New Forest East.

New Forest East spreads across the eastern fringe of the national park and the industrial Waterside shore of Southampton Water, a seat of older residents -- the median age is 48 -- and an overwhelmingly White population. No single town dominates. Totton, with about 25,700 people, is the largest, followed by Hythe and Dibden Purlieu at roughly 20,200, and behind them smaller Waterside settlements -- Holbury, Blackfield, Marchwood -- and forest villages such as Brockenhurst, Lyndhurst and Sway. A substantial rural and dispersed population fills the rest. Local services run through a single authority, New Forest District Council, which administers all 14 wards within the seat.

The ward picture is genuinely mixed rather than one-sided. Across the most recent district contests, fought in May 2023, the Conservatives took twelve wards and the Liberal Democrats ten, with two independents and one Green seat besides. The Liberal Democrats appear strongest along the Hythe waterfront, the Conservatives across the forest and outlying villages. At Westminster the seat has stayed Conservative, but by a much-reduced margin: Julian Lewis, the MP since 1997, held on with 38.5 per cent in 2024 against Labour's 19.7, where in 2019 the party had commanded close to two-thirds of the vote.

The direction of travel, on the figures available, is from comfort towards contest. Recent local coverage has had a flat, administrative character, dominated by council-tax setting and the prospect of local government reorganisation. The forty-point cushion of 2019 is gone; the seat now reads as Conservative-held but more exposed than its long history would suggest.