballot boxes were slow to come in. They were still validating the ballot papers when the final count was called in Newcastle.’
Validation means election staff check the number of ballots received against voter roll lists that are checked at each polling station.
NWLDC appointed Ms Thomas as CEO in August 2022. In April 2023, after he had been expelled from the Conservative Party, Bridgen said: ‘I was informed that the whole of the election services department had resigned en masse, on a Friday, and they’d been replaced by a new team. That was amazing because I can’t remember anybody leaving since I became the candidate in 2006. There were three people in the department, they weren’t relatives, so I can’t understand why they all left on the same day. I think that’s very, very unusual.
‘I spoke to Allison Thomas to ask what was going on. And her answer was that it was the right time for them to move on, whatever that means. Before the election I wanted to have a meeting with the new team. I was very uncomfortable about it. It took a long time to get a meeting.’
The council have denied that the whole team left but admitted Bridgen and Baggett met election services staff before the general election. Their spokesman said that two staff retired in 2022, no staff left or retired in 2023 or 2024, and two original staff remained: Democratic Services Manager Clare Hammond and Electoral Services Officer Chris Colvin. Both met Bridgen and Baggett.
Bridgen was concerned that electoral services staff were on their own in Stenson House, a council building in Coalville, while all other departments had been relocated to other buildings. Part of the council’s offices were due to be demolished, hence the mass exodus.
Bridgen said: ‘We had the meeting four weeks before the election in the old premises. Clare Hammond joined, saying “I thought you’d like to see a familiar face.” It turned out that the whole of the council had decamped, leaving electoral services in that big old building on their own. There was no oversight of them, so no one knew what they were doing.’
The council said: ‘This is not the case. Our entire staff moved to new administration offices in April 2023. For the purposes of administering and managing all elections, the elections team book rooms at Stenson House. This is to enable all members of the team to work in the same office, and to allow the team the space they need to receive postal votes, organise ballot boxes and other work that requires space. This work takes place at Stenson House for every election and has done for many years.’
Bridgen was always popular with his constituents, and his 2024 election address has had 24,231 views on YouTube.
‘Michael and Susan Rudkin from Ibstock were my constituents,’ Bridgen said. ‘Michael was chairman of the National Federation of Subpostmasters. He appeared in ITV’s drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office about the Horizon scandal, and witnessed Fujitsu’s engineers altering sub-postmasters’ accounts remotely at their HQ. The day after he visited Fujitsu, his wife was accused of stealing £44,000 from the post office and wrongly convicted. I helped get that conviction overturned.’
By contrast many in the Conservative Party hated him, and the government refused 20 requests to debate excess deaths after the UK saw a 9 per cent increase in 2022, a year after the covid vaccine rollout.
Bridgen also challenged the World Health Organization’s power grab, continued to highlight the government’s gross ineptitude and handling of the covid pandemic, and they finally kicked him out after Matt Hancock accused him of anti-Semitism, clearly twisting his words. Discussing the horrendous rise in post covid vaccination heart issues, Bridgen tweeted: ‘As one consultant cardiologist said to me, this is the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust.’
On alleged vote rigging he said: ‘If there was any skulduggery relating to the vote, it would have had to have been before the ballot boxes got to the leisure centre. I have no idea who would have been behind it. I tell constituents who ask that I’m trying to get to the bottom of it but without a whistleblower, I’m not sure I ever will.’
If anyone has any information about the vote, please email: sally@sallybeck.co.uk
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