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I Spent a Week in Richmond Watching Zac Goldsmith's By-Election Face Plant

Watching the former Tory humiliated as he handed the Lib Dems their revival on a plate.

Defeated Zac Goldsmith listening to newly-elected Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Olney speaking, at the count of the Richmond Park by-election (Picture by Yui Mok PA Wire/PA Images)

Six days before the vote and Zac Goldsmith is cowarding it up in a cupboard somewhere. The man died on the mayoral campaign trail a few months back, but at least he died publicly. Now? Where even is he?

On Friday, I phone, then email, Zac's people.

They reply, "to let you know that he won't be able to take part in an interview this time."

But I didn't ask for an interview – just a chance to attend his latest photo opp, be near him, bask, touch his cloth.

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A couple more prods. Eventually, a man called Ian Monk ("PR consultant specialising in: Publicity, Crisis Management, Story Brokering, Public Relations, Privacy and Defamation") gets in touch:

"There's really nothing set on stone on the campaign trail – all very fluid for the last few days.

All best

Ian"

I tell him I'm in Richmond for the rest of the campaign and he can name any time he likes, I'll definitely be there.

No reply.

"Seriously. I'm so fluid I'm practically gaseous", I add.

"A charming image" he writes.

"Aye, a real peach. So before I go full Brownian motion, what's going down today?"

What's going down today is apparently, radio silence. Zac's people have decided that the race is too tight, and their candidate too much of a flake to let within biting distance of the press. It's the first clear sign that Richmond Park will be a squeaker.

At Labour HQ in North Sheen, a derelict estate agent is plastered with VOTE LABOUR CHRISTIAN WOLMAR signs, an excitable party worker cracks a gag when I bring up Zac's invisibility: "Oh," he guffaws. "He'll meet you at the nearest Tube stop." A reference to Zac's fist-gnaw answer to The Tube Question during the Mayoral campaign, an answer so astonishingly like a mini-stroke it is worth reproducing in full here:

Questioner: "What's next in this sequence: Bond Street, Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road … ?"

Zac Goldsmith: "I'm going to stop you there because most people have a route, I have two routes … I want to answer this one, most people have a route or two routes and they become like an extension of the body and you use those routes, not for ethical reasons, but because it is the only way to get around London without being late for meetings."

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Think about that answer for a minute.

On the same campaign, he accidentally revealed he has no idea how to drink a pint of beer, clasping his glass by the rim while steadying it from the base, like a Brexiteer from outer space. No wonder basic observation is off the cards.

Still, it's a shame Zac's in hiding, because not only does he look like an effigy of a daytime soap star fashioned from deep-fried camembert, he's got real charm, they all seem to say. He looks you in the eyes and talks about the ecology, and it's like you're the only voter in the world.

FROM TRANSPARENCY TO INVISIBILITY

This was once a promising maverick MP. A campaigner for greater transparency in government, who wanted to introduce a bill to give voters the right to recall their MP. Now, he's gone from transparency to invisibility. The narrative is he's fighting a street campaign, going rogue, like Timothy Dalton in License To Kill . But he's doing it in a carefully cropped way that keeps a diaphragm of PR men between him and the press.

Up and down his Richmond Park constituency, you will find Zac Goldsmith signs in windows that say, "Keeping his word". The idea being that the people of Richmond Park should keep their word to Zac in return.

But what seems unclear is what word, who asked for this word, what he ever stood to lose, and what Richmond could possibly gain from this mystical word. Is this a holy covenant with the God Of Petulance? Or is the Richmond by-election actually about nothing?

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In 2008, David Davis staged Britain's first truly Beckettian by-election, when he resigned his seat in order to stand for it again "on the issue of civil liberties", opposing the Counter Terrorism bill that was then going through the Commons.

Damn straight, except that no one could quite work out what any of that had to do with by-elections. Especially as all of the other major parties then decided to do the equivalent of removing Davis's chair from the room when he went for a piss. They didn't stand any candidates, meaning that the entire exercise was a few fringe cranks-versus.

