Crawley Nicholas Soames (Contesting different se 16,043 27,750 14,141 0 552 Crawley 22,738 20,848 7,492 0 645 Conservative A number of MPs have taken the opportunity afforded by the widespread boundary changes about to come into force to move to another constituency in which they have a better chance of winning. One of those with the greatest justification is the Armed Services Minister Nicholas Soames, who has left his Crawley seat to move to a much safer haven in the same county, Mid Sussex. The reason why Soames decided to migrate was that the Crawley seat has been made much harder for the Conservatives to defend. It used to include both the Sussex New Town near Gatwick Airport itself and also a number of very Conservative villages, which made all the difference. Soames won by a fairly comfortable 7,765 in 1992 but, with the Boundary Commission's decision to reduce Crawley to a compact urban core, that lead would have effectively been reduced to less than 2,000. There are Conservative neighbourhoods in Crawley itself, in places like Pound Hill and Furnace Green, but the local council has proved a disaster area for them in the 1990s, and the favourite to take the redrawn seat is Labour's Laura Moffat, a nurse and local councillor.

	1,102	2.80	9.03	31
	2,764	7.03	11.17	63
	6,087	15.47	11.25	138
	13,326	33.88	14.70	230
	3,163	8.04	10.45	77
	362	0.92	2.81	33
	2,395	6.09	8.01	76
	6,587	16.75	15.25	110
	1,864	4.74	7.13	66
	1,005	2.55	10.17	25