The Conservative Party has selected Jane MacBean as its candidate for the next general election in Aylesbury, the Buckinghamshire seat Labour took by 630 votes in 2024 — a candidate who wrote that rooftop solar and similar measures would “help us reach our 2050 net zero emissions target.”
Kemi Badenoch has said she wants people to know “this is a new Conservative party,” and that “we are changing policies, we are changing people, we are changing process.” Yet 92 percent of her shadow cabinet — 24 of the 26 names on the party’s own list — were ministers, government whips or special advisers in the failed 2010–2024 Conservative governments.
Ten of those 26 names still sit in the net zero Conservative Environment Network’s own caucus, including shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith, shadow foreign secretary Tom Tugendhat and party chairman Kevin Hollinrake.
Writing in ConservativeHome in February 2023, then a Buckinghamshire councillor, MacBean said the new homes Britain does build “are contributing to our other great challenge: climate change.” Building regulations, she wrote, “do not require new homes to be equipped with low-carbon sources of heating, like electric heat pumps.” A year earlier, she called the environment “a political battleground and resident topic of choice,” told colleagues to “recognise the vote-winning potential of nature and champion it in their upcoming campaigns,” and pointed them to “a set of campaign ideas” from that same network.
The network named “Cllr Jane MacBean” as a speaker on a Conservative conference panel about building “sustainably” in October 2023, and as “Cllr Jane MacBean of @BucksCouncil” at its Clean Air Conference nature session in November 2021.
This is not her first race. In December 2019 she stood in Gateshead and came second, on 13,250 votes to Labour’s Ian Mearns on 20,450. Her own website claims that result was “the biggest Conservative swing in vote share ever experienced in the constituency.” In July 2024 she stood in Bishop Auckland, finishing second on 10,364 votes (25.6 percent) as the Conservative share fell 27.4 points; Reform’s Rhys Burriss took 9,466. Michael Crick’s candidate tracker had listed her on Friday’s shortlist for Lichfield, then said Saturday’s result meant she would not attend Sunday’s selection there.
