Tory accountants hit by election drubbing
Last week’s General Election proved to be dismal for MPs from the accountancy profession. Only five are going to be walking through the corridors of power in the new Parliament, with the Conservatives taking the worst beating.
Of the 28 Tory accountant candidates who were either fighting to retain their seats or enter Parliament for the first time, only one, Nick Gibb, standing in Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, succeeded in getting elected.
Conservative accountant casualties included: Roger Freeman, the public service minister and MP for Kettering; Michael Stern, MP for Bristol NW and regular contributor to Accountancy Age’s View From The House; and Jeremy Hanley, MP for Richmond Park and former Tory party chairman.
The Labour party fielded four accountants. Harry Cohen held Leyton & Wanstead; Michael Foster, took Worcester from the Tories; and Julia Drown defeated the Conservatives in Swindon South. The Liberal Democrats, fielding 14 accountant candidates, fared less well with only Scots ICA and Liberal Democrat MP Michael Moore successfully holding onto his Tweedale, Ettrick & Lauderdale seat. Moore resisted a 7% swing to Labour.
Gibb said he fought the election primarily on local issues: ‘We want to revitalise the two town centres and we’re very keen on better sewage treatment with the local economy so reliant on tourism and clean beaches.’
Gibb, a tax manager with KPMG, said he believed the new Labour Government would be ‘very bad’ for Britain. The decision of the electorate to vote in Tony Blair is one ‘people will come to regret,’ he added. Gibb, one of the 190 Tory candidates riding on an anti-Europe manifesto, said the EU had been the main talking point on the doorstep during the campaign: ‘I’m opposed to a federal united states of Europe and so were a lot of voters.’
Stern saw his 45 majority – the second smallest in the UK – overturned by Labour’s Doug Naysmith. The local MP since 1983, Stern refused to comment on what he thought lay behind both his own defeat and Labour’s landslide victory. ‘I’m going home to think about my future,’ he said.
