DBWI: Have Kensington elect a Labour MP

OOC: In honour of Labour's recent electoral successes, including having Kensington elect a Labour MP for the first time in its history (which has convinced me that after the next election Labour will win a 100+ seat majority and Vince Cable will become the leader of the opposition ;)), here's a fun little DBWI.

At present Kensington is the wealthiest constituency in the UK and has reliably returned Tory MPs with hefty majorities, with the exception of a by-election in 1987 where they scraped through with a 3% majority. Your challenge is to have them elect a Labour MP. Bonus points if it is a hard-leftist. The catch is you can't use the 87 by-election, because that would be to easy.
 
Mrs Borwick lost because she had campaigned for Brexit and her constituency is a posh cosmopolitan Remainer stronghold. People there vote Tory because they have money, not because they are ideologically conservative.

As for the challenge, I choose the 1983 election. SDP's William Goodhart has no campaigning experience and his newly formed party cannot compete with the Con/Lab party machines. One month before the election, Conservative MP Brandon Rhys-Williams dies from a stroke. The Tories nominate Michael Portillo as their candidate. To their consternation the young candidate makes a series of gaffes, calling Michael Foot "the most dangerous socialist since Hitler and Stalin" and the Falklands War "a victory of civilised Europeans over primitive brutes". Between the unlucky Goodhart and the noisy Portillo, Labour candidate Benjamim Bousquet silently emerges. On election day he steals away the constituency with a 9% swing, narrowly beating Portillo with a 1% majority and 42% of the votes.

/edit: changed a name
 

Bulldoggus

Banned
Well, if you lived in a place like the US, where politics is more Rural vs. Urban than Left vs. Right, then that might work. Otherwise, utterly impossible. I mean, maybe if Kendall had beaten Cooper to the leadership? You'd need a serious centrist though.
 
Maybe if there's somehow a split on the right, between an official Tory candidate and an independent with prior service in the constituency? Half the Tory voters go for the party; half go for the individual; Labour somehow convince the other parties on the left to stand down and manage to take the seat.
 
Maybe if there's somehow a split on the right, between an official Tory candidate and an independent with prior service in the constituency? Half the Tory voters go for the party; half go for the individual; Labour somehow convince the other parties on the left to stand down and manage to take the seat.

For instance if the Tory Kensington MP has a run at the leadership & fails, then quits the party to stand as an independent?

Or if the Tories move a little too much towards the economic centre for the MP's tastes, and (s)he resigns from the party, claiming "I never left the Conservatives, they left me"?
 
Alan Clark's 1997 majority in Kensington & Chelsea was 9500. A bigger Blair landslide seems the best bet.
  • John Major wins the 1992 election with a 3 seat majority, rather than 21.
  • The Tory civil war over Europe is worse than OTL, bringing about a successful vote of no-confidence in Major in 1995, and hence a 1995 election.
  • John Major's affair with Edwina Currie is revealed a week before the election.
  • The Tory civil war results in multiple right-wingers standing.
  • Labour and the Liberal Democrats do seat deals. The Liberal Democrats don't stand in Kensington.
 
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