The Boston hustings for mayor of Greater Lincolnshire was only on its first question when the tone soured. Rob Waltham, the Conservative candidate and current leader of North Lincolnshire Council, made a jibe about Andrea Jenkyns not living in Lincolnshire. Jenkyns, the Conservative MP in Morley, West Yorkshire, from 2015 until she lost her seat in 2024 and joined Reform, in return accused Waltham of being “disingenuous”. She reminded the audience she grew up in Lincolnshire and is currently renting a property to live there “part-time”, as her son is in a special needs school, but has promised to move fully to the county if she wins the mayoralty.
Out of all the contests taking place in the local elections on 1 May – council seats, mayors, even a by-election – the mayoralty for the new Greater Lincolnshire Combined County Authority is perhaps the most consequential, not just for the residents of Lincolnshire, but for anyone watching the shifting dynamics of British politics.
It is here, in the part of the country that most heavily voted Leave in 2016, that we will see if the momentum Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has been building since the general election translates into concrete results. Jenkyns’s prospects in this race after defecting are being watched closely by other Tories dispirited by the state of their party and wondering if Reform might offer a viable alternative. Reform, meanwhile, is looking to prove it can win votes off the Conservatives and Labour alike and have what it takes to be a serious force in politics.
“It’s personal, because I defected,” Jenkyns told me when we met the day after mayoralty nominations were officially submitted, in a pub halfway between Boston town centre and the glitzy hospitality suite of the new football stadium that is the venue for the evening’s hustings. Jenkyns, wearing a light-blue sundress and orange nail-polish, apologised for being late, before launching into an explanation about how her ADHD makes her more likely to have car crashes. Next, she revealed that Reform’s efforts to court her began long before last July’s election.
“I was in talks with them even in the Brexit Party years,” she admitted. “But I think if you get elected with a party, you should go down with the party… I went down with a sinking ship.”
On 28 November, shortly after Kemi Badenoch was elected Tory leader, Nigel Farage held a press conference to announce that Jenkyns had defected and would be Reform’s candidate for Lincolnshire.
Her big pitch for the mayoralty is a “Lincolnshire Doge”, à la Elon Musk, to cut through all the waste of council spending on initiatives such as green ambassadors and DEI. I asked if her allusions to Musk and Trump are a deliberate strategy, hoping to mimic the success of Maga. Her campaign website even features a cartoon of the 2010s dog meme associated with Doge and with Musk’s efforts. “I wrote that myself. Nigel’s been very supportive,” she replied.
Since Jenkyns’s defection, the pressure on the Tories has only increased. Over Christmas, Reform claimed to have surpassed the Conservatives’ own membership figures – leading Farage to announce his party was “the real opposition” and sparking a public spat with Badenoch that ensured the story got even more widely covered. Pollsters started picking up Reform leads over first the Tories, then Labour. While Trump’s recent behaviour, most notably his betrayal of Ukraine and his shock tariff regime, has caused Reform’s numbers to fall (thanks to Farage’s closeness to the Trump camp), Reform and Labour are roughly tied, with the Conservatives a few points below.
Panicked conversations are underway in Conservative circles regarding a potential merger or electoral pact with Reform – even the removal of Badenoch and appointment of a “unite the right” leader who can bring the two parties together. The day before I travelled to Boston, the Telegraph published a leaked recording of the Tory MP Esther McVey suggesting her party should “let” Reform win the Runcorn by-election on 1 May as part of an electoral pact where Reform would stand aside in places the Conservatives have greater chance of winning, and vice versa. Badenoch, in contrast, has said any kind of deal with Reform is “for the birds”.
What does Jenkyns think of the idea? “This was what I was trying to do before the general election – I met with Rishi [Sunak], I met with Nigel and Richard [Tice],” she told me, adding that she suggested candidates in Red Wall seats should have been able to stand as “a Conservative-and-Reform candidate”.
“That way, we could have potentially defeated Labour, or they would have had a minority government. However, that was from the vantage point of being a Conservative. Now I’m on the inside, and we see all this polling, I don’t think we need to… I really do genuinely think the only way is up.”
Before the hustings, I wandered into Boston town centre. St Botolph’s Church, referred to as the “Boston Stump”, was completed in 1520 and has a 266ft tower to rival that of any cathedral. In the 16th century, Boston was a trading port second only to London. I climbed the 209 steps of the terrifying spiral staircase and looked out over Lincolnshire. On the horizon, I could just about make out the blur of Lincoln Cathedral, 30 miles away, across swathes of flat farmland.
It is a reminder both of just how geographically vast this electoral area is (according to the Institute of Government, at 7,184 square kilometres, it’s the third largest mayoralty, more than double the size of neighbouring Cambridgeshire and Peterborough), and of just how important agriculture is here. There isn’t a motorway in sight; Lincolnshire doesn’t have any.
Back at ground level, the church was advertising a drop-in centre for rough sleepers. The information was posted in English, Polish and Bulgarian. After the expansion of the EU in 2004, there was a sharp increase in the number of migrants coming to Boston as seasonal agriculture workers. According to the 2011 Census, Boston had the highest proportion of Eastern Europeans in England and Wales. (Two years later, Ukip focused heavily on this fact to win its first 16 seats on the Lincolnshire County Council in the 2013 locals, depriving the Conservatives of their majority.) Beyond the historic market square, Boston displays all the familiar signs of a decaying English town: empty shop fronts sandwiched between bookies and discount stores.
These issues – the hollowing out of the town centre, farming, transport, immigration – were raised at the hustings later that day. There were 50-odd people in the audience, almost all white, most of them between 40 and 60. One woman arrived in a spectacular full-length Union Jack coat, complete with a matching hat. An 18-year-old girl asked what the candidates will offer young people who feel forced to move out of the area because there are so few opportunities. Several people wanted to know what the candidates would do about the poor transport links that make it so difficult to travel across the county.
