In which we ask what happens to an MP’s priorities when three quarters of his income comes from his second (and third) jobs?

Show him the money!

UPDATE: 20 April 2025: Sir Oliver’s new favourite football team San Diego FC got absolutely clattered 3-0 at Charlotte, finishing with ten men after some VAR drama (in other news, they have VAR in the MLS). And it’s a very long flight home for the San Diego boys. Not quite as long as Sir Oliver’s back in March, though, obviously. Watch the match highlights.

As we’ve explained before, once an MP is out of government, they can do pretty much whatever they want to earn money. There’s a body, set up and funded by Parliament, called the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA), that tells ministers what they may and may not do on leaving office but it essentially boils down to “wait for a few months…”. ACOBA has no way of stopping a former minister or senior civil servant from taking up a new role but has been known to write a stern letter (see the cases of Sue Gray, who actually did what they told her to do, and Boris Johnson, who didn’t).

Sir Oliver Dowden has now left ministerial office twice – once while in government and once because of last year’s general election defeat. On each occasion he did the right thing, asked ACOBA for advice and was told to wait three months before taking up his new roles. You won’t be surprised to learn that, in both cases, he waited exactly three months before starting his new jobs.

Dowden is nothing if not loyal and it turns out that the work he’s taken up this time around is with the same employers as last time around (we wrote about them back then). He’s back with ‘global macro hedge fund’ Caxton Associates (intriguingly, the people who funded Liz Truss’s petulant insurgency) and with art broker Pierce Protocols (doing business under the name Heni Leviathan which seems sort of appropriate when you consider the modern Tory Party’s commitment to reducing the nation to a state of nature).

Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality

There’s more money involved this time, though. Dowden has spent almost his entire Parliamentary career getting by on his MP’s salary plus – once appointed in 2018 – the larger ministerial salary (there was about a month of outside work while he was briefly out of the cabinet in 2022) but now that he’s free to do so he’s dialing up the dough.

Again, it seems important to note that Dowden’s behaviour here is not exceptional: in the 2019 Parliament over 90% of income from second jobs went to Tory MPs – some of whom have been known to pull down nearly a million pounds per year from one second job or £2.5M in one Parliament or, in the case of the acknowledged master of the art of the second job, Boris Johnson, a million pounds from multiple jobs in one month. Sir Oliver’s income, so far, barely touches the sides.

His most recent declaration says that he’s now pulling down a total of £20,000 per month from the above sources (£10,000 from each). That’s 2.5x his MP’s salary and, added up, brings Dowden’s total declared income to £331,346 per year. At the top we wondered, in the sub-head, what happens to an MP’s priorities when this kind of money starts to flow into the bank account, making the sums coming from the day job look a bit silly. Well, of course, we don’t know. And we definitely don’t know what effect all this new money is going to have on Sir Oliver Dowden in particular. We do know that he’s been a professional and diligent representative for his Hertsmere electors for almost ten years – making speeches next to bins without complaint.

So, in a sense, what we’ve got now, with Sir Oliver out of office and finally pulling down the big money, is a kind of experiment: what happens when you give an elected representative a boost to his earnings equivalent to 2.5 times his basic salary and 6.5x the average wage in the UK? Is it possible that all that wedge will have no effect at all? Is it even slightly plausible that his priorities will not shift? That he won’t find himself thinking more favourably of his main employer and acting in their interests?

While in his ministerial role in the last Tory government Dowden was earning around £150,000 per year (and he’ll have received a severance payment of 16,876 on leaving that job last year). There must be a measure of relief for Sir Oliver in finally being able to join the high earners’ club. For his whole political career he’s been surrounded by the super-rich. The generation of Tory MPs he’s a member of is one of the wealthiest in history and he was usually in a tiny minority of non-millionaires in the cabinets in which he sat. The fact that, as a diligent bagman, he often wound up on Sunday morning TV defending the indefensible behaviour of his millionaire colleagues must have been especially galling.

San Diego FC 0-0 St Louis City

But let’s get to the most intriguing declaration in Sir Oliver’s latest update to the register. It’s not the most valuable – it’s a trip to a football match – but this football match wasn’t down at Meadow Park in sunny Borehamwood. It was at the Snapdragon Stadium in sunny San Diego, 5,500 miles further West, on 1 March. We assume Dowden travelled with his family. At least it’s difficult to imagine how he could have spent £9,217.79 on flights and £1,851.27 on accommodation on his own (plus £462.81 for transfers and £617.12 for match tickets and hospitality). This is another benefit of being out of government: you can stock up on freebies without the kind of examination that government ministers get when they go to the football.

This particular football match was the inaugural home match of a club called San Diego FC. American football soccer is weird. We don’t pretend to understand all this but the club is an ‘extension team‘ that just won a place in the MLS (Major League Soccer) by demonstrating that it has the necessary financial backing. This backing – $500M of it – comes from the man who flew Sir Oliver out for the match, Sir Mohamed Mansour, a British-Egyptian billionaire who was a treasurer of the Conservative Party until his resignation last year. Mansour gave the party £5M in 2023 and was subsequently knighted by Rishi Sunak. He used to be known as ‘Mansour Chevrolet’ back in Egypt because his dad made the family’s fortune by representing Western brands in the region. Sir Mohamed was Egyptian transport minister between 2005 and 2009, but had to resign his post after taking responsibility for a disastrous train crash.

To be honest, none of this really explains why you’d want to fly a Tory Party backbencher 11,000 miles for a football match. We wondered if Dowden could have appointed Mansour to his treasurer role while he was Co-Chairman of the party but Dowden was no longer in that role when Mansour came in. Any ideas?

• More about ACOBA and the register of members’ interests in this 2022 post and here’s a very good ACOBA explainer from the Institute for Government.
• Sir Oliver is still on the front benches – he currently shadows the Deputy Prime Minister – but shadow ministerial roles don’t attract any of the customary limits on outside activity and only the leader of the opposition gets any kind of additional payment for the role. The ministerial code doesn’t apply to shadow ministers.
• In principle, the current government opposes the whole idea of second jobs. Before the general election Keir Starmer enthusiatically supported legislation to limit MPs’ second jobs – his manifesto proposes “…an immediate ban on MPs from taking up paid advisory or consultancy roles,” which would obviously put the kybosh on Sir Oliver’s two main gigs. Things have gone a bit quiet since then, though, and we find this a bit puzzling: banning second jobs looks like a political slam-dunk for Labour. It would affect almost exclusively Conservative MPs; it would present a real practical problem for the big earners and a big political problem for the Tory front bench; and it’s been shown to be immensely popular with the electorate. Is there a tactical concern here that a wave of big Conservative resignations might produce some inconvenient by-election results and a few more ReformUK MPs on the opposition benches? Quite possibly.
• Mohamed Mansour wrote about his ambitions for his new football club for a local San Diego paper in March. Next for San Diego is Charlotte FC away. We assume new fan Oliver Dowden will be watching on Apple TV+.
• The administration of the Conservative Party is a complex matter and we’re not experts but it seems important to note that Mansour was never actually the capital-t Treasurer of the party (which explains why he’s not on this list), only ever a lower-case treasurer of the party. The Conservative Party acquires treasurers of this kind in a pretty spontaneous way and each will have a specific responsibility, depending on their wealth or their network. Mansour’s was to raise money to fight the 2024 general election. This presumably explains why he disappeared sharpish right after that historic defeat.
• We read that Nadhim “Tax Error” Zahawi asked Mansour to fund a bid for the Telegraph last year but that he swerved that one. Very wise.
• Back when he was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Dowden oversaw the Cabinet Office’s 22-person Propriety and Ethics team. Just saying.
• We think it might be worth looking a bit more closely at the two businesses currently providing about 75% of Sir Oliver’s income between them – Caxton Associates and Pierce Protocols. Watch this space.
• From the Politico politics blog, five MPs who really couldn’t muster even a single fuck about the advice of ACOBA.
• Here’s part one of the Oliver Dowden Sketchy Behaviour Monitor which, to be honest, is even less interesting than part two. Bookmark Sir Oliver’s entry in the register of members’ interests and his page at They Work for You. Here’s all of our Oliver Dowden coverage on one page and if you use an RSS reader you can subscribe to this feed. We tweet this stuff and you’ll also find us in the Fediverse – search Mastodon for ‘Radlett Wire’.

It’s a few months since we learnt that Europe’s biggest data centre might be built here in Hertsmere – what could stop it from happening?

In part three of our DC01UK deep dive we’ll look at the various obstacles that must be overcome before it goes live on the Internet in 2030.

It might fall at the first hurdle. The scheme has outline planning permission from Hertsmere Borough Council so the developers must get their ducks in a row and submit a final plan. If we’re honest, though, this doesn’t look like a major concern: the council has given the project its enthusiastic backing and the UK government has cleared the way by adding data centres to the list of developments that can be defined as nationally significant infrastructure projects, alongside energy, transport, water, waste water, and waste projects (Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has even mentioned DC01UK in a speech). Unless something else goes wrong, the project is probably guaranteed to happen. So what else could go wrong?

