“Fiddling expenses? Who isn’t?” asks Clive Stephens, as he unloads clothes in Beacons Laundry in Brecon, mid-Wales. “You can’t hold that against him.”

He’s referring to Chris Davies, who in March pleaded guilty to making false expenses claims and became only the second MP, after Peterborough’s Fiona Onasanya, to suffer a recall vote following a criminal conviction.

But unlike Onasanya, who was dropped by the Labour party, Davies has been reselected by his local Conservative association to defend Brecon and Radnorshire, the seat he first won in 2015. The byelection will be fought on 1 August, an unwelcome present for the incoming Conservative leader and new prime minister.

Stephens, however, won’t be voting for Davies. “I’ll never vote Labour or Conservative again,” he says, having switched back and forth between the two parties since the 1960s. He voted to leave in the referendum and the failure to deliver the UK’s departure is, he says, a joint one. So he’s voting for a different party in this election. I assume that means the Brexit party, but I’m wrong.

“The Liberals,” he says.

They don’t want to leave the EU, I gently remind him.

“I know,” he says. “It won’t make any difference. I’m too honest,” he adds, in a not entirely successful attempt to explain his thinking. “That’s why I’m still working at 75.”

Given that 19% of the local electorate signed the recall petition, almost double the 10% threshold, a surprising number of locals of different party allegiances express sympathy for Davies’s plight. Yet there are some who are adamant that he should have stood down.

One council worker tells me that, owing to her job, she’s in electoral purdah and can only speak off the record.

“I signed the petition against Chris Davies because he tried to shaft a friend of mine who works in his office, by blaming the expenses mistake on her,” she says.

As far as this council worker is concerned, Davies, whom she voted for in 2017, was given a second chance for cynical reasons.

“Everyone knows that they didn’t want to put any promising new candidate in,” she says, “because they know they’re going to lose the seat.”

The local Conservative association is tight-lipped when I call, referring me to someone from the Welsh Conservative party, who also wants to speak off the record.

“His association are totally behind him,” she insists. “If anyone can win it for the Tories in that constituency it’s him.”

Which doesn’t exactly sound like a ringing endorsement.

Jane Dodds, the Liberal Democrat candidate in the forthcoming byelection.

The favourite to win is Jane Dodds of the Liberal Democrats, who, unusually in these parts, is prepared to speak on the record. Her chances have been increased by Plaid Cymru’s announcement last week that, like the Green party, it will not be fielding a candidate in the byelection. Both Vince Cable, the outgoing Lib Dem leader, and Adam Price, the leader of Plaid, have said similar Remain pacts are likely in future. “We are facing one of the most significant decisions, as to whether we are going to be seemingly yanked out of the European Union even without a deal. Under those circumstances it is in Wales’s interest and our common interest to work together and coalesce the support for the Remain side in Wales,” said Price last week.

“It was a very courageous decision,” says Dodds. “Plaid Cymru have made this courageous decision on the basis of trust and a new spirit of co-operation.”

That’s two almost back-to-back uses of the word courageous. If this were a party political broadcast they would be accompanied by a rousing soundtrack of Men of Harlech.

As it is, Plaid Cymru have simply engaged in pragmatic politics. They can’t win the seat, and the Liberals, who have held it in the past, obviously can. Certainly no one else I speak to in the sleepy market town describes Plaid Cymru’s withdrawal as an act of singular bravery. In fact on the high street James Jones, who’s a Conservative voter, complains that it’s “unfair”.

“What policies do the Liberals and Plaid Cymru share other than Brexit?” he asks. “It’s not right.”

Dodds identifies the Conservatives and the Brexit party as her main contenders. “They are in favour of putting forward a Conservative plan to crash out of Europe on 31 October,” she says, and that’s what she’ll be campaigning against.

All of which suggests that this is going to be yet another election fought on the contentious issue of Brexit – the area voted to leave by an even narrower margin than that the rest of the UK.

“Do you know, I’m going to be completely honest,” says Dodds, which is seldom a reassuring thing for a politician to say. “I think people are fed up with Brexit on the doorstep. They don’t want to talk about it any more.”

She’s not wrong about that. Along the main street, Trish Harrison tells me that she “lost the will to live over Brexit a while back”. She had voted Remain but she’s thoroughly fed-up with the whole process now.

On a warm humid Saturday, apathy seems to hang as heavily as the gathering grey clouds. In the space of four years the locals have had two general elections, a referendum, a recall vote and now a byelection. And after all that democracy there remains among many voters a belief that nothing has changed and nothing is going to change.

But it’s also true that few people seem sure what it is that they want to change. Brexiters and Remainers are as divided as ever, even if they’re patently bored with the division, and there’s little consensus on what the main problems are that face the area. “We’re not really the protesting kind around here,” explains Jones.

The Tories’ best hope is that they’ll be carried back on a tide of indifference. But the signs are that one of the new leader’s first experiences after victory on 22 July will be dealing with defeat.