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On the night of the U.K. general election, I was on the phone with someone working for the campaigning MP Andrew Bridgen as the first two ballot boxes were opened at his count, and, as these were being verified, I was stunned by the bizarre news that there were only four ballot papers with his name selected in these boxes containing many hundreds of papers.

My heart sank, because in that moment I entertained a thought I had never thought I would have about the British electoral system. And the feeling only got stronger.

By the end of the night, Bridgen had scraped just 1,568 votes…from 33,811 votes in 2019. He went from being the sitting MP of fourteen years, elected four times, to losing his deposit. How could that be possible? Was it fixed? I couldn’t imagine how. But I could certainly imagine why.

Andrew Bridgen was a very popular MP in his North West Leicestershire constituency, and in the wider world. Although—and perhaps because—he had lost the Tory whip over his anti-vaccine stance, he had maintained very high public visibility and a huge following on social media.

An endorsement from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had cemented him in the minds of the public as someone who was a maverick in the very best possible sense. He was becoming, I don’t think it’s too strong a term, a cult figure.

He infuriated his party leadership and the then Conservative government with his opposition to the Covid vaccine and bravely spoke out relentlessly when no one else would.

He had taken a stand not only on lockdown and Covid measures but also on the Post Office scandal, and on the unpopular high-speed rail link HS2, which had led to many people losing their homes. He was strongly pro-Brexit.

He was confronted by the whips and told to come into line many times. He refused. When he managed to secure a debate on the floor of the House on the Covid vaccines, only a very few MPs turned up, and it was widely believed that the whips had prevented attendance.

He was a thorn in the Conservative government’s side, and he was expelled from the party in April 2023. This came after Matt Hancock wrongly and very unfairly accused him of anti-Semitism, twisting his words after Bridgen said the horrendous rise in excess deaths due to Covid vaccination was “the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust.”

His wife, Nevena Bridgen, said at this time, May 2023: “[The] character assassination campaign against my husband is a political instrument designed to assassinate his character, destroy his dignity, isolate and dehumanize him. From the moment he began speaking up about the current issues, our whole family has been targeted and persecuted.”

But his wife eventually left him, going public again in March 2024 to condemn him this time, in an interview that had a mighty strange tone to it in which she now claimed he had been radicalized by the “anti-vax conspiracy theorist movement” and “became their foot soldier.”

Shenanigans of some kind have undoubtedly been going on, and I have no doubt that Mr. Bridgen was and still is suffering attempts to dissuade him from speaking out on the vaccines. I have spoken to him at length about these attempts, and what he has been through is absolutely shocking. I hope it will come out in due course, but first, we need to find out what happened to his vote.

In the weeks leading up to the July 2024 election, his campaign team, one of whom I was friendly with, was hopeful that the word on the ground as they were knocking on doors suggested he had maintained very substantial support. His constituents were coming up to him in the street wherever he went to say “Good luck, Andrew” and “I’m voting for you and so are all my family.”

His constituents appeared to be remaining loyal to him, not least because he had spoken out so vociferously on their behalf. Out canvassing he was overwhelmed by the support that was being expressed for the courage he had shown in going against the establishment to stand up for his voters.

Of course, no one could be sure, but his X following, the huge postbag of support for his questioning of the Covid vaccines, his celebrity endorsements including from RFK…all these things suggested he would retain his seat while running as an independent, or if not, he would run his mainstream opponents very close.

Labour was the other front-runner, but there was also a Reform candidate, which might further split the vote.

An official Conservative candidate, Craig Smith, was standing, but he was keeping a low profile—so much so, in fact, that Bridgen’s campaign team was somewhat puzzled and suspicious about it. The vote was by no means certain, and, as every vote counted, you would have thought the Tories would be out in force trying very hard to raise Smith’s visibility and to explain to voters that he, not Andrew Bridgen, was now the official Conservative candidate.

However, Smith was barely seen. On polling day, the card was displayed with seven names alphabetically, including Bridgen and the new Conservative replacement as follows:

BRIDGEN, Andrew James/Independent
SMITH, Craig Andrew/The Conservative Party Candidate

This, I think, was potentially very crucial. As was the fact that out of nowhere, the exit poll in this constituency was canceled. This was really odd, because if you consider that the sitting MP was independent for the first time, it had become a key marginal. An exit poll had been booked to take place, but it did not go ahead, mysteriously. All attempts to get to the bottom of this, including calling the polling company, have gone nowhere.

