'At the mention of Tony Blair, the same lady hissed.' (Getty)
Turn right out of the station, head down past the village green and the yoga studio and the osteopaths, and you will eventually arrive at the pebbledash semi that made Keir Starmer. Once upon a time, Hurst Green may have been a place of struggle and strife for the Starmers, but today it is one of tranquilising Home Counties comfort and wealth, where the gently rolling wooded hills roll give the illusion of isolation without any of the actual discomfort.
In one sense, the road where Starmer grew up — Tanhouse Road — bathes contentedly in this tranquil Surrey slumber. It is a pleasant land preserved like some vision of Danny the Champion of the World by the socialism of Clement Attlee. There is a stream at one end and a pub at the other, as well as a local “gypsy camp” crouching on the hill behind.
It was here that I found myself earlier this week, traipsing around in the heat of the British summer, trying to understand the agonised soul of Tory England as it contemplated its own annihilation. Trapped between the barbarian tribes of Reform, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, it is unsure whether to wave the white flag or to launch a final quiet fight for salvation at the ballot box on Thursday.
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.
Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016, due to be published in September 2025
TomMcTague 
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SubscribeI have had a kind of pervasive sadness for decades, not depression, but emotional weariness. I always was extremely oriented to nature and eventually got to know it better than any other thing I know in existance, but getting so deep into it I found the heart of nature is a coldness, an inhuman indifference to any degree or amount of suffering. It just is, and is vast and full of trillions of things beginning life, suffering, and dieing in this mad cyclone: Juggernaut’s Great Wheel. I have seen too much suffering to be unaffected.
I am still in nature ongoing, I cannot bear be away from it, I am on the water almost daily, I fish a great deal, I garden, I am walking in the woods a lot, I live in the woods, with my animals. Still, I love natural life, but I cannot stop seeing the gratuitous utter cold cruelty of the life of the wild creatures, and feel the inhumanity of nature’s complete lack of any compassion, its utter indifference to life that is burgeoning on it. The only things which keeps us all from feeling this is being in society where there is some humanity, some compassion exists, even if we are not receiving any, we know it exists, as it does not in nature.
Arctic explorers almost all mention this sense of depression from raw nature, the tropic explorers do, how it weigs on them. It is an odd dualism, grandness, beauty, and endless suffering in a cosmos of indifference.
And a couple weeks ago my delicate, tiny, loving, pretty, dog died miserably because of just one second, it was with someone else, loaned as company because they were depressed, and it was run over. I have not ever known this deep a depression. I have had other dogs die in their time, but this one was so fragile, I cared so for it, for a decade, it was like a childlike innocent, and then a bad death. This just nailed me. More than I would ever have expected. Just a tiny fox like dog, I am so sad I cannot stop feeling this utter despair for the loss. But I do know time will heal it, not yet, but eventually, I hope.
The person who had it when it died is crushed, and we are going to the shelter and get her a dog, and maybe me another one, I still have one, but maybe a second one again will be good.
I was so sorry to read about your little dog
I’m so sorry to hear about your beloved dog. I thought immediately of the words of Dr Ishaq above – “It’s not about curing, it’s about healing”. Nothing can cure loss or make it right, and I think part of us doesn’t want death fixed as if it had never happened – that can feel like a life erased rather than one prematurely cut short. Healing, though, life going on and loss prompting us and the people who care about us to do better things; I think that counts for everything. It sounds like your little dog had a very rich life, and now another dog will be cherished and nurtured and a friendship strengthened by a refusal to let tragedy define it. Your words prove that there isn’t a cosmos of indifference, but one of love. Take care of yourselves like your little fox-like dog would have done, as you and your friend heal.
I’m really sorry to hear about your dog. You’ll always remember him, but I am sure you will find another lovely companion.
Sanford, I am so sorry to hear about the sudden loss of your sweet pup. Her (?) life was about so much more than the last minute of it. There may be a heaven, and if so, she’s there.
My deepest sympathies. Do not despair. Time will not heal you, but it will weary you a bit less, perhaps.
Oh my, so very sorry Sanford. I do know how you feel and it is very tough to go on. I’ve never really gotten over my own similar situation, it still hurts but what I know is that it’s still better to have them and love them than not to and skip the pain.
Thank you Horatio.
Perhaps this epitaph from Ancient Rome to a beautiful dog called Margarita (Pearl) will cheer both you and Sanford Artzen up? You can find it in the British Mseum.
