Chichester.

Chichester is a coastal and downland seat in West Sussex, built around its cathedral city of the same name, which holds about 32,000 people, roughly three in ten of the constituency. Beyond it the population spreads across a chain of smaller centres -- Bognor Regis, with close to 14,000, the Manhood Peninsula town of Selsey at nearly 11,000, and East Wittering -- alongside a substantial rural and dispersed remainder. This is a network-of-towns seat rather than one dominated by a single place, and an older, predominantly white electorate, with a median age of 47 and a third of residents degree-educated. Local services are split between two district authorities: Chichester District Council, which holds fourteen of the seat's wards, and Arun District Council, which holds two.

The seat's politics have moved markedly. At district level the most recent ward contests, last fought in 2023, were won predominantly by the Liberal Democrats, who took around nineteen of the thirty-one wards on record, with the Conservatives, a local alliance grouping, the Greens and independents sharing the remainder. That direction of travel was echoed at the parliamentary level: in 2024 the Liberal Democrats won the seat on 49.2 per cent, well clear of the Conservatives on 25.7 per cent, a reversal of 2019, when the Conservatives took it comfortably on 57.8 per cent. Jess Brown-Fuller has sat as the Liberal Democrat member since that contest, and has registered no whipped dissent in recent months.

On the figures available the seat now looks Liberal Democrat-leaning across both tiers, having shifted from a settled Conservative position within a single cycle. Recent local coverage has had a broadly administrative character, weighted towards council business -- city-centre public realm works, housing-delivery planning and the coming county elections -- with periodic winter flooding along the coastal road network. Among recorded offences, only shoplifting stands out, running about a third above the comparable constituency average. With control freshly turned at Westminster and dominant but not uniform at district level, the seat reads as recently realigned rather than safely held, and worth watching at the next test.