Inside the Lib Dems’ campaign to tear down the Blue Wall

‘We would not put in this effort if we weren’t the challengers, and we clearly are.’ Liberal Democrat candidate Paul Kohler is sitting on a park bench on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Wimbledon, South West London. In 2019, this was the tightest Tory-Lib Dem marginal seat in the country: Kohler lost out to the Conservative incumbent Stephen Hammond by a mere 628 votes. 

Last time may have been painfully close (‘You’re telling me!’) but now Kohler fancies his chances – and the polls suggest he’s right to be confident. With just four days to go until polling day, the latest surveys suggest that he could win the seat with as much as 50 per cent of the vote.

Known the world over for tennis and strawberries and cream, the affluent Wimbledon constituency forms part of the ‘Blue Wall’, the belt of mainly southern English constituencies that have voted Conservative for generations.