'Pouring money in' Tories spooked as Reform targets Lincolnshire votes

On the gravel pathway of Aggie Chapman's home in the village of West Deeping, a conversation about Lincolnshire's elections next month suddenly shifted from opposition to a local quarry to worries about nuclear Armageddon.

- Ben Quinn

"World politics is so frightening right now that it's all very well worrying about what's happening in our back garden - and yes we don't want the quarry here - but it's kind of insignificant if we end up going into world war three," she told Conservative canvassers including the local MP, John Hayes.

Minutes earlier, Hayes had confidently repeated the adage that "all politics is local" as he knocked on doors with Rob Waltham, an experienced local government leader who is the party's mayoral candidate to lead the newly created Greater Lincolnshire combined county authority (GLCCA).

Yet in doorstep conversations with Conservative voters such as Chapman there was a glimpse of shifting national political ferment as the party faces a serious challenge from Reform UK for more than 1,600 government seats across England.

The mayoral race is a key bellwether, in effect a three-way race between Waltham, Labour's Jason Stockwood, who is a former chair of Grimsby Town football club, and Andrea Jenkyns, a former Conservative MP who defected to Nigel Farage's party.

The GLCCA area is almost England's electoral map in microcosm, welding together traditionally Labour-leaning industrial towns such as Scunthorpe in the north with farmland and prosperous market towns to the south including Grantham, popular with London commuters.