It was not these topics, however, that most animated the candidates. A fierce debate broke out about Ed Miliband’s climate agenda, and net zero in general. On one hand were calls to prioritise food security and condemnation of putting solar panels on prime agricultural land; on the other, a recognition that Lincolnshire is particularly prone to floods. The impacts of climate change are already being viscerally, wetly felt here.
Rob Waltham, the Conservative candidate and council leader, seems to have had a change of heart since 2022, when he pledged to make North Lincolnshire carbon neutral by 2030 – five years ahead of the national target. He told the audience it is “utterly ridiculous” that Lincolnshire is losing farmland to “pylons and solar”. Jenkyns, leaning fully into Reform’s crusade against net zero, claimed Lincolnshire is becoming a “dumping ground” for solar farms and pylons, and described Labour’s treatment of farmers as “sinister”. She derided Conservatives such as Waltham for “declaring a climate emergency” – “I will finish, thank you very much,” she snapped when he tried to interject.
The pair also clashed on a different culture-war front: wokeness. Waltham attacked Jenkyns for being a minister in a Conservative government that did a host of things she now disapproves of, from supporting DEI initiatives to celebrating Pride. She replied that she was only a minister for a few months. “Don’t tell us you were a minister then, if you were only a part-time minister,” he retorted.
Jenkyns told the audience that Waltham has an annual flag raising ceremony for Pride. “The only flag I will raise is the British flag or the Lincolnshire flag!” she pronounced, eliciting a somewhat lukewarm round of applause. The other candidates – and, indeed, the audience – seemed confused by this spat. After a break, the Union Jack-clad woman did not return for the second half.
The animosity between Jenkyns and Waltham emphasises that this is the Tories’ race to lose – and Reform’s big chance to prove itself. The Labour candidate, local businessman Jason Stockwood, is essentially running as an independent – his campaign website does not mention “Labour” once. The Conservatives hold majorities on both Lincolnshire and North Lincolnshire councils, and are the biggest party on the North East Lincolnshire Council too – even if the industrial north of the county traditionally leans Labour. Grantham in the south was the birthplace of Margaret Thatcher. Of the 12 MPs representing various parts of the area, seven are Tories (including Victoria Atkins and John Hayes), four are Labour, and one – Boston and Skegness – is held by Reform’s deputy leader, Richard Tice.
Prior to the election in July, Tice’s constituency, then held by the former digital minister Matt Warman, was one of the safest Conservative seats in the country – on paper, at least. Tice beat Warman by 2,000 votes on 53 per cent turnout. Since then, the sense of dissatisfaction with Westminster has only grown, fuelled by Labour decisions to restrict winter fuel payments and change inheritance tax rules on farms – critical in an area that relies so heavily on agriculture.
“Demographically, much of that area is prime Reform territory,” Joe Twyman, director of Deltapoll, told me. “Having said that, mayoral races – particularly new ones – can be very unusual in many ways, and the choice of candidate could still be important. A well-known, popular local candidate for any of the other parties, or even an independent, could disrupt things.” This explains the Tories’ determination to make the charge about Jenkyns not living in Lincolnshire stick.
It also explains the disagreement in Conservative circles about their own candidate. Waltham has a proven track record as a council leader and is running a hyper-local campaign – his website asserts that ten generations of his family have lived in Lincolnshire. But there are fears that, while well-liked in his own area, his is a less familiar name across the rest of the county, where the fight for air-time will be key. Selecting Waltham to run against Jenkyns was, one Tory insider told me, “like bringing a knife to a gun fight”.
When I spoke to Waltham the week after the hustings, he reiterated his focus on the local angle. “Our pitch is the local Conservative pitch: we get stuff done,” he told me. He accused Jenkyns of “political tourism” by standing in a county she doesn’t live in, and said he was picking up anti-Reform sentiment on the doorsteps, from voters who, whatever they think of the Tories and Labour, still didn’t want to let Farage’s party in. “Reform have a national profile of being the protest party. They’ve not got a track record of actually delivering anything,” he said.
This wasn’t quite the mood at the hustings, but then, Jenkyns was playing to a friendly crowd: several audience members were themselves standings to be Reform councillors. The party is fielding candidates in all 70 of Lincolnshire’s seats – and clearly hopes that Jenkyns’s national profile (not least as the minister who gave journalists the finger outside Downing Street) will send a message.
That message isn’t just to disillusioned voters wondering which box to tick on their ballots. “If Andrea Jenkyns can win for Reform in Lincolnshire, what does that say to other disgruntled Conservatives?” a worried Tory insider asked me. The narrative here – of a Brexit-backing, Boris Johnson-era Conservative defecting to Reform and then winning – would turbocharge fears of the Tories’ demise. Conservative politicians are said to be watching intently.
If Jenkyns does win, the Tory party is braced for further defections – and for a renewed frenzy over a potential deal or even merger. But if she doesn’t, some of the momentum Reform has built up will slow. The party has poured everything it has into Lincolnshire. If it can’t win here, doubts will emerge over how solid its polling figures really are.
The mayoral constituency is so vast and the variables so wide-ranging (there are six mayoral candidates, including an independent) that no one feels confident calling this race.
“I don’t want to tempt fate,” Andrea Jenkyns told me. “You’re talking to somebody who got booted out by the electorate on low turnout – and Reform split my vote last year.” But Lincolnshire is, she said, a “blueprint” for Reform’s future: “If I get elected, I’m not going to – excuse my French – bugger this up.”
[See also: Nigel Farage’s mutinous army]
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