On a balmy afternoon in early April, Sarah Pochin is trying to convince locals in Runcorn to elect her as the Cheshire town’s first non-Labour MP in 52 years.
“Runcorn,” Pochin tells me, “has been so neglected by the Labour administration.” The town, which was once a centre for chemical manufacturing, has for a long time lacked basic infrastructure, she complains. “There’s no leisure centre, no cinema, the facilities just aren’t here.” The area, she says, is “on its knees”.
The signs of de-industrial malaise are everywhere in Runcorn, which lies on the South Bank of the Mersey, 15 miles upstream from Liverpool. The 60,000-strong town makes up two-thirds of the Runcorn and Helsby seat, which also encompasses smaller commuter towns and more affluent villages stretching south towards Wales.
Last month, the constituency became host to a highly consequential by-election when Labour’s Mike Amesbury was forced to resign for assaulting a constituent. Last June, Amesbury won the seat with 53 per cent of the vote, with Reform finishing a distant second at 18 per cent. Nine months later a Lord Ashcroft poll puts the hard-right party ahead by 5 per cent.
This, by any measure, is a colossal swing. If the poll is borne out on the 1st May it will signal a catastrophic plunge in support for Labour, and position Reform as a credible contender for government. The result could set the course of British politics for the next four years.
Today, Pochin is flanked by party leader Nigel Farage and some rather menacing-looking security. Pochin walks with the slightly stiff gangle of Theresa May; when she speaks, she summons the intense calm of Giorgia Meloni.
The first stop is a butcher’s, where Farage does most of the talking. The received pronunciation of the Reformers is a sonic world away from the butcher who complains, in a Scouse accent with a slight Mancunian inflection, that Turkish barber shops have flooded the high street.
They move on to Church Street, the town’s main thoroughfare, where Farage is swamped by admiring locals. Outside a Wetherspoons, a man stops to serenade the Reform leader with the Kinks’ “Sunny Afternoon”. Halfway through, he forgets the tune. “I’m starstruck,” he mutters.
Farage is the magnet to which all of the public and press attention is drawn. Pochin trails behind him, relegated to his shadow.
After much handshaking, the pair reach the banks of the Mersey to answer media questions. A young man sticks his head out of a passing car and shouts, “Go on Farage lad, send the fuckers back.”
Pochin has decided to run for Reform, she tells me, because, “The party reflects my values—family values, community values.”
She is a very different beast to the party’s sitting group of MPs. While Reform’s elected representatives form a near-homogeneous cast of bombastic, middle-aged men, Pochin offers a more measured image.
Ideologically, she is also less extreme than the party’s Westminster outfit. On immigration, her past record suggests a relatively tolerant attitude. In 2022, as mayor of Cheshire East, she hosted a welcome event for Syrian and Afghan refugees who had settled in the area. She also supported the Homes for Ukraine Scheme.
On justice, she believes the system should focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment, and subscribes to prisons minister James Timpson’s “second-chance” approach to criminals. She is an opponent of the death penalty, a position with which 79 per cent of Reform voters disagree.
While serving as a magistrate, Pochin let a mother who had been caught drink-driving off with a fine, telling her “Don’t be too hard on yourself”—a far cry from the Reform’s “zero-tolerance” proposals.
In 2018, in another instance, she was reprimanded by the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office for using her status as a magistrate to influence her colleagues’ views in a political context.
In a Reform government, she tells me, she would seek to be justice secretary. Justice, she says, “is an area which I feel like I know an awful lot about”.
I ask her to name her political idol. “Everybody’s going to say Margaret Thatcher,” she says, before half-jokingly correcting herself, “but obviously my political idol now is Mister Nigel Farage.”
Pochin “was brought up with those [Thatcherite] values”, she says. Her father was a military man who sent her to the Haberdashers’ girls’ school in Monmouth.
A well-to-do Thatcherite, with the air of someone who knows how to ride a horse, would have traditionally found a home on the right wing of the Tory party. Increasingly, however, this political type is defecting to Reform. At least 60 Reform candidates standing in May’s local elections are ex-Tories.
Pochin is one of these defectors. From 2015 until 2020 she served as a Conservative councillor for Cheshire East. Her Facebook posts show pictures of herself with Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg, both of whom she described as “inspirational”.
Council documents show her advocating for fracking, and opposing housing developments and a one-family “Gypsy” pitch.
As a councillor, Pochin had a reputation for refusing to toe the party line. She was eventually expelled from the Conservatives for accepting the Cheshire East mayoralty against her party’s wishes. After expulsion she joined the Independents, an alliance of non-affiliated councillors, which also went on to suspend her when she rejoined the national Conservative party to vote in its 2022 leadership election. In a party as averse to dissent as Reform, this maverick streak may not bode well.
Although Reform pitches itself as anti-elite, Pochin, like Farage, quite clearly is a member of the elite. She studied banking and finance at Loughborough University in the late 1980s before embarking on an international career in sales and marketing which included time at Shell and the Midland Bank (now HSBC).
Her husband Jonathan is a scion of Cheshire-based Pochin’s construction group, which went into administration in 2019. Until 2015, Jonathan was managing director and shareholder at the firm, working on developments including Citigroup’s Tower at Canary Wharf. He too was until recently a Tory, publishing his support for Rishi Sunak in July 2023.
Despite existing in another socio-economic stratosphere from most of her prospective constituents, Pochin feels she is “perfectly positioned… to stand up for Runcorn and Helsby”.
When asked what the most important issue facing Britain is, she replies, “For me it’s about stopping the mass, illegal immigration of economic migrants”, who she argues are a “strain on our resources”. This, she adds, refers to “the huge numbers coming across the Channel” and not “genuine refugees”.
Although Runcorn is overwhelmingly white (97 per cent), according to Lord Ashcroft’s mid-March polling immigration is the most important issue for voters in the wider constituency. The combination of demography and deprivation makes it fertile ground for an insurgent Reform.
With this in mind, the party has sought to attack Labour’s candidate, Karen Shore, as weak on immigration. Campaign literature repeatedly refers to Shore “warmly welcoming” asylum seekers with past comments about providing them with “suitably decorated and furnished accommodation”.
In an effort to change the narrative, Shore has pledged to close a constituency asylum hotel. If Labour’s rightward turn on immigration manages to win angry locals over, we can expect to see a lot more of the same tactics over the next four years. If it doesn’t, we can expect to see a lot more Sarah Pochins.
