Rishi Sunak kicked off a day of campaigning in south-west England in one of his party’s most vulnerable seats in the region: St Ives.
The Cornwall constituency is number 16 on the Liberal Democrats’ target list, thanks to it needing a swing in the share of the vote of only 4.9 percentage points to change hands.
St Ives was once one of the most solid bricks in the Lib Dems’ “yellow wall” of constituencies across the South West, being held by the party from 1997 to 2015.
The Tories gained it in 2015 and have held it ever since, but are defending a notional majority at this election of just 5,227: small enough to mean the seat is at risk from a Lib Dem revival, particularly as Labour – who won just 9% of the vote in 2019 – are not in contention here.
The Prime Minister then moved up the coast to the constituency of Cornwall South East: another former Liberal Democrat stronghold but one that has been held by the Conservatives since 2010 and is not quite so electorally precarious (Lib Dem target 153) – though the swing needed for the Lib Dems to win, 21.4 points, is the kind the party has notched up in recent by-elections.
The road to a Labour government “runs through right here in Worcester”, Sir Keir Starmer told supporters on Wednesday, highlighting just how important the seat and others like it will be to his party’s chances of election victory.
Tory-held Worcester is 70th on Sir Keir’s target list and needs a swing of 6.7 points to change hands, making it the kind of constituency Labour needs to win to have a chance – at the very least – of ending up the largest party after polling day.
It has also become one of the UK’s “bellwether” seats, where the local result tends to match the national result.
Since 1979, whichever party has won Worcester has also gone on to form the government.
Perhaps acknowledging this significance, Sir Keir made not one but two campaign appearances in the town on Wednesday, at the Three Counties medical school and at Worcester City football club.
