A personal view from East Devon Leader Paul Arnott.

It’s just over seven years now since Brenda from Bristol said “You’re joking. Not another one” when Theresa May called a General Election. The feeling today seems the very opposite. More like, “Please can we just get on with it?”

This time last week, however, when I was writing last week’s column, my life was dominated by the challenges we face at the council dealing with 45 years of Conservative neglect. I have mentioned before that we will have to make tough choices, ranging from from our council housing stock to our public toilets to our leisure services, and I’m working hard with officers to get under the bonnet and prepare for difficult debates over the summer. The bill for government defunding of councils has landed on finance officers’ mats across the country.

It's a real honour to sit this year as the chair of the Devon District Councils’ Forum, and another key area of work was preparing a proposed gathering of all the key players to positively discuss what we can collectively do to about our water and sewage services in East Devon. South West Water (SWW) are the obvious culprits, but we need to bring government agencies into the room too. Much of what SWW get away with, from dividends and bonuses for failure to poor monitoring of leaks and sewage incidents is down to the government entirely.

Indeed, and forgive a tiny political moment here, but my lot, the Liberal Democrats, keep trying to get bills through Parliament to toughen it all up only for the Conservative MPs to keep voting it down, even as they are wailing and gnashing their teeth for the benefit of their local electorate.

But then last Thursday, Mr Sunak walked out into what is now known as 10 Drowning Street and announced a July 4th election. Luckily, my official launch as a candidate for Exmouth and Exeter East (EEE) had long been set for June 1st. And so, it begins.

Therefore, this will be the last newspaper article by me until after the election as by old convention a period of neutrality begins. And I’m not going to set my pen down knocking my opponents. But I will conclude with a few facts.

First, political pundits and betting sites have identified that only by voting Liberal Democrat will a change in Exmouth and East Exeter happen. The factual evidence is shown by the number of elected councillors across the whole constituency in 2023. There are two Greens, six Labour, nine Conservatives and 12 Liberal Democrats. This is the last hard reliable evidence of voting patterns.

Other parties may seek to mislead the electorate on this, but in percentage terms by votes cast, that’s 10% Green, 13% Labour, 37.5% Conservative and 39.5% Liberal Democrat.

Objectively then, it can be stated on the basis of electoral evidence across the whole constituency and not a couple of by-elections that if it was someone’s wish to elect other than a Conservative then only the Liberal Democrat will achieve that. That is, of course, me, so I feel a bit embarrassed to say so, but there we have it.

The other key fact for our campaign is the wonderful and enthusiastic endorsement of Claire Wright, who took 25,000 votes at the last election in December 2019. Those votes need to go somewhere. Very kindly she has urged everyone to vote for me.

And of course, if anyone fancies joining Claire and me on the campaign trail, please do send an email to paularnott@eeelibdems.org.uk