The freak circumstances that conspired to save ‘doomed’ Iain Duncan Smith

As one big Tory beast after another faced The Hunger Games on election night, one notably escaped the carnage. Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader, stood tall on the podium with the former and current Labour candidates whose vicious infighting had done him such a big favour.

He looked pleasantly surprised when the returning officer for Chingford and Woodford Green called out his total of 17,281 votes, which was understandable given the exit poll predicted he had less than a 1 per cent chance of winning. And yet there he was, the great survivor who had more than doubled his majority and a beneficiary of one of the biggest cock-ups in modern campaigning history. It looked as though IDS had been saved by a miracle. “I live for the fight,” he says. “Campaigning is a test.”

Back in 2019, it would have been easy to assume Duncan Smith was on borrowed time. The mood of Tory jubilation that came with Boris Johnson’s 80-seat majority was somewhat muted on the borders of north east London and Essex. The now 70-year-old Duncan Smith, who took over the constituency from Norman Tebbit in 1992, had clung on by 1,762 votes, behind Labour’s Faiza Shaheen, and, as the 2024 election grew ever nearer, the people willing to entertain the chances of a Tory hold were as rare as happy Scottish Nationalists. Such a result was made even less likely by a boundary change, which had tacked on parts of Labour-leaning Ilford South and Upper Walthamstow to the constituency.

Even Duncan Smith admits, “My seat should have been a write-off well before this election. That we held it was based on the fact that even though people were angry with the government, they would still vote for me.”

Unbeknownst to anyone outside the Byzantine world of the local Labour constituency party, all was not well. In scenes reminiscent of many internal power struggles since Sir Keir Starmer became Labour leader, the Corbynite faction tried to hold on to its influence as diktats and fresh priorities were passed down from the new regime in Labour HQ. 

Shaheen, 42, was avowedly Corbynite and an acolyte of former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell: she supported Rebecca Long-Bailey in the leadership contest and controversially argued against accusations that Jeremy Corbyn had placed a wreath on the grave of members of the terrorist organisation responsible for the the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. 

In another arcane incident described by her opponents as “casual racism,” she made fun of the former home secretary Sajid Javid, speculating that he “definitely orders lemon and herb chicken at Nandos,” supposedly mocking his authenticity as a man of Pakistan heritage.

In fact, the bad feeling dates back to the selection process for 2019, when Corbyn was still Labour leader. Moderates in the constituency party felt that Shaheen had been imposed upon them. Then, in 2022, Shaheen, an economist, was selected again, on the basis that she had run Duncan Smith close in 2019.  

This, despite the fact she was spending much of her time at New York University. And she was still Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate on May 22 this year, when Rishi Sunak called the election. 

But, over the next seven days, as Labour high command reviewed its candidates, Shaheen was summoned to appear at a last-minute National Executive Committee panel and asked to explain a series of social media posts that downplayed anti-Semitism accusations, which she had liked.

On May 29 she was informed she had been deselected, a decision which Shaheen said left her in a “state of shock” and prompted a largely sympathetic response on social media. 

Owen Jones tweeted: “Labour is an institutionally racist political party.” Fifty local activists left with her and helped coordinate her campaign as a newly Independent candidate. Under the impression that Shaheen had been ditched only for liking one of his Daily Show sketches, the US satirist Jon Stewart said of Labour’s actions: “This is the dumbest thing the UK has done since electing Boris Johnson.” For a few days, Chingford was the most famous British parliamentary constituency in the world.

A local Labour activist told me: “She always ran like she was an independent anyway. It was always about her rather than the party. So, after she was deselected, it was just a more exaggerated version of how she’s always been.”

On hearing the news that she had been replaced by Shama Tatler, 41, Shaheen posted: “Really? Wow, a Brent councillor with no history here at all? They would rather lose than have a Left pro-Palestine candidate. This is offensive to the community.” 

On May 31, Shaheen wrote a column in The Guardian claiming hundreds of people would not vote for Labour because of the way she had been treated. She turned out to be right about that.

On the same day, the Chingford Labour office was vandalised, covered with anti-Israel graffiti, including ““Israel [sic] lobby out” and “UK MPs for UK Not Israel.” 

Tatler condemned it as an attack on the whole community, which some of Shaheen’s supporters claimed was a smear on local residents. That Tatler, a Hindu, was a member of the Jewish Labour Movement was not met with universal approval. On June 5, Shaheen was endorsed by the “We Deserve Better” group, a coalition of hard-Left activists who put Gaza front and centre of their politics.

Shaheen’s campaign was aggressive and dynamic, with its own YouTube channel and effective social media. Seven-time world snooker champion Ronnie O’Sullivan, a local, gave her his unconditional support. In her heartland, the Highams Park ward, Shaheen’s supporters were highly visible, handing out slick leaflets at train stations and schools, pressing stickers on to children’s blazers before they walked into the playground. Her team made much of their own canvassing, which always put her ahead of Duncan Smith and Labour.

A Labour volunteer who canvassed every day the week before election night told me: “We never put anything out there challenging Shaheen directly. She had been saying since day one that she had been wronged by the Labour Party and we were such bad people, but we’d done nothing to combat or repudiate that. I’m glad they deselected her – but we needed a better, clearer explanation of why it was done.”

Instead of addressing the real threat to Labour, the local party’s message and literature were generic, attacking Rishi Sunak and making fun of his decision to leave D-Day celebrations early. Deselecting their own candidate at the start of the campaign – six weeks before the election – gave Labour a mountain to climb. With a replacement who was easy to disparage as an “outsider,” Shaheen effectively portrayed herself as the victim of a stitch-up. 

Where Shaheen was known by all, Tatler was struggling for recognition. “Once the Labour split happened, we couldn’t figure out what was happening to it,” says Duncan Smith. “But I was able to hold the protest vote from Reform to a minimum because people knew my record. And I said to my team “‘Don’t get mixed up in anything to do with Labour.’”

The volunteer says: “On the doorstep, so many people said to me, ‘Not very nice what you did to that lady, was it?’ She was very good at exploiting that.”

Meanwhile, Duncan Smith’s team were going about their business. Shaheen was using the ultra-local card for all it was worth, but two can play that game. The former Tory leader is known as a highly conscientious constituency MP and had three decades of local networking to call upon. That was crucial in keeping his vote above that of his two warring rivals.

“We never stopped working the constituency after the last election,” says Duncan Smith. “That was critical. We were very local - it was about me and what I’d done. I have close-on 90 per cent recognition in the area.”

“We didn’t work hard enough to expose Shaheen’s politics,” says the Labour volunteer. “We weren’t aggressive or passionate enough.”

With the candidates lined-up on the stage in the early hours of July 5, Shaheen kept staring across at Tatler, who was visibly shrinking as the outcome became obvious. When the results were read out, Shaheen shook her head and snarled at Tatler. But it was Duncan Smith who prevailed. Tatler had 12,523 votes; Shaheen 12,445. Both camps were blaming each other. 

“There was some vicious stuff going on between their campaigns,” says Duncan Smith. “On one hustings I had to sit between them to keep them apart.”

Not only had IDS won, but he’d increased his majority to 4,758, albeit with a reduced share of the vote. Up until Shaheen’s deselection, Chingford and Woodford Green was the tenth most likely seat to switch in the ranking of Labour’s targets. 

One Labour activist said to the Politico website: “He’s like the Terminator. He cannot be defeated.” 

On the night of a Labour landslide, they’d somehow contrived to mess it up in Chingford. It was a terrible election for the Conservatives, but here was a minor miracle to bear witness. Norman Tebbit was no doubt chuckling somewhere.