“Gaul sired me, the shell of the rich sea gave me my name: the honour of that name is becoming to my beauty. Taught to roam unexplored woodlands with courage and to chase furry things over the hills, unaccustomed ever to be restrained by heavy harnesses or to endure savage beatings with my snow-white body: for I used to lie in my master’s and my mistress’s lap and mastered the art of resting wearily on a spread-out blanket. Even though I used to be able to express more than I was entitled to with my near silent mouth- that of a dog! –, no one feared my barking. But I have already met my fate, stricken down during ill-omened whelping – me, whom earth now covers under this little marble plaque”
Margarita .
Meanwhile, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders gets thicker and thicker with every new edition and more and more instances of feeling a bit down for perfectly understandable reasons become medicalised.
In the current lockdown I’m sure there are many people who have experienced the feelings of melancholy as described above, including myself. Living alone, with health issues, in the middle of a bleak winter, unable to meet friends … these all conspired as a quadruple whammy on my psyche. Thankfully we heading towards the end for what has been for me one of the most testing of my life and one I do not want to experience again.
German has an interesting word, “Sehnsucht”…which is translated as “longing”, “yearning” or “nostalgia”. It’s always used with an air of sadness or melancholy because you can’t be with the person/have the thing/be at the place to which the feeling refers. The target of the feeling may or may not be something that existed; a place may be a “Sehnsuchtsort” (Ort = place) even if you haven’t been there. The person experiencing the emotional feels incomplete somehow.
Our English word nostalgia comes from a similar idea in Greek – algia, pain and nostos, returning home – the ache you feel when you yearn to go back to a safer place, but can’t.
When I was a child, I came across a painting by Maxfield Parrish—one of those depicting a Classic garden and gorgeous natural surroundings, at a golden and soaring blue twilight. I was struck so deeply by this—the longing, the joy, the sorrow, the sense that I should BE there.
I was so happy to learn I wasn’t alone in this experience when I read “Surpised by Joy” wherein C.S. Lewis described the exact same sort of feeling; he calls it joy. It’s sehnsucht. It’s hiraeth. It may be a brief glimpse or inner knowledge of Heaven.
Goethe wrote a novel ‘Sorrows of young Werther’ about unrequited love and unfortunately it attracted young men to kill themselves. It is thought it was the beginning of the romantic era where the young were praised for being pale and languid-ennui became a fashionable word amongst the middle classes.The young today seem a bit sad and humour-free. Jane Austen makes fun of it in Persuasion where a young man is grieving for his dead fiancee ,reading sad poems and the like , then promptly ups and marries the first new girl he meets.
I’m German, and what’s interesting about the word Sehnsucht is that it’s a compound. “Sehnen” means longing, yearning. “Sucht” comes from “Siechtum” which means illness, especially long-term incurable illness/ infirmity, and the modern meaning of Sucht is addiction. So, Sehnsucht is an addiction to longing or longing yourself sick. It’s a much stronger feeling than nostalgia, which also exists in German (Nostalgie) and is quite mild by comparison.
Thank you Horatio for this.
This is utterly beautiful. The nuance you so beautifully express, the ways of seeing, are what is so needed in our world. So much wisdom here.
A brilliant article, thank you Horatio. Burton attended my grammar school when he was a child and I recall an ancient edition of his book behind a glass case in one of our halls. I haven’t thought about it until I read this, so will look to purchase a copy and read it.
I’m 62. About age 50, and 53, I had what I describe as “an emotional earthquake”. At fifty, it was only rumbles, at 53, it was devastating. I didn’t have psychosis, just a long, intense period of what I can only call “melancholy-angst-intermittent-existential-panic”. It was very tenacious and lasted for years. I described it to others as a mid-life crisis, but maybe it was much more than that. It did involve gerascophobia.
At some point I gave up mentioning it, because, even though it’s rooted in concrete experiences and memories, there’s a certain ineffability to it that even the most well-intentioned people couldn’t really understand. I pondered and pondered, reflected and reflected, and searched and searched the Internet. Little my little, clue by clue, I found words, concepts, books, movies, melancholics throughout history, that gradually helped me ease it. As some commenters have already mentioned, “sehnsucht” was one of them. “Weltschmerz” was another. I sought out and read books and watched films and television episodes that allowed me to confront, face and explore my feelings, that contained bits and pieces of them. I guess it may have been a sort of exposure therapy. It allowed me, to some degree, to objectify my feelings in literature, art and film, and to that extent, lessen their grip.
Static, The Twilight Zone
The Guests, The Outer Limits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJs7pZg_ngQ
She
Lost Horizon
You Can’t Go Home Again
Brave New World
The Swimmer
Just to name a few.
