THE Tories continue their hold over the Rochford and Southend East constituency after James Duddridge won with 27,063 votes, giving him a majority of 12,286.

The victory was a welcome relief for Mr Duddridge after the 2017 election resulted in a five per cent swing to Labour, with Tory majority being cut by 3,928 votes making it one of the most marginal seats in Essex, second only to Thurrock.

Labour’s candidate Ashley Dalton received 32 per cent of the 46,316 total votes - a drop from the 17,465 votes she won in the last general election. Despite receiving a large share of the result, the party had hoped to further cut the Tory majority.

Navin Kumar, Independent candidate, received 1,107 votes (2.4 per cent), Keith Miller, Liberal Democrat candidate, received 2,822 votes (6.1 per cent), and Jason Pilley, candidate from the Psychedelic Future Party, received 367 (0.8 per cent).

The Tories have held the constituency since it was formed in the 1997 and Mr Duddridge’s victory will give him another five years representing the area which he has held since 2010.

Mr Duddridge and his fellow candidate Sir David Amess even facetimed Conservative Mark Francois, to congratulate him on his win for Rayleigh and Wickford.

Mr Amess comfortably won his Southend West seat and will be standing for deputy speaker of the House of Commons.

Elsewhere, both Basildon Tory candidates fought off opposition by thousands of votes, Castle Point remained in the blue and the Tory majority in Thurrock increased by thousands.

James said: “It was a long campaign of six weeks, so it meant a lot of knocking on doors. We had a team of over 100 people who were regularly out and about, and we also tried things differently this time, using a lot of social media.

“The most common thing throughout the campaign has been people saying I’ve always voted Labour, in the past tense. So the key thing for us is how do we retain people that have voted Conservative in May and future elections.

“For the first time ever I’ve got over 50 per cent of the vote, in fact I got 58.7 per cent, which is the biggest majority I’ve ever got. I think that’s only going to grow.”

Mr Duddridge is likely to have attracted large proportion of the Brexit voters owing to his membership to the European Research Group, which has strongly advocated for leaving the European Union.

Despite consistently voting against Theresa May’s Brexit deal, Mr Duddridge says he will back the withdrawal agreement laid out by PM Boris Johnson.

He continued: “I’m keen get back to a parliament which can get through the withdrawal agreement bill, and now I’ll be taking it through the House of Commons.”

Turnout was 61.25 per cent and the total number of votes 46,316.