Davis was then forced to go around announcing to the folk on his doorsteps that they should vote for him to protect our civil liberties.

"Yes, dear" is the only logical response to that. Possibly followed by the offer of a soothing mug of tea, and maybe a nice biscuit and why don't you come in from the rain dear, you look terrible and please take that tinfoil helmet off, the CIA rays can't penetrate in here dear, see, Brian's going to turn the microwave on and that will scramble them for sure. Davis won, but the eccentricity poleaxed his career for eight years.

Zac's case is slightly different, in that he had at least warned his constituents he might do something weird. But there's a weasel element too – because in 2012, when he made his original promise to resign if Heathrow got the Third Runway, he merely offered to resign as a Conservative MP. No mention was made of standing again – that came later.

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The stunt lacked goal-directedness. What Zac didn't seem to realise was that the people of Richmond Park were always going to be spoilt for choice when it came to anti-Third Runway candidates. So it proved. All three major candidates are so loudly opposed to it you'd think there were votes there. Even the Christian Peoples Alliance – who foist a flyer at me in the station – have devoted their leaflet not to smiting what they would see as the constituency's resident sodomite Sir Elton John, but to resurrecting plans for an airport way out in the Thames Estuary – the "Boris Island" – complete with lurid drawing of such that looks like a child's picture of The Rapture.

Besides – even if he'd got the result he'd wanted it would have been unclear. Would a reduced majority mean that Heathrow was a non-issue?

As if the meaning of Richmond Park weren't obscure enough, you've then got UKIP not running because they apparently back Brexiteer Zac. You've got the Greens refusing to stand a candidate because they wanted to forge a "progressive alliance" – which seems to mean that they want the Lib Dems to win, not Labour. And then you've got the Tories not running because they back Zac, even though he's not actually their guy and stuffed things up for them royally with his fecklessness. It's high order clusterfuckery.

Which makes even less sense given that the Lib Dems were aiming to pull the by-election away from Heathrow entirely. The maths is simple: this was a 70 percent Remain constituency, the most pro-EU in the country. Zac was a Brexiteer poster-boy. The Lib Dems are now the official party of not leaving the European Union.

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On Monday, one of Labour's local organiser confides that, in their canvassing, they had a hunch that things could be tight for Zac. He had a hefty 23,000 majority. That could be cut to a couple of thousand. "More," he says, "If they had a better candidate, to be frank".

Sarah Olney, 39, is an accountant at the National Physical Laboratory. She only signed up to the Liberal Democrats the day after their General Election wipeout, but is now their candidate. Like Zac, Olney's gone to ground, following a disastrous run of interviews. First with the Evening Standard, who recorded her home life with children Rufus, three, and Isabel, seven: "One snap shows their mother in costume as Iolanthe, the Fairy Queen (she is a Gilbert & Sullivan fanatic)."

Olney stands in a long line of candidates who've likely spent many hours hunched over a laptop glow furiously deleting old blog posts. In her case, the crucial line that has been used to spear her again and again is: "Britain is leaving the EU — OK, I accept that. I don't think we should re-run the referendum." None of which is now policy in a party aching to swing all the Brexit malcontents behind it. When Sophy Ridge asked Olney about whether she'd vote down Article 50, she visibly winced, before fluttering about in a series of desperate deflections. Half the art in politics is not to look like you have perforated a colon when someone asks you a hard question.

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In the Standard, having flummoxed her way through Brexit questions, blustering through the revelation that her husband actually worked on delivering Heathrow's Terminal 5, Olney signed off the interview: "If I don't win, I've got a nice house, a great husband, lovely children and a good job to go back to." Cheers, pal.

A LIB DEM COME BACK?

With so many of their best massacred at the last election, it was odd the Lib Dems couldn't find a more experienced candidate – a Vince Cable or an Ed Davey – to contest this seat. They could hardly make a secret of their joy finding themselves fighting Richmond Park: they needed a game-changer, they needed to start being The Party That Brought You Remain. The seat was theirs before Zac snatched it in 2010. Once this whole westerly stretch of Thames was known as The Orange Riviera: like a golden stain of piss, it leaked down from Chiswick to Kingston. These were the comfortables on the suburban fringe of the capital, definitely not Labour rabble but a bit too Benugo for natural Tory fodder.

