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Hello and welcome to special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. Is the Blue Wall under threat?

We hear a lot these days about the Red Wall. Boris Johnson is keen to remind anyone who'll listen

about all the gains the

Tory party made in the 2019 general election. But what about those seats in the South that the

Tories have relied on for so long? The Chesson and Amish in by-election saw the Lib Dems take the

seat from the Tories in a surprise win. I'm now joined by James Forsythe and Paul Goodman, the editor of Conservative

Home. James, can you talk us through that result? There were some nerves ahead of the vote,

but ultimately, I didn't get the sense that the Tory party vote that would a lose it and two lose

it by that margin. So I think at the beginning of the campaign, the Tory view was it's a by-election.

The majority will get cut down a bit, particularly because HS2 means that there's not a huge amount of goodwill towards the party in the seat, despite it having historically been a safe Tory seat.

But it would all be all right.

Then as the campaign went on, I think people sensed it was getting closer.

I think at a week ago, people were talking about, you know, 1,500,000 majority.

As this week went on, people were like, oh, maybe it'll be three figures, not four.

But I think people thought it was going to be close, but they weren't going to lose.

They certainly weren't expecting to lose.

0.8,000 votes. The Lib Dem majority is bigger than the entire Lib Dem vote in the seat in the

2017 general election. It is a quite remarkable result. What has driven this result, I think

that there is a mixture of planning an HS2 came together in a sense of building concrete being imposed against

the wishes of local people. I think that there is now a problem with the phrase leveling up.

...