The neighbours might object. As with any big development – especially one planned for land that is 100% in the green belt – local people are upset about DC01UK and have begun a campaign. Sadly for the locals, though, this scheme is going to be very hard to stop. As we said in an earlier post, this is the kind of land Angela Rayner calls ‘grey belt’ and even the green belt lobby seems to have given up. Our MP has met with the local campaigners but it doesn’t sound like he was able to give them much hope: “I encourage residents to submit their own views on the matter directly to the council,” he says. The fact that the developers plan to leave half the land as green open space and have promised substantial enhancements to the local environment will not help the opposition’s cause.

The demand might not be there. The trigger for DC01UK – and hundreds of projects like it all over the world – was the massive surge in demand for data centre capacity that we wote about in our first post, almost entirely the product of the AI and machine learning revolution – apparently an unstoppable and unarguable fact of the modern world. But the launch, only two months ago, of a new large language model (LLM), from a Chinese firm called Deepseek, suggests the direction for AI might not be quite as ‘up and to the right’ as had been hoped by investors. Deepseek wasn’t supposed to be possible. American sanctions have stopped the sale of the latest versions of the specialist chips needed to train and run serious LLMs to Chinese firms. Deepseek was trained on chips from the top manufacturer NVIDIA but these chips had been deliberately downgraded so as to slow Chinese progress in AI. That a group of brilliant computer scientists was able to coax top-tier AI performance from second-tier hardware suggests that this might not be the brute-force business we thought it was to begin with.

The Deepseek engineers made such resourceful use of the hobbled chips’ capacity that they were able to get around the punitive sanctions regime and keep China in the AI game. And, more to the point, if one Chinese firm can make more efficient use of AI hardware then the American giants, then so can anyone. Suddenly the AI game doesn’t look so one-sided and the soaring demand for newer and faster hardware doesn’t look so nailed-on. If more really can be done with less, then maybe the world doesn’t need the vast additional computing and data centre capacity that’s now being built. So do we think that the spreadsheets that justified DC01UK’s grand plans have been dragged to the trash? No, we don’t. The underlying growth in demand for the kind of cloud services that run in data centres like this one is unabated – and most of it has no need of LLMs – but has the gloss come off the AI data centre business? Just a bit. We’d like to have been a fly on the wall in a post-Deepseek DC01UK planning meeting that’s for sure.

It’s the water stupid. In our previous post we wrote about the extraordinary demands that a data centre on this scale makes of resources like electricity (to power the servers) and water (for cooling). The power is, apparently, already sorted. The water, though, may not be so straightforward. Our region, the East of England, is already classified as ‘severely water stressed‘ and environmental groups calculate possible daily shortages of up to 800,000 litres by 2050. We’ve calculated that DC01UK alone will need 250 million litres per year (660,000 litres per day) to keep its servers cool. Where will this vast quantity of water come from? In fairness to the developers they may be considering an approach to DC01UK that doesn’t need any water at all – at least not after the initial top-up. It’s possible to build a server farm with a ‘closed’ cooling system that recycles the cooling water used – condensing it after it’s evaporated and pumping it back through the system (Microsoft is testing this approach). It’s not easy, though, and you need to engineer your data centre from the ground up to take advantage of this approach, pumping water right through the computers to cool the chips directly. There are even more advanced solutions – like the one from Google’s parent company Alphabet that will site a direct air capture facility next door to your data centre, producing CO2 to be stored forever underground and clean water that can be used to cool the servers. Magic. But very expensive. And a relatively small firm like DC01UK probably doesn’t want to be adding cost to a low-margin business like a data centre if they don’t have to. Where will the new data centre get its water? And, as shortages bite, will DC01UK just dry up all together?

The money. Obviously. The companies behind DC01UK are not the final operators and won’t be funding the project. Can they guarantee the billions of pounds necessary to get a fitted-out, ready-to-launch DC01UK to market in 2030? Of course not. So this comes down to who is actually providing the money and to the absolute forest of unknowns – global recession, soaring borrowing costs in the UK, a tech crash that crushes demand – that might bring the thing to a grinding halt and leave that nice dog-walking field in South Mimms just as it is now.

Then there’s Donald Trump. This one’s tricky. Will a new worldwide trade framework be a good thing or a bad thing for a UK data centre? We don’t think anyone knows right now and there are many contradictory factors. We think, though, that this global re-arrangement could actually be a good thing for DC01UK – and for firms like it outside the USA. Services – like those provided by DC01UK to big corporations – are not covered by the new American tariffs. That has to be a good thing in itself: the biggest national customer for data centre services is the United States by about a mile and worldwide data centres will be able to continue selling their capacity to American firms on the current terms. Since the physical location of a data centre is important – you want your servers to be close to your customers to reduce latency – local facilities like DC01UK will continue to be important.

The hardware that goes into data centres is, as you’d expect, mostly made in the far East. NVIDIA’s AI chips, for instance, are made in Taiwan – and US tariffs have been applied there. It is possible that the hike in price for these products in the USA could be beneficial to firms in the rest of the world – if there’s a sudden oversupply of hardware made in China, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan a glut of unsold kit could cause prices to drop here. Fitting out DC01UK could turn out be cheaper than planned. This fear of ‘dumping’ by lower-cost countries is putting the fear of God into UK manufacturers but since no computer hardware is made in Britain, this cannot be a concern. Although it’ll obviously be a years before any computers are purchased for DC01UK, it’s just possible that the geopolitical chaos unleashed by Donald Trump will turn out not to be an obstacle at all but, in fact, an advantage.

• The data centre will be built on an 85-acre site, currently agricultural land, in South Mimms.
• Here’s an interesting development from just down the road. A UK company is planning a data centre waste heat network – they’re going to capture the enormous amount of heat generated by data centres in West London and use it to heat homes nearby. The scheme will produce 95GWh of heat annually in its first phase, beginning in 2028. Although they’re not connected developments, there’s a plan to build somewhere between a couple of hundred and several thousand new homes on green belt land close to DC01UK. Wouldn’t it interesting if they could be heated using the waste heat from the data centre?
• Bookmark this page to keep up with our updates on DC01UK. If you’re one of those weirdos who still uses an RSS reader, follow our feed or this Google news alert (RSS explained). We’ll almost certainly be tweeting about this of course. Email [email protected].
• Links, references and background we’re saving as we cover this story.

Previously on Radlett Wire: two local firms have secured outline planning permission to build Europe’s biggest data centre right here in Hertsmere. We don’t know much more than that. For instance we don’t know who the final client is or who will use the facility once it’s live. Likewise, we have only the most basic information about the facility itself. If you know more than we do about any of this or if you have anything you’d like us to know about the development, leave a comment under this post or email [email protected].

So, in this, the second post in our DC01UK deep dive, we’ll look at what we don’t know and what we should be keeping an eye on as this development proceeds. In the next post we’ll look at the bigger trends – in business, geopolitics and in AI – that might stop it from happening all together. Later we’ll look at the reaction of the affected communities: the people of Potters Bar and the settlements around it who will have to put up with this huge construction project and its long-term operation.

Seven key measures

The data centre business is a mature one. The first dedicated facilities built specially to host computer servers in Britain actually precede the Internet – built mainly for businesses in the City of London – and are now almost forty years old. The industry, over the years, has developed a pretty complete set of standards and measurements (mostly simple ratios) that are used to compare facilities and to judge efficiency. As the development progresses we can use these ratios to work out whether DC01UK is doing a conscientious, thoughtful job or just chucking up a big dumb data barn. As neighbours and Hertsmere electors we think we have a right to hope that this development is clean, efficient and up-to-date – especially as the project appears to be a fait accompli in planning terms (National and local government have signed off on it and expect it to go ahead). At the moment, though, we’re going to have to rely on a fair amount of guesswork because they’ve told us hardly anything (next to each measure we’ve put an indication of how much we know now, in italics – hopefully this will change as the development proceeds).

