COLLEEN Fletcher has kept her seat in Coventry, celebrating a win despite a torrid night for the Labour Party nationally.
With a turnout of 59 per cent, Mrs Fletcher took Coventry North-East with a majority of 7692, the thinnest in the history of the constituency.
Fletcher topped the poll with 23412, Sophie Richards for the Conservatives polled 15720, the Brexit Party’s Iddrisu Sufyan achieved 2110, Nukey Proctor for the Liberal Democrats had 2061 and Green Party candidate Matthew Handley had 1141 votes.
In her acceptance speech, Mrs Fletcher said: “Putting yourself forward is never easy, and my fellow candidates fought respectful campaigns.
“It is an honour to serve the people of Coventry North East as your member of parliament, in the community that I was born and raised in and continue to live with my family.
“I hope that over the last four years I have shown through my words and my actions that I can and will always stand up for the interests of our city and our communities.
“I fought this election campaign on delivering more investmenet for our communities and public services, so we can build a stronger and fairer society that cares for everyone, and delivers the real change we need.”
Speaking on the predicted Tory landslide election victory, Colleen tol the Coventry Observer: “The result is disappointing – you can continually ask questions but there are ways that you can move on the things you want to do and that is what I will be doing with my two colleagues in the neighbouring constituencies.
“I have fought three elections which would mean I should’ve been in parliament for 15 years, but I haven’t even been there for one term. So that has been difficult, it looks that the Conseervatives have a majority tonight, and I expect they will use that to wreak havoc across the country as they have done over the last ten years.”
