In Starmerland, the ladies are not for turning Tory women will decide Sunak's fate

And yet, today, you don’t have to walk far from Starmer’s old front door to be shaken from this daydream. The Haycutter, the pub at the end of Starmer’s old road, is a case in point. Though the name nods to the area’s not-so-distant past — the land behind Tanhouse Road, once owned by the Starmers and used as a Donkey Sanctuary, is still used for haymaking by a local farmer — The Haycutter is no drinking hole for farm hands, if it ever was. Instead, it is a place of derivative country chic, all gins and faded wood, Asahi on tap and the obligatory burrata and truffle fries for “starters and nibbles”.

It was here that I found a group of retired women, florally Tory and on the rosé. I mentioned that Starmer had grown up just a few doors down. “Well he should’ve known better, then,” quipped one with an authoritative grin. At the mention of Tony Blair, the same lady hissed. All were dismayed at the state of the country and the idea of a Labour government, but greeted the prospect of Reform becoming the opposition with horror. And yet, they have still not made up their minds who to vote for. “There definitely needs to be a change,” said one. “But frankly there’s no one to change to.” If Sunak had lost these ladies of Surrey, the game was surely up. But had he?

Travelling through the North Downs and into the Kentish Weald beyond — a land now teeming with vineyards rather than hops (for shame) — I encountered this same message of agonised indecision again and again. Even on Tanhouse Road, one woman stopped me as I went poking around looking for clues for the life Starmer once led, and told a similar story: she was unsure who to vote for, and desperately disappointed that, at that moment, no-one had come knocking on her door to persuade her. And she once knew and liked the Starmer family.

For many, it seems, the election has barely even begun to penetrate their lives. There seems to be a hesitation about what to do about it — a bewildered apathy. Most I spoke to wanted the Government squashed, but beyond that were unsure. And this feeling seems to be felt particularly strongly by women.

For Rishi Sunak, however, it is these quietly fuming Tory women of the shires who may now decide the difference between respectable defeat and total humiliation. That at least is the conclusion of a number of Tory pollsters and candidates staring into the abyss.

The pollster Andrew Cooper, for example, who grew up in Surrey and went to school with Starmer before going on to advise David Cameron, told me that these hesitating women were the last great hope for the Conservatives: the new “shy Tories”, as he put it. “Having lived through the 1992-97 period when the polls were wrong because of what became known as the shy Tories,” he said, “I think all of the conditions are there — that we may have shy Tories again.”

And the figures certainly seem to back up his analysis. Even with just a few days to go, a poll shared with UnHerd shows that some 16% of those who voted Conservative in 2019 still don’t know who to vote for. Of these undecideds two-thirds are women. And of these, 70% are over 50, 80% voted Conservative at the last four elections — and the vast majority voted Leave in the EU referendum. They are also disproportionately concentrated in the south of England, with 44% living in the shires around London, while hardly any actually live in the capital itself. Of these women, just 10% say they have ever been tempted to vote Labour and even fewer have thought about backing the Lib Dems. And yet they are still apparently undecided.

So, why the “shyness”? Certainly, the women in the pub could not be described that way. One explanation is simple: like much of the rest of the country, they don’t like the Government — and, even more to the point, they don’t like Rishi Sunak. According to Cooper’s polling of 1,000 one-time Tories, only 5% thought Sunak was strong and only 4% thought he “shared my values.”

For the Conservative campaign, this leaves Sunak in a particularly difficult situation. For these undecided shy Tories, they simply do not want to hear anything about why the Government deserves another chance — because they don’t think it does. “The only thing you can say to them,” Cooper said, “was ‘look, we’re going to lose anyway, and people like you do not want a Labour government with a huge majority, and the only way to avoid that is, is hold your nose and vote Tory again’.”

He points out that, contrary to some arguments that there is nothing Sunak could have done to turn around the Tory party’s fortunes, there has been a steady decline in the proportion of 2019 Conservative voters saying they intend to vote Tory again at the next election. Before “Partygate”, the proportion sticking with the Tories had dropped to 84%. By the height of that crisis, the proportion had dropped significantly into the mid-60s, before falling into the low 50s after Truss’s mini-budget. Since Sunak took over, however, the proportion of 2019 Tory voters who say they will vote Conservative again has plummeted to 44%. “And that’s on Sunak,” as Cooper put it to me.

But as the election draws to its conclusion, how many of these “shy” Tories will actually hold their noses to save the party? One Tory candidate in the Blue Wall told me the women he had spoken to “don’t want their friends to know they are voting Conservative”. Their husbands were grumpier, he added, and more likely to vote Reform. Another Tory candidate from the Home Counties told me she had certainly noticed women were more undecided in her canvassing: “Definitely.” But why? “They worry about public services [but] they’re not inspired by Keir — they’ve been too equivocal about women’s rights.” From a Tory perspective, J.K. Rowling’s attack on the Labour party last week could not have been better timed.

And yet, there has been little change in the polls. Indeed, there is no guarantee these women and their grumpy husbands will actually turn out to save the Conservatives. In fact, the reality could even be worse. In Tunbridge Wells, half an hour or so away from Hurst Green, I met one elderly couple who, at first, seemed to neatly match Cooper’s analysis of 2019 Tory voters. Yet, in this case it was the husband who was still, reluctantly, planning to vote Tory while the wife was still so furious she had not made up her mind. She might even turn up and spoil her ballot by drawing “a pretty picture” in protest. The shy Tories of 2024 might actually be a mirage — they’re just angry ones.

What is so remarkable about this election is that, just five years on, from Johnson’s triumph in 2019, we are contemplating not only the Conservative Party losing control of the Red Wall in the north, but also swathes of the Blue Wall which has for so long stood around London. Is this a part of a permanent change in British politics, the suburbs spreading into the former Conservative heartlands just as urban sprawl of the big Democratic cities of the United States is turning once-safe Republican states like Georgia and Virginia purple?

In private, I was told that Starmer’s campaign director Morgan McSweeney has been warning people that it would be wrong to draw any long term forecasts from the results this Thursday because of the volatile nature of modern politics. The reason for this is that, during the Eighties and Nineties, the vast majority of people always voted for the same party. People tended to have a clear sense of which party protected their interests, making it harder to persuade people to switch. As a result, relatively small swings were required to win elections. In 1979, for example, Margaret Thatcher won with a swing of around 5%. Today, the polls are suggesting Labour could win with a swing four times greater than this. The number of voters each party can count on has shrunk dramatically.

Underneath it all, then, is a new volatility spawned by the confusion voters now feel about which party represents people like them. Are the Tories for the rich or the “left behind”? Are they for the establishment or the Red Wall? And what of Labour? Are they for the forgotten small-town folk or the urban liberals? In Surrey and the Kentish Weald people seemed confused. Among the ladies of the Haycutter, one half-joked about how “common” it was that one of her neighbours was displaying a Vote Labour sign in their front garden. Yet, among the great middle-class sea of urban professionals spreading out from the cities of England, the sentiment is now entirely the other way around. Voting Left is a display of middle class distinction; only the old and the suspect vote otherwise — the sort who still drink in pubs that do not offer burrata.

According to the latest MRP polls, this sea of liberal voters is on course to wash away the last Tory tribes of old England. The great irony, however, is that this wave of Starmerite red may finally wash up on the high ground of Starmer’s conservative Hurst Green. Unless, of course, the angry women of the old world decide, reluctantly, that they must do their duty to save their tribe.

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Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Betting The House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election.

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