1. Electricity
   PUE (power usage effectiveness) basic information
   This is the biggie, obviously. Data centres draw more electricity than almost any other kind of industrial facility and they’re the fastest-growing power draw on the grid right now, almost everywhere. Recent developments (crypto and now AI) have accelerated this growth. The only useful datapoint we’ve got from DC01UK so far relates to electricity use and it’s a helpful one because we can use it to calculate some of the others. The original announcement from Hertsmere council says that the National Grid has reserved a 400MVA substation for the facility. That translates quite precisely into a peak power draw of 360MW. St Albans, for comparison (population 150,000), can draw about a third of that – 135MW. DC01UK is going to be huge.
2. Water
   WUE (water usage effectiveness) unknown
   Data centres get very hot (put your hand round the back of your computer and feel the heat it’s putting out – now multiply that by millions) and they’re cooled these days using a mxture of conventional air-conditioning and water pumped through the servers. Although no figures for water use have been published we can use the electricity figure to calculate that if it’s built to current cooling standards DC01UK will need about 250 million litres per year. That’s about 660,000 litres per day, a vast multiple of the water needed by the agricultural land it will be built on, to state the obvious. Eastern England is one of the most water-stressed parts of Britain and already experiences shortages in dry spells. ‘Zero-water’ data centre cooling systems exist – they recycle cooling water instead of just allowing it to evaporate. Can we expect a system like this from DC01UK?
3. CO2
   CUE (carbon usage effectiveness) unknown
   This is a measure of how much CO2 is emitted per unit of IT energy consumed in the data centre. The lower the CUE the better the environmental performance. This is another factor for which we have no figures at all. The developers will have to calculate this number and they may already have done so. A CUE of 0.0 is possible but only if 100% renewable electricity is used. In a developed economy a figure of 0.2 is more likely. In the UK where there’s no coal in the energy mix but where there’s still a lot of gas, the number is likely to be between 0.1 and 0.2. It’s going to be fascinating to see DC01UK’s figures once they’re public.
4. Energy reuse
   ERE (energy reuse effectiveness) unknown
   This one’s closely related to the CO2 figure above and to the heat figure below. If energy is used efficiently and not wasted – if heat from CPU cooling is reused elsewhere in the building, for instance – the CUE will come down. 1.0 is the worst here; it means all the energy that’s not used is wasted. A number lower than that indicates greater efficiency.
5. Renewable energy
   REF (renewable energy factor) unknown
   In Britain in 2025 (and certainly in 2030 when DC01UK is meant to be finished) there’s no reason why electricity for a single facility like this one shouldn’t be from 100% renewable sources. Likewise there’s no reason why electricity, once generated, shouldn’t be stored – either on-site or elsewhere – to improve efficiency and reduce cost. It’s another unknown but perhaps the presence of a green energy business in the DC01UK partnership might help here.
6. Heat
   HRE (heat reuse effectiveness) unknown
   In Britain we tend to heat our homes individually, using gas boilers. Elsewhere, especially in Europe, buildings or whole districts are heated from a single source. So, it’s probably a bit unrealistic to expect that the spare heat produced by DC01UK be used to heat homes in South Mimms and Potters Bar. It’ll probably just be vented to the air. Heat reuse effectiveness (HRE) is a simple percentage – what proportion of the heat generated is re-used? The most efficient industrial heat sources in the world, including some data centres, achieve HREs of above 50% – less than half of waste heat is thrown away. Unless the DC01UK developers have a surprise in store for us – perhaps a groundbreaking plan to heat local housing or greenhouses – then we expect this to be a very low number: somewhere between 1 and 5%.
7. Land
   LUE (land use efficiency) basic information
   This is another calculation that’s fairly easy to do, so we can make a decent guess at how efficiently this data centre will use the land allocated to it. Dividing the published figures for the power draw of the DC01UK data centre (360MW) by its area (93,000 sqare metres) and assuming a 75% usage rate gives us just below 3 kW/m², a measure which puts it in the high efficiency category for all buildings but somewhere in the middle for a data centre. It will be fascinating to learn just how ambitious the developers intend to be.

There’s an irony in the fact that the best possible way to cool a huge computing facility like DC01UK would be, well, to build it somewhere else, somewhere really cold to be specific – somewhere like Northern Norway or Alaska. Cooling is then effectively free – you just find a way to let the cold air from outside in (and once you’ve warmed it up you make sure you’re not just venting it back to the outside but using it to heat the housing estate or the university next door). And it doesn’t need to be in the arctic – simply moving your datacentre seven or eight degrees North – say from Potters Bar to Stockholm – would reduce the cooling costs of a 360MW data cantre by 100,000–150,000 MWh per year.

A data centre is a very 21st Century beast. Once it’s built, most people won’t know it’s there and it’ll hum away on the horizon, behind its careful landscaping, relatively innofensively. And since all of its critical inputs and outputs will be travelling over fibre-optic and copper cables buried in the ground there’ll be no queue of 40-foot trucks, no rail siding, no enormous car park. But we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that DC01UK is going to have no impact. Its need for electricity alone will be vast – amounting to almost 1% of the whole country’s demand for power (this is our estimate – we’ve calculated an annual draw for DC01UK of 2.37TWh at a relatively conservative 75% utilisation and the UK’s demand in 2023 was 266TWh).

A data centre is the ultimate globalised business. Once it’s switched on billions of transactions will take place every day in that inconspicuous high-tech shed next to the M25, connecting people, businesses and machines in every corner of the world.

• In a difficult period for the world economy, data centres are one of the few growth areas so a bit of Googling will yield plenty of freely-available data and background information, from governments, NGOs and consultancies:
  Energy trends in the UK (PDF) – Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
  Energy Consumption in Data Centres and Broadband Communication Networks in the EU (PDF) – European Commission.
  Data Centres and Data Transmission Networks – International Energy Agency.
  UK Government Sustainable ICT – a UK government blog – a few years old but some useful background on the issues.
  The energy conundrum – a report from Savills, a property consultancy.
• When placing a data centre, it’s not just the average temperature that matters. Humidity is also important. The drier the climate the easier it is to cool the facility using evaporative cooling. This explains why enormous data centres can still be viable even when built in extremely hot locations like the high desert of Arizona. You won’t need us to tell you that the climate in South Mimms will not permit much evaporative cooling.
• The DC01UK web site is full of data but, understandably, none of it is about the environmental impact or the resource demands. It’s all about the contribution the facility will make to the local economy.
• Bookmark this page to keep up with our updates on DC01UK. If you’re one of those weirdos who still uses an RSS reader, follow our feed or this Google news alert (RSS explained). We’ll almost certainly be tweeting about this of course. Email [email protected].
• Links, references and background we’re saving as we cover this story.

Well, possibly. Data centres are the cotton mills and steel foundries of our day. Vast, industrial-scale facilities that are right at the heart of the fourth industrial revolution. And one might be built right here, next to the motorway in South Mimms.

One of those visualisations that developers churn out. More here.

We’ll admit to a certain childish excitement about this. Mysterious developers want to build Europe’s largest data centre right here in Hertsmere. The developer applied for planning permission in September of last year and last week the council granted outline permission for the development. We suspect they’re as excited as we are, although there’s some doubt as to how involved Hertsmere can now be, given the special status of this development. We’ll be keeping an eye on this project and we’ll provide as much detail as we can as it progresses but, to begin with, here’s what we know so far:

Are you serious? On the green belt? The data centre, if built, will be on green belt land to the East of South Mimms services, right next to the M25. The developers are in luck, though: this is exactly the kind of relatively-unloved green belt that the government has recently been calling ‘grey belt‘. You might expect a plan to build on 85 acres of agricultural land in a district that has a history of green belt belligerence to produce an angry reaction (like the one that held up the Radlett Railfreight terminal for years) but when even Peter Waine, chair of the Hertfordshire branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, speaking to the BBC, can’t muster more than: “It may not be the most wonderful and beautiful green belt but it is green belt…” Here at Radlett Wire, at the other end of Hertsmere, we get the strong feeling this particular chunk of green belt may not be long for this world.

Inside the red outline

It’s going to be huge. The claim, in the news stories and press releases, that DC01UK will be the largest data centre in Europe looks defensible. Europe’s largest running data centre is presently in Portugal. It covers about 800,000 square feet and the proposed South Mimms operation is aiming for two million square feet. But there’s another project, in Newport, Wales, that’s also aiming for two million and, anyway, the critical measurement – especially for the local community – is probably not square feet. Planners and architects use a measure they call gross external area (GEA), which is more useful. It’s the total area of a building, including all floors, measured from the outside. It’s the critical measurement used for rating, council tax and planning. DC01UK’s GEA is 187,000 square metres, slightly more than the 185,000 square metres (2,000,000 square feet) that will be devoted to computers. And as we’ll explain, there are other important numbers – relating to water and electricity use and to pollution – that we should understand and keep an eye on.

But size isn’t everything. If completed – and if not eclipsed by other projects along the way – this puts DC01UK just inside the top ten biggest data centres in the world, but it’s an extremely volatile market, and brutal and connected directly to the financial performance of the companies that use these facilities. Data centre capacity is a commodity – like bauxite or wheat. The biggest firms (Google, Amazon…) build and run their own but most data centre capacity is bought and sold by intermediaries or brokers. A business that needs servers for a new app is concerned only with cost; margins must be hair-thin, effiency constantly improving. So, honestly, how this plays out, between now and the proposed opening date in 2030 is anybody’s guess. Whatever happens, as you’d expect, this enormous facility is already well-and-truly dwarfed by the biggest. A single Chinese data centre, operated by China Telecom, is already over five times bigger than DC01UK and sits on a campus called the Inner Mongolia Information Park in Hohhot, China alongside several other enormous facilities (truly visible from space). Also, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the seventh largest data centre in the world is buried in the side of a mountain in Utah and is operated by the United States National Security Agency. It’s safe to say that, although you’ve never heard of it, it knows a fair amount about you.

Another one of those visualisations.

Who will own the data centre? Guess what: we don’t know. We know a bit about the company set up to see it through planning, DC01UK, but nothing about the facility’s final user nor even its ultimate owner. This project is, according to Computer Weekly, a joint venture with local house-builder Griggs and Chiltern Green Energy, neither of which – I hope they won’t mind me saying – are what you’d call giants of the information age. The Register, a UK tech news web site, says it will ultimately be used by one of the ‘hyperscalers’ (industry jargon for the handful of tech giants in a position to make use of such a huge facility) but that the usual suspects – Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta – all declined to comment. This is not surprising. The big firms are typically secretive about their data centres – these are, to state the obvious, business-critical, round-the-clock facilities and ‘uptime‘ must be protected at all costs. Amazon, in particular, treats its data centres as if they were national security assets and goes to great lengths to hide them. There’s only one project described on DC01UK’s web site and there’s no ‘about us’ page. We expect it’ll be some time before we know who the final client is.

