Lib Dems Claim Richmond Win Is Voters' Rejection of Brexit, Trump and 2015 General Election Result

Richmond Park now has a Lib Dem MP after its candidate, Sarah Olney, ousted Zac Goldsmith who, as a Conservative, won the seat in 2010 and was re-elected last year, only to resign the Tory Whip and as an MP over Heathrow's third runway which he campaigned against. Goldsmith stood as an independent candidate and polled 45.2% whilst Olney received 49.7% of the popular vote - Christian Wolmar, the Labour Party candidate, polled just 3.7% and lost his deposit.

When Goldsmith resigned his seat and announced he was standing for re-election, his former party decided not to field a candidate against him, a decision the Tory hierarchy may now be regretting.

Here's the Lib Dem leader claiming that his party's latest electoral success is down to voters rejecting the result of the referendum, rejection of Trump and rejection of the 2015 General Election Result - none of which this by-election result actually substantiates!

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He was later interviewed by Andrew Neil and was clearly in denial that during the referendum campaign Cameron, Osborne, Gove, Boris and others all said that a vote to leave the EU was a vote to leave the Single Market. I suspect that he would far rather that all copies of a Lib Dem leaflet published by his predecessor in 2008 be destroyed:

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Copies of this leaflet seem to be resurfacing on the interwebs!

Richmond Park's new MP based her entire election campaign on a single issue: Brexit and her rejection of it. Yet in an interview earlier today with Julia Hartley Brewer on TalkRadio, she is unable to answer simple questions about Brexit and the Single Market!

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Richmond Park was a 21% swing by a Remain constituency against its incumbent Leave MP; Labour MPs of Leave constituencies should reflect on that.

A rejection of Brexit, wasn't Richmond one of the most pro remain constituencies in the country?

That Farron Lib Dem leader annoys me greatly, he just wont accept the referendum result, what a knob and what a democrat he is

Goldsmith was an idiot, he rejected those who had voted him in as a Conservative MP,
so why should they support him as an independent candidate!

He wrongly pinned his hopes on his objection to the third runway at Heathrow carrying him through.

One thing, at least he kept his word and resigned from the Tory party when the third runway got the green light.

Its just paining me to see Farron trying to make this by election into some sort of Brexit vote which to anyone with half a brain can see it wasn't.

Yes it is: it's one of the more affluent parts of London whose residents will have benefited from globalisation. I strongly suspect that some of those electors who voted Tory in 2010 and 2015 voted Lib Dem this time as a protest vote and will return to the fold in 2020 (or earlier); it's also likely that a good few Tory supporters did not vote this time.

The party's name now falls foul of the Trades Description Act as far as I'm concerned. Almost all the honest, decent democrats - former Labour Party defectors - have either died or joined another party (Ukip?!), leaving our Methersgate a fairly lonely soul.

Regardless of how the Lib Dems try to spin it, their victory last night has absolutely nothing to do with Brexit. Or Trump. Or their electoral disaster that was the 2015 plebiscite.

I don't understand why Farron was babbling on about Trump, he looked to me that he was over excited and didn't know what he was saying, not like the Lib Dems have had much to celebrate over the years, maybe he was just making the most of it

I am familiar with Richmond, basically its ultra posh and full of people who know nothing about the real world.

Where is Andrew when we need him to stick up for his party?

Andrew is not typical of the party he supports. He is a former card-carrying Labour Party member who left in the early 1980s and joined the Social Democratic Party founded by Bill Rodgers, David Owen, Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams. Their defection came amid Labour's lurch to the left as it was infiltrated by Trotskyites at the constituency level who were at odds with the PLP and Labour voters - sound familiar?!

The modern Liberal is anything but democratic and believes that only people like him should have any electoral say, the rest of us are too ignorant and are there to be ruled and do as we are told. Andrew is given to posting as an intolerant Liberal but in real life, he much more accommodating.

I sincerely hope Andrew is more accommodating in person than some of his posts suggest

According to her Wikipedia entry, Sarah Olney was, until very recently, an accountant at the National Physical Laboratory. She apparently joined the Lib Dems in the wake of the last General Election when the Lib Dems were humiliated at the ballot box. During her interview with BBC News today, she said "I had never thought about being a politician. But I knew I was a liberal. When I saw what happened in the general election last year I felt I had to get involved." In public. she has been campaigning against the expansion of Heathrow Airport in spite of the fact that her husband is a town planner who worked on the airport's Terminal 5 thus making her a typical leftie hypocrite.

Her majority is a wafer-thin 1,872 votes.

From that radio interview:

Julia Hartley-Brewer: "My first question, absolutely the most crucial question, when is the second by-election going to be held?"

Sarah Olney: "The second by-election?"

JHB: "Well we don’t really know whether voters really knew what they were voting for when they elected you so shouldn’t we have a second by-election – you want a second EU referendum don’t you?"

SO: "I was very clear in my campaign exactly what I was standing for and the voters have returned me to Parliament with a clear mandate."

JHB: "A clear mandate but less than 50 per cent of the voters of Richmond voted for you, are you sure you’ve got that mandate?"

SO: "Well I won’t the vote last night in the by-election and we’ve overturned a huge Conservative majority here."

