A personal view from East Devon Leader Paul Arnott.

Last weekend in Awliscombe, the re-elected MP for the Honiton & Sidmouth constituency, Richard Foord, held a gathering for the many people who had helped his campaign.

To me and thousands of others it marks the end of the “put a blue rosette on a donkey and it’ll get elected” hegemony in a huge chunk of East Devon. Even if the Conservative and Reform votes were combined (16,3007 plus 6289) Richard would still have won, with 23,007 votes. In addition, Labour and Green took a combined 4,341 votes.

This very much reflects what has been happening at the district council where the Conservatives currently have just 15 out of 60 councillors. Going into the local elections in 2015 they numbered 45. I would argue that with the rise of the Independents from 2015 in East Devon, then the resurgence of the LibDems working alongside them in 2023, what has happened at local council level is of a piece with what is now bedding in locally at Parliamentary level.

However, sadly for me, I couldn’t get to Richard’s evening because it clashed with the opening celebration of the all-new Seaton Jurassic Discovery Centre which I would not have missed for the world. The journey of the centre from well-intentioned flop of before to what I saw on Saturday night has been agonising. Looking backwards just for a moment, there is no doubt that the original concept was poorly conceived and had little realistic regard for how to make the centre work commercially.

As Leader of the District Council since 2020, I kept saying this and irked many officers at both Devon County and East Devon Councils. There were a few well-remunerated egos in play. With Covid, there was an unavoidable need and a justification to close the centre down, which helped me push for a serious rethink, and although it took about a year longer than it could have done at last we managed to sell the building to Seaton Tramway.

Not for a nano-second did I doubt this was the right way ahead. Indeed, I am one of many who wondered why on earth the Tramway’s bid to run the centre when it was first opened was given such short shrift. However, as they say, “we are where we are”.

Therefore, on Saturday night I watched Jenny Nunn and her extraordinarily positive team open the doors. The first area is the fantastic soft play area which I have no doubt will be a huge hit for local parents with its accompanying café.

Then we went into the large area where a well-meaning but dull zone about palaeontology has been replaced with animatronic dinosaurs instead, from little ones bursting from their eggs to absolute whoppers with rows of terrifying teeth. The educational side of it all, how it relates to our own Jurassic Coast, is all there, but crucially it is fun too.

The whole event sat in the context of what appeared to me to be the busiest weekend I have ever known in Seaton, hardly a parking apace to be had, with a food festival, motorbikes on the seafront and the beach studded with barbecues. More than I have ever seen in the last quarter of a century, Seaton really is turning a corner. At East Devon, our countryside team has laboured hard to make a success of the Seaton Wetlands too, which this year has welcomed an amazing 100,000 visitors and 52 educational groups.

With a fair wind, the lower Axe Valley from Colyton all the way down to Seaton will have an even more amazing offer for local residents and vital tourists to enjoy. It’s just a beginning of course, but that the energy is there is in no doubt.