There’s some history in this area. DC01UK was incorporated in 2022 and was originally called Hilfield Battery Storage so we assume it’s connected with the application to build a battery storage farm on Hilfield Farm in Aldenham, rejected last year after a public inquiry. One thing is clear: the deal-making has begun. Vast facilities like DC01UK don’t just show up in districts like ours – they’re incentivised to do so. Tax breaks, subsidies, promises about transport, housing and infrastructure, cut-throat competition between regions – all will play a part in this project. We don’t know enough about any of this yet – and the actors are secretive, but we suspect there will be people in Hertsmere who already know substantially more than us – we’d love to hear from you in the comments!

What’s so exciting about data centres? Aren’t they just big, dumb warehouses for information? Data centres have been a big deal for a long time, since the first of the really huge online businesses began to build their own all around the world. But the pressure to provide new data centre capacity has recently exploded (last year Goldman Sachs estimated a 160% increase in demand). It’s become a very big story in the business and technology press and now it’s crossed over into the mainstream media and social media – and it’s all because of artificial intelligence (AI). AI needs an enormous amount of computing power – both in training new models and in running queries against them once they’re live. Typing a query into ChatGPT will usually use at least ten times more computing power – and thus electricity – than a Google search. And the industry really didn’t see this coming. It’s really only a couple of years since it dawned on the tech firms and on their investors that they were going to need many times more computing power than previously projected. So the rush is on.

Governments and local authorities have noticed this massive new opportunity and are rushing at it. Three weeks ago Keir Starmer launched his AI action plan, which he says will ‘deliver a decade of national renewal’. We should probably also acknowledge the boldness of Hertsmere here. Council leader (and head of something called the Hertfordshire Growth Board) Jeremy Newmark has obviously moved quickly. Apart from the obvious explosive dynamism of the AI industry he’ll be aware that, here in Britain, the government has committed to a completely new and much more aggressive orientation on economic growth – and to change planning procedures to speed up development. More specifically, data centres have been reclassified as critical national infrastructure and will have special status when it comes to planning inquiries. In fact, developments recognised as nationally significant infrastructure projects have had special status since the then Labour government created the status in 2008. In this regime, the local authority is not the lead planning authority – just a ‘statutory consultee’. DC01UK may already be on the fast track.

But could anything hold it up? Short answer: yes. And it probably won’t be planning. Even in the couple of weeks since we learnt about the project, the terms of the explosion in data centre capacity have changed completely. Less than a week before Hertsmere’s DC01UK announcement a new Chinese-built AI model called Deepseek R1 was launched. To say that it caused an epic freak-out at every level of the AI ecology would not be an overstatement. The freak-out centred on the fact that this new software was almost as efficient as the leading American models although it had been built on simpler technology – and much more cheaply. It was a huge shock, challenging the fundamentals of the emerging industry. As it dawned on the company’s competitors that a rich and useful AI model could be built using a fraction of the resources, that their assumptions about the progress of the technology could be all wrong, share prices tumbled, projects were cancelled or paused, projections and forecasts altered. So, could this global chaos change the trajectory of the South Mimms project? Cause it to be cancelled or scaled back? It really could. At Hertsmere Council everyone will have their fingers crossed.

In the next post, more about the crazy business of powering (and cooling) a modern data centre.

• For comparison, the largest warehouse in the UK – belonging to Amazon.com, natch – also covers around two million square feet. The O2 covers 1,126,270 square feet.
• It took the addtion of the magical term ‘AI’ to give all this stuff the kind of political salience it needed. When Technology Secretary Peter Kyle announced the change in status for data centres in September the most exciting application he could come up with for these gigantic buildings was storage: “…from photos taken on smartphones to patients’ NHS records and sensitive financial investment information.” Boring! In the few months since then, the AI brainworm has fully infected everyone involved. When Rachel Reeves announced her big ‘growth reset’ in January it was all AI, all the time.
• Amazon’s policy of secrecy about the location of their data centres even extends to their own staff. According to Peter Judge in Data Center Dynamics: “Only those within Amazon who have a legitimate business need to have such information know the actual location of these data centers…”
• There’s another huge data centre under construction in Hertfordshire – Google is building the company’s first UK facility in Waltham Cross. Incidentally, the existence of this project may suggest that Google is unlikely to be DC01UK’s ultimate customer.
• Everyone involved with this project is obviously moving quickly. If the government’s promises about removing barriers to growth are real, this project could almost be a kind of benchmark. The completion date in the press release is a bit unimpressive, though. 2030? Elon Musk claims to have built his new Colossus AI data centre in 19 days (although he did basically just stuff 100,000 NVidia GPUs into an old washing machine factory).
• Bookmark this page to keep up with our updates on DC01UK. If you’re one of those weirdos who still uses an RSS reader, follow our feed or this Google news alert (RSS explained). We’ll almost certainly be tweeting about this of course.
• Links, references and background we’re saving as we cover this story.

There might be a by-election in Hertsmere in the new year. Reform UK is the first to have noticed

Boom. First out the gate. Reform UK is distributing leaflets in Hertsmere in anticipation of a by-election in the new year. Candidate Darren Selkus’s letter to electors says:

If the rumours prove true and Oliver Dowden is granted a peerage in the New Year Honours, it would trigger a by-election right here in Hertsmere. With Labour still in power and the Conservatives in opposition, this presents a unique opportunity for a free vote – a vote for real change, a vote for Reform.

We haven’t heard the rumours Selkus cites, but we have been speculating for a while that Dowden might not relish the prospect of a whole electoral term in opposition.

So, it’s relevant that the Tories have spent the last 14 years packing the red benches; enobling, well, practically anyone, as far as we can tell. The long list of peers they’ve advanced includes the millionaire PPE entrepreneur, the son of a former KGB agent (spending his dad’s money freely in London and in Umbria), the mysterious ‘adviser’ no one can remember and the ‘chief of staff’ who worked for Liz Truss for less than a month. They’ve done this at a greater rate than any government in modern history (we’ve just learnt that these are called malverisation appointments). And it’s not just peers: Conservative governments since 2010 have given ten times more knighthoods and damehoods to MPs in 14 years than Labour did in 13. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to call this out-of-control patronage. They have no shame.

Peer explosion

So will Sir Oliver – who scored his knighthood in the final hours of the Sunak government (and picked it up this week at Windsor Castle) – move along the corridor to the Lords in the new year? We’re not so sure. He’s still a young man and the private sector must beckon (although, of course, he might not have much choice in the matter and there’s nothing to stop a peer of the realm from moonlighting at, say, a Mayfair hedge fund).

The operator

We’re quite impressed by military veteran Darren Selkus. He’s an operator. His communication with electors is savvy (and he says that, if elected, he’ll give his MP’s salary to charity, something that at least one of the party’s new MPs is already doing). He suspects he can increase Reform’s vote share at a by-election because voters have greater freedom when they know they’re not selecting the next government (in his letter he calls it a ‘free vote’).

Vote share won by parties of the populist right in Hertsmere since 1983

We know this to be true in by-elections – turnout is lower and minority parties can gain share. It’s an intriguing equation. Can an insurgent party have an impact in a home counties seat like ours, between general elections, when the Tories are so firmly embedded? At the July election Selkus won 6,584 votes (just short of 14% of the vote) – more than UKIP at their 2015 high-point and the largest vote for the populist right in the history of the constituency. He must be absolutely beside himself at the prospect of closing the gap at the right-hand end of the chart a bit.

Trousers as class war

His party’s leader is, by a mile, the most successful British politician of the 21st Century. His relaxed manner, his defiance of silly parliamentary norms and his sure-footed disregard for electoral law have secured for his party a solid and pretty defensible 15% of the national vote. It remains to be seen if a shamelessly, almost defiantly, upper-class character like Farage can get past this percentage while striding around the country in those mustard-yellow cords, though.

More to the point, while the whole hierarchy of his party is drawn from approximately the same gene pool – especially the various braying suits we see on the TV – it’s hard to imagine a breakthrough with the other 85%. Reform is not AfD or FdI or even the Trump GOP. The party’s platform is significantly deeper than it was when it emerged from the Brexit Party but it’s an uninspiring package. There is no exciting radical agenda, no iconoclastic intellectual figurehead, no assault on corporate power in Reform’s future. It’s frankly odd that, having engineered the most consequential constitutional change in recent British history, Farage and his party have no apparent plan to make use of the huge boost to sovereignty produced by Brexit beyond hardening the borders. Their only consolation must be the fact that the two main parties are apparently out of ideas too.

The risk is that the party will exhaust its potential because it’s impossible for this generation of leaders, formed in the anti-immigration and anti-EU campaigns of previous decades, to imagine a modern, emancipatory populist platform (Farage remains obsessed, for instance, with privatising the NHS – not what you’d call a rallying cry for the masses). Still, there’s so much potential for the bigger parties to screw this up that you really never can tell…

The players

We know that Reform aspires to the status of a start-up and the party’s response to the possibility of Dowden’s removal to the Lords is appropriately agile. The established parties probably haven’t even noticed yet. And they’ll almost certainly have to go through another selection process before they can start sending out leaflets. Reform has first-mover advantage.