I tried to discuss it on a few Internet forums, but I found it pointless and frustrating. Nobody seemed to quite get it, and many nagged me to “get help”, as in psychotherapy. I have serious problems with psychiatry and modern psychology. My melancholy is not “clinical”. I believe these are very much rooted in reductionist, physicalist and secular worldviews, which I don’t share. I see myself as religio-philosophical, and questions of an afterlife and the nature of the self are very deep, mysterious and unanswered for me, and very existentially relevant. Therapists who have atheist or indifferentist-agnostic biases cannot see or feel the big picture that I do, which is very relevant to what questions I must explore and what course I might take. They dismiss them as distractions and try to control the narrative. Therapy/psychiatry/clinical psychology is like modern shamanism. It will work fine for people who’ve internalized the conventional worldview of the society they grew up in. It will not work for the philosopher, the thinker, the doubter.
I’ve had bouts of melancholy as far back as age 14. I’ve also had ecstatic visions of joy, though I think those are pretty much gone now, washed away by time and bitter experience. Now they’re replaced more by hard realism. Right now, I’m working on letting go of many things I’ve clung to for a long time. It’s not easy, and I accept that. I suppose this sounds morose to most people, but actually it’s very therapeutic. A lot of my melancholy has been caused by longing for the unattainable, most recently, the unattainable past. My terrifying, exciting, “barbarian world” as I call it.
I think I’ve made quite a lot of progress on my own, and one thing I’ve avoided is happy, sappy, positivity and optimism. For me, these just bury the sliver, to fester and the wound to grow. I think I’ll always be prone to melancholy and that’s okay. It’s part of who I am. I don’t want to be cured, and I’m not even quite sure if I want to “heal”. (I’m not sure what that even means.) All life is struggle. I must take the minotaur by the horns and fight him, to the death!”
Please can anyone identify the painting of the lady in the white dress in a walled garden?
I read Clare’s The Light in the Dark at the end of last year. I got a lot out of it, mostly a feeling of wanting to understand better than I had before, especially how to manage when you have children and have to keep going. It was not easy reading, but as it is set up as a diary, it was fairly easy to read small parts every day. It would have been tough to just sit down and read straight through.
What a beautifully written piece. I wish you the best. And I look forward to reading your book.
So, if you expect everything to be good and it’s not, you get depressed.
If you expect everything to be bad and it’s not, you get happy.
If only it were that simple! The article makes it clear it is not!
That is the Buddhist way..
Ah yes right on schedule, here we go yet again with this routine: ‘The mentally ill person whose mental illness nothing but a a quaint ephemeral and picturesque gift of ‘melancholia’ granting the individual vast spiritual insight and considerable social cachet’ -schtick is back, Again!
This is the same trite, glib, shallow, cliched and naive fantasy of “One flew over the cuckoos nest” in which mental illness is a social construct has now returned for what must be the fifth time in as many decades.
“It’s not an illness, man… it’s a BREAKTHROUGH!! He’s not crazy – society is crazy, man! ‘Cause like, If you just, like, talk to them nicely ‘n stuff, man – then all their problems simply vanish, don’t you know?! Stop being so mean by trying to treat them! Maybe they like rotting teeth, hallucinations and shrieking all night behind a garbage bin – until they are finally hospitalized with malnutrition related disease – who are you to impose your establishment hang-ups, man!?”
Here in Vancouver our policy and legislation on mental illness is so utterly misguided that parts of the city resemble an open air insane asylum – dotted with shrieking shouting starving rotten toothed twitching and occasionally violent people who cannot be legally be committed or treated – unless and until they physically injure a passerby- because mental illness is of course nothing more than social construct that vanishes if you just think about it the right way – like this puerile article does.
AN, you are right but you have missed the point of this particular article. You are right in that even a ‘nervous breakdown’ is not as serious in one way as true mental illness. It is easier to treat and easier to heal. Once experienced, few people ever want to end up in that state again. Whereas mental illness! My heart goes out to those sufferers who cannot get proper treatment, who may not be able to decide for themselves even to continue with treatment so they get lost and end up homeless etc etc. We have not served these people well, people who CANNOT without skilled and caring support, get better or even stay on an even keel. But we all of us can do something to support the depressed/melancholic individual whereas without skilled help, mental illness is a disaster for all concerned. Again you are right to be angry about the current obsession with mental health issues in one way as people are depressed in their spirits and emotions and should get better but not ill in the way that a schizophrenic is.
I don’t think that’s what the article says at all.
Try and have more compassion and you may think and feel differently. Do you understand the trauma behind people’s mental illnesses ? Walk in their shoes.