JHB: "You have and yet you have questioned the EU referendum vote. You said that one of the big issues on which you stood - I mean we thought Heathrow would be the big issue, there wasn’t actually a single candidate who was campaigning for a third runway for Heathrow, so Heathrow became a dud issue in the by-election, it became all about Brexit. In what way have you got a mandate from the people of Richmond - if you don’t have more than 50 per cent of the vote the vote in the EU referendum on June 23rd was a much clearer mandate, wasn’t it?"

SO: "Well to be fair I campaigned on that issue in this by-election and I won a clear majority of the votes last night."

JHB: "You absolutely did but your margin of victory was only about the same as the margin of victory in the EU referendum – about 4.5 per cent, in which case again, shouldn’t we re-run the by-election to be clear?"

SO: "We accept the result of the referendum – what we’re saying is we think there should be a further vote on the terms before we make the final decision to leave."

JHB: "Did your party leader Tim Farron mention that before and did anyone else on the Remain campaign mention that on June 23rd?"

SO: "It’s the…er… development since the referendum."

JHB: "So we’re allowed to change our policy after the referendum and then go back to revisit the referendum – is that what we’re doing?"

SO: "Sorry I missed that."

JHB: "Well I’m just a bit confused because we had a remain campaign, we had a leave campaign, just as you’ve run a campaign, Zac Goldsmith ran a campaign, Christian Wolmar from the Labour party. Voters knew what they were voting for in your by-election, they knew what they were voting for in the EU referendum. Why do we think that one election should be re-run and one shouldn’t?"

SO: "Well in the referendum it wasn’t clear what people voted for – there wasn’t a clear manifesto."

JHB: "I was clear."

SO: "There wasn’t a clear manifesto set up for the terms of leaving – we leaved for departure but not a destination, there was no clear manifesto for what happens to our membership of the single market."

JHB: "Yes there was – the Remain campaign said we were going to leave the single market if we voted out."

[Long pause]

JHB: "Yes they did, they repeated it every single leading member of the Remain campaign said a vote to leave the EU was a vote to Leave the single market. Nothing unclear about that at all.

Sarah’s aide: "I'm really sorry but Sarah has to leave now."

JHB: "No she doesn't. Sarah, if you want to be an elected a Member of Parliament I think you should probably be able to answer some simple questions about your policy. Can you get Sarah back on the line please?"

Aide: "I’m sorry about that, she’s got another interview now."

JHB: "Can you get Sarah back on the line please. I don't know who you are, we've waited an hour to have this interview, if she doesn't want to answer questions from a radio station perhaps she's not fit to be an MP."

Aide: "I’m very sorry she’s got another interview now."

JHB: "Has she got another interview? That’s funny because she was booked in for this time."

After a long pause, JHB told listeners: "So, that’s the Liberal Democrats, folks."

Okay, so we'll accept that Mrs Olney has been elected as MP for Richmond Park, nevertheless there should be a further by-election before Mrs Olney assumes her seat in the House of Commons, right?

The Lib Dems are disingenuously attempting to rewrite history. Not only did politicians and other key figures for both the Remain and Leave campaigns make it abundantly clear in their speeches before the 23rd June - that a vote to leave the EU was a vote to leave the Single Market - but we taxpayers paid £9 million for that same message to be included in a government pamphlet that was distributed to every household in the United Kingdom prior to the Referendum.

I am sure that the (very) well heeled residents of Richmond are slowly realising that they have been tricked into electing someone who campaigned by parroting sound bites first given by her leader - and his predecessor - and that she knows next to nothing about politics, the Lib Dem party (she only joined last year), the EU, the Single Market and what issue was decided by the majority of voters on June 23. She's about as useful to the electorate as Jeremy Corbyn.

Curiouser and curiouser ... there are allegations that the Green Party nationally was offered a £250,000 "incentive" not to put up a candidate for the by-election which would have divided the "Remain" vote and allowed Goldsmith to retain the seat.

The plot thickens, it would be interesting to know for definite who was behind it, I'm sure it will come out if the story is true.

If the allegations are true, then there's potentially one or more offences under the Bribery Act 2010 whereby, the offer of a bribe is sufficient, the offer does not need to be taken-up for an offence to have been committed. This needs to be investigated, we cannot have millionaires and possibly-foreign organisations buying our elections in this way.

Who is in the frame for being the mystery donor I wonder

It's "better" than that, Dom. The Guido Fawkes web site broke this story yesterday afternoon and its coverage included a couple of quotes from a report produced by the Kingston Branch of the Green Party with full details of the incident. Added to that, Guido Fawkes had obtained a copy of that 30 page report and uploaded it to Scribd so that anyone could read it. The National Party claimed that no such report exists.

Sometime yesterday evening, that report disappeared from Scribd:

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So the publication of a document that (the Greens claim) doesn't exist breaches copyright??!! The fact that this document exposes criminal conduct and may lead to there having to be a re-run of the Richmond by-election doesn't come into it, I suppose.

Given the fact that the Lib Dems have just been fined £20,000 - the maximum the Electoral Commission can impose - and that the Metropolitan Police has been asked to investigate as the Commission believes the Lib Dems have flouted criminal law, fighting what would be a high-profile by-election would not be a welcome prospect for them I suspect.

I blame our Andrew

Mark could you please do me a favour and refrain from posting pictures of Sarah Olney as I find her appearance somewhat annoying, she has an appearance that even Spitting Image wouldn't have to enhance, many thanks in advance