Labour, when it comes to it, would do well to go with their general election candidate: personable and popular Josh Tapper. His campaign in July was effective and his vote share was among the highest for Labour in the constituency’s history.

To be honest, the Liberals might as well not bother: their 2024 vote share in Hertsmere was close to the party’s 2017 low point (when the candidate was too busy to do any campaigning). To have fallen to fourth place behind Reform in the year of the party’s great revival is just embarrassing.

Shapps in Radlett

For the Conservatives, as we keep saying, a by-election in such a peachy seat – one of the safest in Britain – would present an opportunity to bring back one of the big beasts who lost their seats in July. We have no special insight here but surely Grant Shapps must be in with a chance? We would certainly relish having the colourful former web marketing executive and hilariously implausible defence secretary to write about here.

The Greens are bound to show up but their candidate John Humphries (a veteran of two previous general elections in Hertsmere) polled about a third of Selkus’s figure here in July and, although Humphries might also see a by-election boost, the party has essentially disappeared since the election, apparently having no clue what to do with four actual MPs during an actual climate crisis, so we’re not expecting much.

• Here’s our detailed post about the results of the 2024 general election in Hertsmere.
• Farage has told the press that Reform UK will soon no longer be a private limited company and will even adopt a formal constitution, under which the members could, in theory, remove a leader. We won’t hold our breath.
• This spreadsheet is the only place you’ll find results for every general election in Hertsmere since the constituency was created in 1983, plus council elections, PCC elections and groovy charts. It’s yours to download and use.
• Of course, if the rumours that Elon Musk plans to funnel $100M into Reform via the UK subsidiary of his social media business are true then this might alter the party’s prospects a bit.
• We can’t find anyone offering odds on Shapps’ return to Parliament in Hertsmere but we’d probably put a few quid on it if we could. He’s a local boy, he’s obviously still keen (he’s constantly popping up as ‘former defence minister’ and ‘former transport minister’ in the media and he is keeping his web site up to date).
• The image of London in that Reform leaflet is one of those really shonky AI-generated ones that were doing the rounds on social media earlier this year. Another practical, cost-saving move from Reform – no need to pay for an image!
• Speaking of leaflets, whenever you receive an election leaflet through the door you could do posterity a favour and upload it to electionleaflets.org.

When we started blogging about Radlett, in the very distant past, Oliver Dowden wasn’t even a thing yet. He’d recently returned to the Tory Party HQ from a period at a vast, global PR company. And it wasn’t just any PR company. It was one of those vampiric outfits that would rather do the dirty, morally complicated – and highly-remunerative – work of laundering the misdeeds of dictatorships and cults than get stuck into promoting a new breakfast cereal.

Sir Oliver’s employer, Hill and Knowlton, famously represented the American tobacco lobby as long ago as the 1950s, helping to muddy the waters as the evidence for the health effects of their products accumulated. It hasn’t got much better since then. The firm has topped the table of firms representing murderous regimes (Indonesia, China, Kuwait and so on…) for decades and used a catalogue of disreputable techniques to help the US government sell the invasion of Iraq to middle America. The story of the firm’s complicated entanglement with the Scientologists and Eli Lilly – the Prozac people – is worthy of a movie (Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Al Pacino – that kind of vibe). We imagine the only reason there hasn’t been one is that the producers would have to get past Hill and Knowlton and the Scientologists to get it made.

We have no idea which accounts Sir Oliver worked on when he was with the firm (and the Scientologists were long gone) but we suspect this period must have been formative for a political operator like him. We also suspect that what he learnt there has informed his own conduct in later years. We’ve lamented in the past just how irritatingly squeaky-clean he’s been during his Parliamentary career. Staying out of trouble and cleaning up after less temperate colleagues and superiors has become his signature move. Search through Sir Oliver’s appearances on the Sunday morning programmes and you’ll find essentially a long string of competent defenses of the indefensible.

Dowden doesn’t make stupid gaffes or originate mendacious laws but he’s exemplary at putting things straight after others have. We feel sure that whoever takes over in November will find a use for the ultimate bagman, although we’re not convinced an operator of Sir Oliver’s calibre will be able to tolerate a minimum of five years of crisis management from the opposition benches. As a politician he’s never known anything other than government and we’d be surprised if he isn’t pretty soon bored with the mundane constituency stuff – he’s certainly already fielding calls from the other side of the revolving door.

Thank you, Sir Oliver

Here at Radlett Wire, we have a lot to thank our MP for. It was his election that revived our interest in this blog in the first place. We’d been writing about the Christmas Lights and the Rod Stewart tribute act at the theatre and the new pet spa up at Battler’s Green farm for a few years and we were honestly bored to death. When diligent-but-boring, five-terms MP James Clappison was brutally despatched to make way for David Cameron’s most trusted SPAD we were kind of excited.

We changed the theme of the blog sharpish and we’ve been keeping an eye on Oliver Dowden ever since. And, to be honest, the people of Radlett seem to be a bit less interested in him than they were in the Christmas lights (did we tell you Anthony Joshua switched them on once?). Our numbers fell of a cliff when we made the change and they’ve never really recovered. If we had a single commercial thought in our heads we’d have gone back to the tribute acts and dropped Sir Oliver all together.

And we find this instructive, of course. We’ve learnt that ordinary electors are definitely much more interested in constituency matters than they are in the goings-on in Parliament. This is universal, of course. For most people the fact that their MP is a Machiavellian schemer in SW1 is utterly irrelevant – boring, in fact. It’s much more important that this MP is visibly working to stop the hideous green belt development that’s going to block out the light or ready to stand up for a constituent against the council. That kind of thing.

Things pick up around here at election time. People seem to like our detailed posts about the candidates and the campaigns and the election results posts are always popular – and this is the stuff that keeps producing traffic long after the election. We assume these posts become a kind of reference – and they continue to show up in Google search results so they must be of some value. This is why we try to make sure our posts are:

• Packed with useful information – the more the better. This will make for long (sometimes slightly boring?) posts, but this is important work so that’s cool.
• Absolutely objective and scrupulously accurate. We have our opinions but they don’t influence the facts. We never share unverified stories or gossip. Our spreadsheet of historic election results, for instance, is the only place you’ll find the whole history of Hertsmere elections in one place.
• All about the politics. We’re not interested in the private lives of the politicians we talk about, only their public conduct and their official roles.
• Comprehensively sourced – with links to every resource we make use of. And we’ll link to sources of every complexion – from the Telegraph to the Morning Star, via the Guardian, the Office of National Statistics and – of course – Wikipedia.
• Up-to-date. We’ll go back to older posts and add new information. Our voting in Hertsmere post has been updated multiple times since first published and currently provides the most comprehensive guide to the history and politics of the constituency you’ll find anywhere.
• Sarcastic. Always sarcastic. Sorry.

The fact that the local press has largely stopped covering Parliamentary and constituency politics between elections is another reason we want to carry on covering the activites of our MP. There ought to be somewhere that puts on record, all in one place and with a critical eye, the business of a single constituency MP. They’re important people, our representatives – and have been for hundreds of years – since long before ordinary people were able to vote for them. We shouldn’t let them operate unobserved.

So, Sir Oliver’s list of sketchy behaviour is not a long one. And what’s on it is, let’s face it, not the most damning. Hardly a morning’s work for a Boris Johnson or a Nadhim Zahawi. But we’ve been keeping track of it, so here’s a list, with links to our original coverage.

BehaviourWhen?DetailsSums totaling £82,741.09 for his office2017-2022Dowden election date betting scandal interview situation£8,398 from a hedge fund2022Has Oliver Dowden finally joined the club?£5,000 from an art services company2022ibidFairly minor infamies

• What you’ll notice about the dates associated with the last two items on this list is that took place while Sir Oliver was out of office and on the back benches. The rules are less onerous when you’re not a minister. They don’t apply to shadow ministers either so expect a bit of a boost to Sir Oliver’s income from these outside sources now that he’s in opposition.
• You should also bookmark Sir Oliver’s entry in the register of members’ interests on the House of Commons web site. You’ll notice a fair number of gifts, mostly seats at the opera and at sporting events. No trainers, though.
• There’s a function within the British civil service called The Government Digital Service that’s won praise around the world for its work in making government information easily accessible. As a result, information published by the UK government, Parliament and other public bodies is mostly presented in very user-friendly and open ways. Not all of it, though. If you’ve ever searched it, you’ll have noticed that the Parliamentary register of interests is presented in an essentially un-searchable form with no analysis or comparison functions (the same goes for the record of MPs’ expenses, for some reason). It’s not in a database and it’s extremely hard to compare one MP with another or one year with another. It’s almost as if it’s been hidden. We can’t think why the MPs would want information about their gifts and outside jobs to be quite so awkward and inaccessible. The brilliant people at MySociety have recenly begun to publish the members’ interests data in various useful formats, though. There’s a spreadsheet you can download.

We really should have put some money on this.

