Remain-voting seat of St Albans, held by Conservative leave campaigner, is a top target – with data putting Lib Dems behind by just three points

Tim Farron has launched a last-ditch plea for Labour voters to back the Lib Dems in seats where the party could beat the Conservatives, touring remain cities including London, Bath and Oxford.

National polls have painted a gloomy picture for the Lib Dems in much of the country, but the party believes it could still pull off a breakthrough in certain seats where the political climate plays in its favour.



The party has made the Conservative seat of St Albans in Hertfordshire one of its top targets over the past few days. The remain seat, 57th on its initial list, is held by the Conservative Anne Main, who campaigned for leave. The party’s canvassing data suggests the Lib Dems are behind the Tories there by just three points.

The decision to focus on the seat hinges on unexpectedly promising results in the county council elections. Though the party’s national results were poor, analysis of the vote across wards in the parliamentary constituency showed the party won 44% of the vote.

St Albans is a three-way marginal held by Labour from 1997 until 2005, and the party is likely to take a significant number of votes. In the face of defeat in a number of key target seats prompted by Labour’s recent poll surge, Farron will spend the remaining hours of the election campaign on Wednesday urging a tactical vote strategy.

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“Every vote for the Conservatives is a vote for the dementia tax, NHS cuts, sacked teachers and a bad Brexit deal,” he will say, closing the campaign at a rally in Oxford. “If you are a Labour supporter who lives somewhere where the only way of beating the Conservative candidate is a Liberal Democrat, then I need you to lend me your vote.”

Farron began the morning in Solihull, travelling to St Albans and Twickenham and then on to Carshalton, where the incumbent Tom Brake is facing a stiff challenge from the Conservatives.

He will then go on to Bath – the only place in the party’s former south-west heartland that the Lib Dem leader has visited in the past week, fuelling speculation it has written off regaining seats in Cornwall and Somerset.

Farron poured pints with local pub landlords and the Lib Dem candidate, Daisy Cooper, at the morning stop in St Albans. Cooper said the national polls would not pick up a specialist political climate such as the one in St Albans. “Lib Dems succeed when we work hard on a target seat strategy. That’s how we have to operate. We have special circumstances here,” she said.

Cooper said Brexit was still a key issue on the doorstep in St Albans, which voted 63% to remain, unlike many other parts of the country where the debate has been dominated by national issues. “There are many people who work in finance, in universities with EU funding, and they are worried about the impact leaving the EU will have,” she said.

Though Farron has been pursuing an 11th-hour strategy to persuade Labour voters to back him in Tory-Lib Dem marginals, Vauxhall is among a small number of Labour-held seats still in play for the Lib Dems.

Leaked internal data indicates the party is neck-and-neck in the south-London seat, where it came fourth in 2015, after a backlash against the Labour leave supporter Kate Hoey, who has a 12,000 majority.

Vauxhall had one of the highest remain votes in the country – 79%. Local Lib Dems have plastered the constituency with images of Hoey campaigning with the former Ukip leader Nigel Farage.

The canvassing data from the final week of the campaign puts the two parties neck-and-neck, with the Lib Dems one point ahead, showing 35% voting for Hoey and 36% for the Lib Dem candidate, George Turner.

However, the briefing note accompanying the data suggests about 25% of the Labour vote is classed as “Yellow Labour” – traditional Labour supporters considering voting Lib Dem because of dissatisfaction with Hoey. Any voter who would not reveal who they were voting for – but said they were not backing the Lib Dems – has been added by analysts to Labour’s tally, the briefing said.