Nick Clegg loss surprises Lib Dems and Labour alike

For all their differences, Labour and Liberal Democrat activists in Sheffield Hallam agree on one thing: they didn’t see the constituency result coming. After 12 years as the local MP, the former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg lost his seat to Labour by 2,125 votes.

“Quite frankly, I absolutely wasn’t expecting it,” said Jared O’Mara, the winning candidate.

“It was our manifesto that did it. It resonated with people. If the media hadn’t doggedly gone for Jeremy and character-assassinated him and typecast him as weak … he would have become prime minister.”

Labour was not expecting to improve on its share of the vote from 2015, when Oliver Coppard ran a well-publicised campaign but fell 2,353 votes short of taking the seat.

2:34

The prosperous constituency in south-west Sheffield – once home to the steel city’s factory-owning classes – has never in its 130-year history been represented by Labour. Apart from two years under the Liberals from 1916-18, the seat was Tory until 1997, when Richard Allen won it for the Liberal Democrats.

Constituents shopping in Crosspool on Friday afternoon had mixed reactions to the result; some said they were sorry to see Clegg go while others were less complimentary.

“He only ever came out when there was an election, taking selfies with kids and that,” said Clarissa Russell, 44, who works in Crosspool Fruit, Veg and Flowers.

The store’s owner, Norman Voyse, 58, had backed the former Lib Dem leader in the past but voted Conservative this time, having seen the area change significantly over the 16 years he had run the shop.

“As the older people have died, younger people have come into the more expensive houses,” he said. “The people coming in are earning good money and are usually government workers and people like that.”

Speaking to the Guardian in the run up to the 2015 vote, Clegg admitted that the area had seen demographic shifts. “It used to be a true blue seat,” he said. “So actually the transition from Conservative to Liberal Democrats showed that there was a change there anyway, and that’s just to do with the very sharp increase in public sector employment in South Yorkshire over the past 10 or 15 years.”

Jodi Brookes, a 28-year-old scientist who voted Labour on Thursday after supporting the Lib Dems in 2015, said the result was less about the candidates and more about national issues.

“For me, it was a tactical vote because I didn’t think the Tories should be in power,” she said. “The result reflected the national picture. [Clegg] might have kept his seat if people felt the Lib Dems counted for anything.”

Although O’Mara said his victory was the result of a rejection of austerity politics, activists from both parties said the increased Tory vote (up 10% to 13,561) helped Labour’s chances.

“[Conservatives] didn’t vote tactically for us in the end,” said a local Liberal Democrat activist. “We had tried the Tory squeeze, but it didn’t work.”

Media reports have attributed the result to students taking their revenge for the coalition’s raising of tuition fees after the Lib Dems had promised to abolish them, but that analysis was rejected by activists from both Labour and the Lib Dems. “A lot of students weren’t around because at least one of the universities had finished,” said one local Labour activist. “And lots of the others were busy doing exams.”

O’Mara – who will become the third MP in parliament with cerebral palsy, alongside the Tories Robert Halfon and Paul Maynard – previously worked as a press and campaigns officer for the British Council of Disabled People, a charity that no longer exists. For the past 10 years he has been a music events organiser in Sheffield.

Asked about Clegg, O’Mara said: “I think politicians have tough decisions to make. I very much disagree with so many of the decisions he made but what you’ve got to appreciate is that he’s just a human being. He’s got feelings and emotions and I do feel sorry for him.

“He’s lost his job and I wish him well in the future.”