As we said in our last post, the keeping-an-eye-on-Sir-Oliver-Dowden business has really fallen off a cliff since the election. We’re not complaining. It was bound to happen. And, to be honest, we weren’t expecting him to do anything worth keeping an eye on until after the new Conservative leader is announced in November. Our “Oliver Dowden” Google alert has been so boring of late we were considering cancelling it. But then…

What we definitely weren’t expecting was for Sir Oliver to be caught up in the alleged election gambling scandal. The whole thing looked so not his style. Seriously, can you imagine Sir Oliver “what me, guv?” Dowden gripping his tiny pencil and pushing a betting slip across the counter at Coral’s? “20 quid on 4 July, please.” But here it is, according to Sky he’s been interviewed by the Gambling Commission as part of their investigation into bets placed by Tory insiders on the date of the general election.

Sir Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality

We should be clear, the Sky report goes on to say: “a source close to Sir Oliver said the former senior cabinet minister is not and was never under investigation himself,” so, presumably, he was being grilled about whether he saw any other senior Tories coming out of a bookmaker’s clutching a betting slip with their collar turned up in the days running up to 22 May.

Here’s hoping for more mildly disreputable stuff from Sir Oliver. Up until now the absolute shadiest behaviour we’ve been able to find from our squeaky clean MP is making use of a notorious legal loophole to accept £82,741.09 for his office from an ‘unincorporated association’ that apparently has no address, no members, no directors, no web site and has never published any accounts – called the South Hertfordshire Business Club, between 2017 and 2022.

• We suspect this to be Sir Oliver’s first appearance in the gaming trade press too, so that’s a bonus, publicity-wise.
• And what’s this about ‘a source close to Sir Oliver’? Once you’re out of government your team of flunkies and loyal spokespeople evaporates in an instant. When Sky reporter Jon Craig says ‘a source close to Sir Oliver’ he means ‘Sir Oliver’.
• The Tory rump in Parliament must be almost hysterical with glee at the revelations from the government benches about Taylor Swift tickets, Hugo Boss trainers, the loan of a house to do homework in and so on. But it’s worth remembering that even the squeakiest of MPs will sometimes find themselves accepting a large payment from a hedge fund. Sir Oliver was one of ten Tory MPs who took paid jobs with party donors during 2022, including, for some reason, a very well-paid engagement (£700 per hour!) with Caxton Associates, the hedge fund that bankrolled Liz Truss’s bold experiment with reality.
• As a (very) small business operating in the South Hertfordshire area we would be interested in availing ourselves of the services of the South Hertfordshire Business Club but we haven’t been able to locate a membership form. If you know more about the club, who runs it and how we might join, do leave a comment.

Look, we know we should have expected this, but we’re experiencing a bit of a post-election comedown.

There’s plenty of action in Parliament, of course, and it’s kind of mind-blowing to hear the man in the big hat reading out a list of broadly social-democratic laws, even if some of them are a bit arbitrary and possibly even cynical.

But in our favourite bit of politics: the parliamentary and government career of our MP, Sir Oliver Dowden, things have gone very quiet indeed. Let’s have a little look.

Runners and riders and fallers at the first fence

Last week we reported that Dowden was supporting Victoria Atkins for Conservative Party leader but he’s actually not said a word about that since Christmas so we suspect he’ll have moved his alliegance by now. He’s an important figure in the party, though, just behind the big beasts, and he always goes early with his endorsement (see this earlier post for more about Dowden’s habit of picking winners) so his opinion matters. Who do you think he’ll support when the time comes?

You can still get 25-1 on Atkins and a ridiculous range of odds on Dowden himself. 12 bookmakers are currently offering a median of 83-1 on the former Deputy Prime Minister and outlier Betfair will currently give you 342-1, which we reckon is crying out for a fiver if you’ve got one lying around.

Bagman forever

Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality

Oliver Dowden, as we’ve been saying on here for years, has been moving around the fringes of power for his whole political career. We’re not qualified to tell you why he’s not found his way to the top tier yet, although we have our theories. This historic Tory drubbing must represent his best opportunity yet, though. The field is much smaller (there are only 121 of them to choose from now after all), his nine years in parliament and six years in government must now put him somewhere in the top half of the table in term of experience – and many of the genuine big beasts have retired or been ejected.

For most of his less battle-hardened colleagues there’ll be a reluctance to go for the big job while everything’s so sad and broken. Suella Braverman, one of the more credible candidates, has already imploded – and will probably be a Reform MP by the time the conferences come around. The desperate antics on the opposition front bench last week – with two of the leadership frontrunners, er, losing their shit during a very boring ministerial statement – doesn’t bode well. This is going to get nasty. We can understand the attraction of a long caretaker period, even if only to allow everyone to calm down and for the new medication to kick in.

Leadership candidates Badenoch (13-8) and Atkins (25-1) in action

So a Dowden leadership bid is unlikely. He’s a realist. He knows he’s not charismatic enough, that his network is too thin, that his awkwardness and his reedy estuary voice won’t carry him through a gruelling period in opposition. It’s a very relateable dilemma, shared by so many of us – in our work and in our private lives. But Dowden’s great strength is that he knows his limits and is happy to stick to the second tier, managing situations, solving problems and providing back-rubs for the big beasts.

Our MP has been pretty quiet since he won in Hertsmere (against a 20% swing to Labour). On social media he’s made one appearance, looking a bit untidy, standing by a chainlink fence. Must have been a tough few weeks.

What’s he talking about over there by that fence? The green belt obvs. While he was in the government his room for manoeuvre was limited – he had to be seen to defend the interests of his constituents while sticking to the government’s line on planning reform and development. His solution then – on the Radlett aerodrome development, for instance – was to intervene only when he could identify someone else – like the county council – as the villain. But he’s off the chain now so we can presumably expect him to be much more robust in defence of farmland like the fields on Barnet Lane behind that fence. He might want to iron his shirt.

• The only complete source for Hertsmere election results going back to when the constituency was created is our free spreadsheet, which also includes council and PCC results.
• Our overview of the 2024 general election results in Hertsmere – pretty much the most detailed coverage you’ll find.

Voters are often called upon to solve problems for the political class

What a Labour landslide actually looks like

Especially in Britain, where governments can call elections whenever they fancy it within a five-year term (Fixed Term Parliament Act RIP), we’ll usually be asked to go to the polls when a government is in crisis or has an urgent problem to deal with. In 2017 we were called upon to help Theresa May break her Brexit impasse by giving her a big enough Parliamentary majority to push through a deal (nice work, Theresa). In 2019 we were asked to resolve Boris Johnson’s even more intractable Brexit dilemma (guess he did get Brexit done). But what problem was Rishi Sunak asking us to solve for him by calling an election six months before he had to, in the teeth of the lowest popularity ratings and the worst polling for decades?

We’ve updated our free spreadsheet of results from every general election in Hertsmere all the way back to the first one, in 1983.

It looks like Sunak was desperately hoping that the electorate would rescue him from the Reform insurgency, that Richard Tice wouldn’t have time to organise a national campaign, that Nigel Farage wouldn’t dream of giving up the glamour and the gilded corridors of Trump Tower and that, when forced to choose, unhappy Conservative voters would snap back to the Mother Party and send Reform packing. No such luck.

So who won?

Well, to state the obvious, here in Hertsmere the Conservative Party won, with a majority of 7,992 votes – not bad considering the national picture but almost two-thirds smaller than in 2019, when Oliver Dowden won by 21,313 (it’s the smallest majority he’s won in four general elections). This much-reduced majority compares pretty well with the other seats where Tories held on too. In fact Hertsmere is now the tenth safest Conservative seat in the UK – up from 43rd before the election (even allowing for the fact that there are now so few of them this is still a big improvement).

Polling isn’t recorded at the council-ward level so we can’t tell how different parts of the constituency voted. We’re going to go out on a limb, though, and guess that the issues that motivated prosperous parts of the constituency like ours were VAT on private school fees, capital gains tax and the risk of an update to the 1991 valuations used to calculate council tax. The investment managers among us might also have been worried about Labour’s plans for carried interest.

The average Tory majority at this election was 4,086, which is a number that must put the fear of God into the strategists at CCHQ. The median was 3,572 and the largest in the country was – guess where – Rishi Sunak’s Richmond and Northallerton, where the majority was 12,185.

Lay your bets

Let’s get the succession out of the way. Who will take over the dry husk of the Conservative Party? Who will be its William Hague? Its Michael Howard? The person to rebuild it after the earthquake? We’d assumed the jockeying for leadership of the soundly defeated Conservative Party – reduced to the smallest number of MPs in its history – was well under way before Thursday’s epic collapse but we were a bit surprised to learn that Oliver Dowden might well be supporting outsider Victoria Atkins for leader when the contest comes.

The fear for mainstream political parties in chaotic periods like this is that an ordinary electoral set-back might turn out to be a realignment, a permanent break – like the Tory catastrophe after the Great Reform Act or when the Liberals disappeared as a party of government in the twenties. Is it possible this is what just happened to the Conservative Party?

The Telegraph got excited about this two days before the election but on actually reading the source of their scoop – an article in The Independent – it seems that Dowden was really just buttering up a guest at a Xmas drinks party back in December. Atkins herself, on hearing Dowden say “…there’s only two people from my generation that I could see leading the Conservative Party: Rishi Sunak or Vicky Atkins…” is recorded as saying only ‘wow’.

