Arundel & South Downs.

Arundel and South Downs is a rural seat with no single dominant town, its character set instead by downland, dispersed settlement and a string of small market towns. The largest share of the electorate -- more than a quarter -- lives outside any built-up area, with the population then spread across Barnham, Storrington, Henfield, Midhurst and Steyning, none of which exceeds nine thousand residents. It is an older, prosperous and overwhelmingly White constituency, with a median age above fifty and around a third of adults degree-educated. Local services are run by three district authorities -- Chichester, which holds the most wards here, alongside Horsham and Arun -- a three-way split that makes administrative geography unusually fragmented for a single seat.

That fragmentation carries into the local politics, where recent ward contests point away from the Conservatives. Across the most recent round, the Green Party took the largest number of wards, with the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives sharing the remainder, and Green and Liberal Democrat candidates have tended to win the rural wards comfortably where they have stood. Most of these contests date to 2023, so the picture is a few years old, though a 2025 result at Midhurst kept the Liberal Democrats in front there. At Westminster the seat remained Conservative in 2024, with Andrew Griffith re-elected on a plurality and the Liberal Democrats second; but his winning share fell to a little above two-fifths, and the gap over the runner-up narrowed sharply from the commanding lead of 2019.

The direction of travel, on the figures available, is from safely Conservative towards genuinely contested, with the local and parliamentary trends now pulling the same way. Recent local coverage has had a markedly administrative character, dominated by the slow-moving question of how West Sussex local government is to be reorganised, alongside the routine business of planning and housing. The combination -- a shrunken Conservative margin, a fractured council map and a strengthening Green and Liberal Democrat presence at ward level -- suggests a seat whose long-settled allegiance can no longer simply be assumed.