North East Fife.

North East Fife is a rural and small-town seat spread across the north-eastern corner of the Fife peninsula, with a Census population of about 92,000 and a median age of 46 that sits well above the Scottish norm. No single town dominates: the constituency strings together St Andrews, the market town of Cupar, the coastal communities of the East Neuk around Anstruther and Crail, and a landward hinterland reaching to the Howe of Fife and the Tay coast. Local services across the whole area are run by Fife Council, a single Scottish unitary authority, from which six wards fall within these boundaries. The pattern is one of dispersed settlement rather than concentration, an older population scattered between coast, university town and farmland.

That geography has produced a settled local politics in which the Liberal Democrats hold the upper hand. Across the most recent ward contests the party took the larger share, leading in St Andrews, Cupar, the East Neuk and the Tay Bridgehead, with the Scottish National Party consistently second and Labour and the Conservatives reduced to the margins. The parliamentary picture points the same way, and more emphatically over time. At the 2024 general election the Liberal Democrats won on 54.7 per cent to the SNP's 23.2 per cent, a gap far wider than the knife-edge result of 2019, when barely three points separated the two. Wendy Chamberlain has held the seat for the party since 2019.

On the figures available the seat looks comfortably held rather than contested, with the Liberal Democrat advantage broadening at successive elections and the SNP appearing to lose ground locally. Recent coverage of the area has had a flat, administrative character, dominated by council business -- road and footway programmes, traffic-safety measures and rural anti-poverty planning -- rather than by national controversy, and the constituency has kept a low profile beyond Fife. The longer-running questions are demographic: an ageing, dispersed population and the strain that places on rural transport and services. For now the direction of travel tends to favour the incumbent party, though the seat's recent history shows how quickly its margins can move.