We wouldn’t mention this bit of Tory Party gossip here if it weren’t for the fact that Dowden has a record of picking winners. If you’d like to make this a little more interesting you’ll currently get between 10-1 and 25-1 on Victoria Atkins for leader (with favourite Kemi Badenoch on 2-1 or even 6-4). We urge caution while things are so fluid, of course, but we’re wondering about a couple of quid on a wildly implausible come-back for Nadhim “Unsecured Loan” Zahawi at 66-1 (Dowden himself is presently at around 50-1 – although we’re about 90% sure that it’s once-a-bagman-always-a-bagman for our MP and that he wouldn’t dream of standing. Prove us wrong, Sir Oliver!).

The gang of three – all, remarkably, still in their seats

And when we say ‘picking winners’, we mean really picking them. Dowden was part of the ‘gang of three’ thrusting young MPs, along with Robert Jenrick and a junior Minister called Rishi Sunak who were first to endorse Boris Johson for leader in June 2019 (look at their happy little faces! Seems so long ago). Anyway, you know how that went.

But canny Dowden was also ‘first to wield the knife‘ when Johnson’s time had come in July 2022 and the letters of resignation started to pour in (do you remember there were so many of them we made a spreadsheet to keep track of them?). We wrote about this back then.

Dowden was then among the very first to join #TeamRishi, although it was an idea whose time hadn’t quite come because we had to get through that weird Liz Truss bit before Sunak could assume power as some sort of saviour. “Unquestionably the best person to beat Labour…” you say?

(although there was a bit of a scare in the small hours, Dowden’s favourite for Tory Party leader Victoria Atkins was re-elected, so it’s still on…).

The two biggest parties – one of them two hundred years old (well over 300 if you count from the origin of the Tories) and the most successful political party in modern world history; and one of them well over a hundred years old and the most durable party of the working class anywhere in the world – are both

The voting

Labour. Of course, as we should have expected, the result here in Hertsmere was another win for incumbent Oliver Dowden. The swing against him was huge – over 20% – and the swing to Labour pretty good too but nowhere near enough. Josh Tapper’s share of the vote, 28%, is the fourth highest ever polled for Labour in Hertsmere, also the fourth largest number of votes, 13,459. But to win he’d have to have done better than Beth Kelly in 1997, whose 19,230 votes and 38.2% brought her to within 3,000 votes of a win. Even if Reform had not existed and every one of Darren Selkus’s 6,584 votes had gone to Tapper, we’d still have a Tory MP today.

This must have been an absolute rollercoaster for Josh Tapper. When selected by his local party back in March he’d presumably have had very limited expectations, in Britain’s 43rd safest Tory seat, but as Rishi’s catastrophic campaign ground on and the polls (so many polls!) began to pile up, he must have allowed himself to think the unthinkable once or twice. We noted some polls here that put Tapper over the line but they were very much outliers. It must be heartbreaking for him to watch the many new, young Labour MPs turning up at Parliament over the last few days. Better luck next time, Josh!

Of course, one of the more remarkable things about this Labour landslide is that it is the product of one of the lowest vote shares in recent political history – 34%. Commentators are calling this result ‘wide but shallow‘ or ‘distorted‘. Fraser Nelson in the Spectator calls it a Potemkin landslide, which is clever. Activists, of course, will say things like ‘that’s how politics works’, or ‘a win is a win’ but will be privately conscious of the fact that Starmer won three million votes fewer than Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and, startlingly, over half a million fewer than the same bloke in the catastrophic 2019 election. Labour must govern – and quickly make a real impression on the lives of Britons – in the knowledge that Keir Starmer is less popular in electoral terms than the hated predecessor he has expended so much energy to delete from the national memory.

The counter-argument is that where the Labour win is wide but shallow – a ‘sandcastle landslide‘ that could be swept away when the tide comes back in – the Tory position now is narrow and shallow. It has to be a fear for the remains of the Tory leadership that a Parliamentary party with 122 MPs and an average majority of about 4,000 looks very fragile indeed and essentially only one more defeat from total irrelevance – especially when its next leader might well be from an extreme wing of the party and ready to essentially abandon the party’s historic base.

The Liberals. In Hertsmere, Labour remains the only viable opposition. The Liberals fell apart here – again – and there was a 3.2% swing against Emma Matanle. The ruthlessly effective Lib Dem campaign – which has produced 71 seats nationally – focused on harnessing the ‘efficiency’ of the electoral process by investing everything in winnable seats. It was always going to leave Matanle on the outside. In the 1980s the party – before the SDP merger – was the second-largest in the constituency. Matanle’s vote was less than a third of the party’s best performance here in 1983. It will be a long road back.

This list of Liberal and Lib Dem candidates, incidentally, includes Zerbanoo Gifford, the only Zoroastrian (we think) ever to have stood for election in Hertsmere; Laurence Brass, founder of an important Jewish-Palestinian peace settlement who is still serving as a Hertfordshire county councillor almost forty years on and Sophie Bowler, the Lib Dem candidate who won some press coverage in 2015 for being ‘too busy to do any campaigning‘ and consequently won the smallest number of votes for her party in the history of the constituency.

Reform’s performance in Hertsmere was, in national terms, not remarkable. An outer-London green-belt settlement was never going to be a good prospect for the party so their investment here was probably small. Darren Selkus was essentially on his own (at least he was actually visible) and the fact that he was able to bring in 6,584 votes – more even than UKIP at their 2015 high-point (and, remarkably, more than UKIP’s entire national vote at this election) – probably bodes well if he wants to stand again (he stood for the Brexit Party in Epping Forest in 2019 too). His vote here was the largest for a populist party in the history of the constituency (easily enough to get his deposit back). The party took lumps out of the Tory vote this time round but all the parties are conscious that Reform UK will be the primary source of chaos in UK politics for some time yet – and the party really won’t want to stop at humiliating the Tories. Like UKIP before it, the party’s presence in the political landscape is going to focus minds and all parties will be thinking hard about how to make sure Reform can’t come for them in subsequent elections. Labour’s concern will be that Reform came second in 98 UK seats and in 89 of them Labour was the winner.

From Darren Selkus’s Twitter account

During the campaign Selkus promised to give the whole of his MP’s salary to charity, which suggests that his business – which sells wood veneers – is probably doing well. He’ll be able to give it 100% of his focus again now.

The Greens must be wondering what they have to do to have an impact in British politics. If any party should be disrupting UK politics from the margins then surely it ought to be the party of the climate crisis and of protecting the environment? But no, once again, the disruptive force – here as across Europe – is a reactionary populist party. A party, in fact, that explicitly opposes Net Zero and advances a kind of ‘la-la-la-not-listening’ approach to global warming. Reform UK Chairman Richard Tice explains that, because the UK’s economy is relatively small, cutting emissions here would “make zero difference to climate change”, so we should focus on adaptation (taller sea walls, flood-resistant crops, factor-50 and so on) rather than participating in the worldwide energy transition.

The Green Party put up a candidate in every seat in England and Wales this time and now has four MPs, one fewer than Reform – a big breakthrough. In Hertsmere, John Humphries, a veteran campaigner who stood here in 2019, continued the party’s steady growth in share. Where the party took seats this time they came from the major parties but it will be a long time before the Greens represent a threat to the Tories here.

One of the party’s challenges is that, once elected, Green MPs will be subject to the same local political pressures as everyone else. It’s already started: this Telegraph story is from two days after the election:

Would a Hertsmere Green MP be brave enough to support the construction of a thousand PassivHaus homes on the green belt? Or a big solar farm on agricultural land in the constituency?

The Independents. The other group that’s really boomed in the 2024 general election is the broad church of candidates with no party affiliation. We counted 487 candidates in the general election with the word ‘independent’ in their party name, the largest number ever in a UK election – most constituencies in Britain had five or six candidates, which is more than usual. Six Independents were elected to Parliament this time. One of them was Jeremy Corbyn, of course. Four of them were so-called ‘Gaza candidates’, standing against Labour in seats that have larger Muslim populations (and one is an independent Unionist in Northern Ireland). The press have been quick to suggest that these one-issue candidates are the thin end of an Islamist wedge or ‘a failure of integration’ but a quick look at their biographies suggests otherwise: one Lib Dem barrister, one solicitor, one IT consultant (and school governor) and the chair of a Muslim advocacy group. We’d suggest that standing for Parliament is about the best evidence of integration you’ll find.

Hertsmere’s Independent is Ray Bolster. Bolster kept us guessing by remaining entirely invisible for the first five weeks of the campaign – no web site, no social media, no leaflets. But in the few days before the poll he put his head above the parapet and put out a leaflet. We learnt that Bolster is a local man, an RAF veteran and a life-long peacenik. His 536 votes doesn’t look at all bad when you consider how elusive he was during the campaign.

No concerns about age here

The only other Independent in the history of Hertsmere was Ronald Parkinson, who stood as an Independent Communist in 1983 and polled a remarkable 1,116 votes (although the fact that he had the same surname as the winning Tory may have contributed to this total).

• Detailed results for Hertsmere from the BBC (with nice charts) or from Wikipedia (with a simpler table of results).
• We’ve updated our spreadsheet of results from every general election in Hertsmere all the way back to the first one, in 1983 (you’ll also find council and PCC results).
• Since Oliver Dowden remains our MP we can continue keeping an eye on him. Follow the #DowdenLog tag here.

