News that the Conservative chairman in the ‘safe’ Tory seat of Bexhill and Battle thinks that one of the prospective candidates for the position of prospective parliamentary candidate faced a double whammy because ‘she was brown and a woman’, is not the kind of national profiling that the candidate for the constituency, Huw Merriman, would have wanted as he launches his campaign.
The comments, straight out of the UKIP book, have surprised local people. Talking to the Financial Times, chairman John Barnes, appraising the candidate, London barrister Suella Fernandes said ” “wowzer performance on the night” but added fatally that her gender and race had been a “handicap” in such a strong field. “The double whammy of being brown and a woman probably handicaps her still”.
The story is unlikely to have done any favours to Huw Merriman, a local candidate with a good record of service to Wealden District Council. It is the last thing that he would have wanted as he aims to widen his appeal to the electorate in what might be a three horse race for the local seat.
Embarrassingly for the local conservative party, national attention has now been drawn, not to his record, but to the story of the Bexhill selection process, in which all the members voting for the candidates were white and nearly all elderly, according to one person at the hustings.
Whether this kind of profile in the local party will benefit their campaign is yet to be seen. There is a reasonable argument to be put that the chair of the local conservation association is out of touch with the modern world.
He added fuel to the flames with a further comment; “a person with brown skin is very visibly a townie in rural Sussex and looking very urban in rural Britain means you are at a potential disadvantage,”
A Tory party spokesman quickly stepped into the debate with an attempt at damping down the flames. The issue reached the pages of the national press and features in the Mail, Independent and Telegraph, as well as the Financial Times. “These comments are unacceptable and they neither reflect the views of the Conservative party nor the reality, which is that people from all backgrounds are being selected to be candidates for the party.”
Perhaps the saving grace in the comments made by John Barnes is his throwaway remark that ‘she gave a wowzer of a performance’.
The few remaining colonels in the constituency, with tweed jackets and monocles, that still take a breakfast of kedgeree in the mornings in their library of P.G. Woodhouse books, will presumably have nodded in approval at the tone of the hustings debate and the benign wisdom of John Barnes.
Sadly the comments are unlikely to have done anything much for the standing of the Tory party locally.
Simon Montgomery
editor, Bay Life