The constituency is a weird one, perfectly bisected by Richmond Park itself – the hunting lodge once beloved of chicken drumstick kingpin Henry VIII. On the far side of the park it includes the more downmarket nowheres of North Kingston and Norbiton. From Sheen, it's about 55 minutes by public transport to even get to Norbiton – the park acting as a glossy-green Berlin Wall. Meanwhile, out to the West, in Kew, there are heartlands so Tory that the Labour guys never bother visiting, oligarchical playgrounds that price out even the media stars who live town-side. The average cost of renting a house in Richmond is £3,500 a month

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Out in the streets of Sheen, everything is kitchenwares. There's a design showroom next to a framing place, a carpet emporium, a sinks and baths shop, a thai spa, a Whistles. Everything in this world that you'd need if you already had everything you really needed, the sense of a society in which the chief goods are home renovation and Oliver Bonas. Is this how the Easter Islanders dwindled to extinction? These people have climbed Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs to the point where the only thing they really need from their politics is a warm fuzzy feeling – classic Lib Dem hunting grounds in other words.

Which is why they threw the kitchen sink and then some. Their canvassers knocked on every door four times. They put over 20 leaflets through every letterbox. Every party bigwig was dredged up to bang a gong for Sarah. On the Wednesday before the vote, Bob Geldof was somehow pressed into service for them, presumably displaying the same unerring eye for the common man as on his Brexit flotilla.

It's Tuesday night that the omens irrevocably darken for Zac. At the final hustings, he doesn't turn up for the first hour, instead being replaced by a Tory councillor for Barnes. It turns out he's been run over by his own car. Clipped, at least, losing some cloth and "a little bit of skin". While canvassing, a volunteer who was driving Zac's car pranged into his own man. It's not quite Brian Harvey and jacket potatoes, but the candidate has to get some new trousers, costing him time. While most Richmonders would humbly pop into the local Zadig & Voltaire on their way up, when it comes to trousers, Zac is evidently a man of principles.

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The same day, the Lib Dems release private polling, suggesting that their candidate is one point ahead. The swing would still be seismic. But since when has that stopped anything in 2016?

A counting agent for independent candidate Zac Goldsmith looking at the ballot papers arriving for counting during the Richmond Park by-election, at Richmond upon Thames College, London. (Picture by Yui Mok PA Wire/PA Images)

On the big day, out at the Richmond Common polling station, it's freezing, the mist is wraparound. I get talking to a middle-aged woman. She's normally a Conservative. But this time she has backed Olney. "All the candidates are against Heathrow. We need to send a signal." Another well-manicured old duffer in a gilet, who seems like classic true blue Tory material, instead says, "It's a chance to be heard, because we haven't so far". Reproduce that tactical voting mentality times 20,000 and you've got the 30 percent swing – one of the most stonking reversals in history.

The count comes through around half-two in the morning.

Goldmsith, Zac: 18,630.

Olney, Sarah: 20,510.

Labour are chucked into a distant third, 1515, meaning that goofy railway expert Christian Wolmars loses his deposit.

Zac's speech is short, gracious, his milky eyes set to "trying to be brave in the face of death". And it is death we're talking about. This is a humiliation so total and so public and so self-inflicted that it either leads to radical self-reassessment (Portillo in 1997) or exiting the stage.

When he lost against Sadiq, pilloried for a campaign he let Lynton Crosby racially-charge for him, the night of the count was long. From about 4PM, the candidates sat inside the London Assembly building while downstairs the votes were tallied. It was only midnight when the result was eventually declared. Apparently, as the night wore on, aware of the inevitable, one by one, Zac's campaign team melted away, until it was just the candidate himself, upstairs in an annexe of the building, alone, pacing, waiting for the blade to fall. As he went to the executioner's block yet again, there were at least some supporters still left. He kept his word. He did his hara-kiri. And now his guts are there for all to see, in every sense.

@gavhaynes

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