It’s chaos at Reform HQ but that’s how they like it…

A man with a contract

For an insurgency polling in double digits and threatening to disassemble the most successful political party in history, Reform UK is a pretty shabby outfit. Neither a high-gloss, updated 20th Century dinosaur like Le Pen’s National Rally, nor a dark, ideological machine like Alternative for Germany, nor even a big-money hostile take-over of an establishment party like Trump’s operation. But maybe we shouldn’t expect a slick operation here, maybe it’s not very British to expect a challenger from the far right to be anything other than scrappy and a bit lairy.

The man in the photo with all the American flags is Newt Gingrich – not a British politician, of course, but pugnacious Speaker of the US House of Representatives during the 1994 Congressional mid-terms, a veteran conservative political operator who wrote the Republican party’s programme for that election, an enormously influential document that many credit as the beginning of the populist turn, the epic shift in American politics that ultimately produced you know who.

Darren Selkus, army veteran and business owner, is Hertsmere’s Gingrich. Read about him on the Reform web site.

Gingrich’s document was no mere manifesto, no mere platform. It was a contract. A Contract with America. The idea was that instead of promoting a dry programme of dry legislation to be fought out vote by arduous vote through the congressional system once in power, the party would lay out an ambitious reworking of the system itself. Gingrich was a political visionary who saw an opportunity to put the Republican party back at the heart of things. In this he wasn’t so much a proto-Trump as Trump’s inverse – he wanted to shift the power in American politics back from the presidency to a radicalised congress.

His contract was more than the usual shopping list of policies carefully weighted for viability; it was a series of linked measures that would, together, overturn decades of post-war liberal orthodoxy – economic, social, diplomatic, everything. It begins with eight pledges – reforms to the congressional system aimed at cementing a conservative model of governance indefinitely. It’s a fascinating document, not least because it self-consciously marked the end of folksy, optimistic, forward-looking Reagan conservatism and the beginning of the darker variety the whole world is now familiar with – George W Bush’s messianic militarism, Trump’s ‘American carnage‘.

Britain’s Gingrich?

Gingrich was working as an insurgent inside one of the two governing parties, of course. He’d been an operator since the 1960s. Trump began as an outsider but entered the Republican party and hollowed it out brutally. It’s his party now. Farage has not yet achieved a position inside the Tory Party but he’s been influencing the shape and direction of the party pretty directly for twenty years now. He’s a kind of parasitic shadow leader, directing the mighty, 300 year-old Conservative Party, pint in hand, from the saloon bar. It’s only a few years since Farage looked like he was finished. Boris Johnson had cannily replaced him as populist folk hero, Brexit was finally done and the man himself seemed to be more interested in the goldmine on the other side of the Atlantic. But his influence endures. And we suspect he’s not finished with the Tory party yet, whether he’s elected in Clacton or not.

The Gingrich contract must have come to mind for many on Monday when Nigel Farage launched Reform’s ‘Contract With You‘. This contract isn’t quite as ambitious – and it’s likely to be a lot less influential (we suspect it was written in a bit of a hurry – count the typos).

Reform’s document steers clear of grand claims. It’s essentially a pretty focused list of policies designed as a response to a probable Labour government. Farage is positioning his party as the effective opposition in the coming Parliament. His assumption is that the Tories, no matter how many seats they finally win, will be so diminished, so intellectually exhausted that they’ll have little to offer while the party is laboriously rebuilt. That Reform, even from a base of a handful of seats, will dominate on the critical issues. And they might be right (they’ll need to win a few seats, though).

Beginning on the very first page we’re into a sequence of commitments that are carefully weighted to offer a challenge to the likely governing party without being in any way deliverable. Finding £50 Billion of savings in the civil service, a sum equal to the whole defence budget, seems implausible to say the least, for instance. Taking back £35 Billion per year from the commercial banks without causing mini-budget levels of market chaos likewise.

Pledges pledges pledges

You will find the obligatory numbered pledges at the beginning, though – obviously an indispensable element of any contemporary manifesto. These numbered pledges, for some reason, all begin with a kind of John Lennon flourish: 1) Imagine Smart Immigration, Not Mass Immigration; 2) Imagine No More Small Boats in the Channel; 3) Imagine No NHS Waiting Lists; 4) Imagine Good Wages for a Hard Day’s Work; 5) Imagine Affordable, Stable Energy Bills.

In this rather boring package, the only place where the language soars a little is in the final policy section, headed ‘Reform is needed to defend and promote British culture, identity and values’ (intriguing use of the passive voice there). This is where we find the more inflammatory bits – the obligatory mention of sharia law (not a single mention in the whole document of Farage’s favourite ‘Judeo-Christian values‘ though), anti-woke legislation, de-banking, dumping equalities legislation and so on. But it’s striking how unambitious this all is. Farage and Reform here are not reaching for a consitutional remaking of Great Britain or for the destruction of the liberal institutions of the post-war settlement. In fact all we get are some rather managerial proposals about running the NHS more efficiently and a predictable kicking for the old enemy – the BBC.

Comedy cost savings

In the financial section Reform turns out to be as obsessed with the zero-sum tax-and-spend calculations as the major parties. And this is interesting, not least because it’s not very revolutionary. Only a very cautious insurrectionary party would be so interested in retaining tight control over expenditure after the revolution. Of course it’s possible that this very cautious package is meant to answer fears about Farage as a potential Mussolini, seeking election so that he can cancel elections and rule forever, but we’re ready to bet that this is it. We’ve reached the limit of Reform’s intellectual and ideological ambition.

The table of savings at the end reads like the kind of Dragon’s Den forecast that would make Deborah Meaden weep – various conveniently round numbers totted up in a table so that party spokesmen can claim it’s ‘fully-costed’. Evaluating this lot would cause the entire staff of the OBR to faint in unison.

So why a contract?

Back in the nineties, the Contract With America wasn’t quite the ideological bulldozer Gingrich hoped it would be – it was essentially cut to ribbons in congress – by hostile conservatives from within his own party as well as by Clinton’s Democrats – reduced to a pretty thin set of compromised measures, most of which failed to pass. Gingrich went from sole proprietor of a congressional earthquake to “who?” in a few years. But his aggression, his unwavering rejection of the bi-partisan conventions of congress and his disrespect for his party’s elders have all influenced American politics to the present day.

Another man with a contract

So, back to the UK general election of 2024. Why would a party leader want to attach this ‘contract’ idea to his policy programme?

It stands out from the crowd. The contract language quite cleverly opens up some distance from the other parties’ documents. It’s the only set of promises in play that’s not a manifesto, not a dreary document like all the other dreary documents. At his launch, Farage said: “today is not a manifesto launch. If I say to you ‘manifesto’, your immediate word-association is ‘lie’…”

Contracts are for consumers. The idea of a contract is actually a pretty good expression of our relationship with contemporary politics. Electors in the third decade of the 21st Century are not expected to engage with politics – as activists or organised workers or even as enthusiastic private citizens. We’re expected only to consume politics, to rate its quality via occasional elections and sometimes to switch brands, in the same way we switch gas providers or mobile phones. Meanwhile, political movements are over, replaced by narrowly-focused campaign groups. Incidentally, this explains why we feel so disempowered and disconnected from politics, why so many people say “they’re all the same…” – the politicians like it that way.

Businesses love contracts. Reform UK is a business. It’s the image they’re looking for. Tice and Farage and Habib have enthusiastically embraced the ‘start-up’ idea. Journos and critics noticed ages ago that Reform UK is not a conventionally incorporated political party. Columnists and social media geniuses thought the revelation that the party is just an ordinary limited company would be an absolutely killer gotcha. “Look, it’s not a political party, it’s a scam!” Of course it made no difference at all. Nobody cares. Limited companies are famously easy to set up in Britain. It costs £50 and takes less than 24 hours. The fact that the simplest and most robust organisational form for this new force in British politics was actually an off-the-shelf company really does suit the project. A disruptive, entrepreneurial enterprise like Reform probably ought to be a business and not a fusty old not-for-profit.

Chaos suits Reform

Reform UK wasn’t ready for the election when Sunak announced it but that’s fine – it’s a start-up – the rag-tag Reform team mobilised resources with the ‘fuck you’ energy of a tech entrepeneur. ‘Move fast and break things’ could almost be their slogan. Hiring and then quickly firing candidates as they’re exposed as racists and lunatics is all part of the energy of an insurgent party. When opponents get excited about the chaos inside the Reform operation they’re profoundly missing the point. That’s how they like it – and, let’s face it, voters seem to like it too.

What’s in this contract?

Next time we’ll look at the content of Reform UK Ltd’s ‘Contract With You‘ and possibly at the policies of their unlikely collaborators, the SDP…

• This episode of Politico’s weekly podcast, about Nigel Farage’s return to the party he founded, is fascinating.
• Reform’s arrangement with a vetting software company is the other contract in the news this week.
• Farage and Gingrich have met, at least once, at the 2016 Republican National Convention.
• We published a thread summarising the history of Reform and its precursor parties – the Referendum Party, UKIP and the BNP – last week.
• Part one of our guide to the parties in Hertsmere for the general election covers Reform and all the other fringe parties.