Dorking and Horley.

Dorking and Horley is a Surrey seat with no single dominant town but a string of distinct centres spread across the North Downs and the gap between them. The largest is Horley, near Gatwick on the constituency's south-eastern edge, followed by the linked settlements of Great Bookham and Fetcham, and then the market town of Dorking itself; smaller villages such as Salfords, Brockham and Westcott fill in the rural remainder. With a median age of forty-five and roughly two in five residents degree-educated, it has the comfortable, settled character of the commuter belt. Local services are split between two district authorities -- Mole Valley, which covers the bulk of the wards, and Reigate and Banstead, which runs the Horley end -- a division that makes the seat two administrative places stitched into one.

That split is mirrored in the local political picture, which has tilted markedly towards the Liberal Democrats. They have taken ten of the twelve most recently contested wards, on shares often above sixty per cent in the Bookham and Dorking areas, while the Conservatives held a single Horley ward and the Greens took another. The parliamentary result followed the same grain: at the 2024 general election, the first fought on these boundaries, the Liberal Democrats won on around forty-two per cent to the Conservatives' thirty-one, a margin of roughly eleven points. Chris Coghlan, returned that year, sits within this broadly Liberal Democrat-leaning landscape rather than standing apart from it, and has recorded no whipped dissent in recent months.

On the figures available the seat reads as contested rather than settled, a former Conservative area that has moved decisively to the Liberal Democrats across both tiers without yet hardening into anything safe. Recent local coverage has had a largely administrative and infrastructure-focused tenor, with council finances and the reorganisation of services drawing the steadier attention; the pressures on the district authorities have featured more than any national theme. The direction of travel is clear enough, but on these boundaries the seat has only one general election behind it, and its longer-term standing remains open. Whether the recent swing proves durable or merely a single-cycle reaction is not yet something the record can answer.