Was it withdrawn so that there was no true sense of what the vote actually was, in terms of whom people thought they voted for? I cannot believe I am even thinking this, but this is where we are.

An implausible 95 percent decrease in votes is an implausible 95 percent decrease in votes. And for an MP who is easily the most troublesome for the establishment and who has made the biggest noise about vaccine harm, it has to be wondered about.

It seems to me unlikely that it would be feasible to fix the vote because the only way to do that with paper ballots would be to replace all the boxes with pre-stuffed ones. It is unthinkable.

But what does seem possible is a form of legal swaying, whereby voters were encouraged to confuse the newly independent former Conservative who is their popular sitting MP with the new official Conservative candidate, who is unknown but happens to have Andrew as his middle name.

Note to Deep State election fixers: If you put enough candidates on the ballot paper, can you frustrate the result?

It also seems plausible to me that the official Conservative did not canvass much so it wasn’t obvious to people that there were, effectively, two Conservative candidates, their old one (now stripped of the party title) and a new one.

No one notices internal party politics, and the fact of Andrew Bridgen losing the Conservative whip would not have been a big deal in most people’s lives.

It was to Craig Andrew Smith’s advantage that people might simply assume an Andrew was still the official Conservative.

At one point, Bridgen’s team received a call from a confused voter asking whose name she was to put the cross by if she supported Andrew: the independent or the Conservative, because she couldn’t work it out. How many more voters did not bother to call up and ask?

Perhaps thousands of people mistakenly thought they were voting for their loyal sitting Conservative MP, whom they knew by his first name, Andrew, when they saw a line reading across as follows:

SMITH, Craig Andrew/The Conservative Party Candidate

It is the only plausible explanation I can come up with. I think it is possible the ballot paper was not presented as clearly and therefore as fairly as it might have been.

In any case, Smith, Craig Andrew won 15,859 votes—the sort of number I was expecting Bridgen to win, while Labour’s Amanda Hack won 16,871 and took the seat.

A long, wordy statement was put out by Smith when Bridgen recently alleged there must have been election tampering.

Smith’s statement was so outraged and so confident in claiming no election tampering had taken place I cannot understand it because how would he know for sure? I can only think he suspected or knew he had benefited from the confusion, which was why he sounded so defensive.

He included one incorrect claim: that no exit poll had been planned, or canceled. Yet the polling company confirmed it had been planned, and was canceled.

The market research company Ipsos MORI, which conducts exit polls on behalf of the BBC, Sky Television, and ITV, confirmed that just two weeks before the election they canceled the North West Leicestershire exit poll with no explanation, removing any chance to check voters’ candidate preference.

Bridgen was first elected in 2010, overturning a Labour majority of 4,477 to win with a majority of 7,511, 45 percent of the vote. In the 2015 and 2017 general elections, he kept his seat and increased his margins to 11,373 (49 percent) and then 13,286 (54 percent). In 2019, his majority increased again to 20,400, 63 percent of the vote, with 33,811 voters.

To drop from 63 percent of the vote to 3.2 percent with just 1,568 votes seems so unlikely as to merit an inquiry.

Bridgen’s competitors were virtually unknown in the area. Both had a tiny social media presence. Amanda Hack, who won the seat for Labour, had just 840 followers on Facebook and 2,431 on X, compared with Bridgen’s quarter of a million.

Bridgen has said: “After the election, people were coming up to me, and still are, saying, ‘I voted for you, my whole family voted for you. What happened?’”

North West Leicestershire District Council strongly denied that the vote was tampered with.

A council spokesman told conservativewoman.co.uk: “With the exception of the exit poll being canceled, the allegations being made have no factual basis and are based on inaccurate assumptions.”

However, they did admit that exit poll was canceled and their spokesman said: “We were only informed at the very last minute.”

Bridgen has questioned the time it took to count the vote. The ballot boxes took around 25 minutes to reach Whitwick and Coalville Leisure Centre, where the ballot papers were to be counted. Polling stations closed at 10 p.m. But the count there did not begin until 2 a.m.—a four-hour time lag.

“There was no explanation,” Bridgen has said.

Personally, I dare not think the vote was directly rigged. I sincerely hope Britain has not fallen to a place of vote tampering. But in the treacherous times we live in, and given what has happened in America so many times, I am absolutely ready to admit I could be wrong.