Hadleigh Castle, one of the featured properties, was built in the 13th century but now lies in ruins on a hill above a section of the Thames meandering towards the North Sea. People like me who grew up in this densely populated, marsh-fringed stretch of Southend might know Hadleigh as a right-of-passage destination for teenage drinking, rather than for any association with Edward III. Sheltered from the wind in one of the towers, you could truly escape the streetlights, Neighbourhood Watch patrols and trendies spoiling for a ruck.

The surrounding constituency of Castle Point — named after the ruin and containing Hadleigh, Benfleet and Canvey — is, according to new polling by UnHerd, the most monarchist place in Britain: 67% think it’s “a good thing”. Neighbouring constituencies had similarly high results. Essex, it seems, more than any other county, belongs to the king.

Castle Point is an area closely linked with the Thatcherite stereotypes of Essex Man and Essex Girl. It is notable, too, for being at the top of two other charts that have come to define Britain: it had the third-highest Leave vote in 2016, and it has the highest percentage of property ownership in the UK, with 82% of its dwellings owner-occupied.

Monarchism and home ownership are intrinsically linked; there are, after all, few more voracious property owners than the Windsors. As Londoners leaked into Essex in the postwar years, if they didn’t move to the new towns of Basildon or Harlow, they swapped a life of anxiety under landlords for a dabble at sovereignty. Soon, the transfer of the working classes from east London’s slums to Essex’s new suburbs became a shiny symbol of home ownership, particularly after Thatcher’s Right To Buy scheme.

Yet property ownership in these parts was not triggered by Right To Buy, but by a boom in the sale of parcels of land on which migrating Londoners with not much money but plenty of resourcefulness built DIY homes. On to this patchwork of land, acquired wholesale by cunning developers, were built thousands of makeshift homes. It’s partly how my father’s family came to live in Essex, by building a bungalow in a woodland clearing in Thundersley, which is now part of Castle Point. The rectangular, pebble-dashed dwelling my Nan grew up in is long gone; the plot now houses a luxury detached property for the modern Essexperson on a street filled with SUVs parked on lit-up driveways. When I recently visited the area for my new book, I met a woman who lived in one of the surviving bungalows built by my great-grandfather. She was very keen to talk about the history of the people who built the original estate, but not in stories of kings and the queens. “I like real history,” she said.

Before the Coronation, 1953 was already a pivotal year for Essex: the Great Flood that swamped the lowlands up the east coast of Britain killed 120 in Essex, the majority in low-lying clusters of seaside bungalow communities in Jaywick and Canvey Island. The newly-widowed Queen Mother visited Benfleet near Canvey to meet evacuees, many of whom would never move back to their ruined homes. Her visit was reported in Hilda Grieve’s The Great Tide as a morale booster and source of salt-of-the-earth stories: “There was I in me nightie, up to me neck in water with the bloody cat in me arms. What was I to do? Chuck the bloody cat in the drink?’”

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The rescue effort relied on a flurry of Royal prefixes. Evacuees from suddenly sea-filled places such as Foulness Island were taken to the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club in Burnham; missing persons on Canvey Island were diligently recorded in the form of case cards by the South Benfleet branch of the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service. It was, as the social historian Ken Worpole observed, a purely practical upshot of a post-war society of “small platoons” and the omnipresence of the monarchy in a kingdom that had not fully realised its Empire was in terminal decline.

Yet Essex’s modern affiliation with the monarchy may still prove to have a limited shelf life. Many of the outbursts of fondness for the Queen after she died stemmed from the fractured connection between civic life and the monarchy, as if the decline of the country were somehow inexorably linked with the life and death of Elizabeth Windsor — whereas it perhaps has more to do with the policies of Right To Buy architect, Margaret Thatcher. As house prices outpace local wages, Essex property is less accessible to first-time buyers than ever, beckoning already wealthy Londoners to buy property in the county and chipping away at its reputation of offering upward mobility through homeownership.

John, a retired postman and sometime anarchist I met in a pub in Southminster on the Dengie Peninsula, talked fondly of receiving Royalty In Essex when he was a schoolboy in Walthamstow, which was still part of the county in the Fifties. John had voted for Brexit, but was not a card-carrying Conservative property-owner, much less a monarchist. He lived in a modest rental property in a side street away from the pub, trying to invent a new kind of software on a knackered PC that made spread betting more profitable for him (I don’t think it ever paid off). Back at his house, he pulled the slim book from a shelf, still in pristine condition, and talked at length about the hope and promise it had symbolised 70 years ago. When Britain’s tarnished king is crowned this year in a country that feels like it is bottoming out, Essex — and England — will not be able to say the same.

This is where David Amess, the Tory MP, was killed last year at a constituency surgery. Due to this, Labour and the Liberal Democrats are not standing in the by-election today where they might, in other circumstances, have tried to dent the immense Tory majority. (Amess took 60% of the vote in 2019, in a Leave-supporting seat.) It wouldn’t happen though, and perhaps the opposition parties know that, and their politesse is also cynicism. If there is a Boris Johnson land it is here. This is Essex, the land of spurious self-confidence. Why else build a mile long pier into the mud of the Thames estuary, where no one wants to go? Because you can. The men of Essex have not lost their affection for Johnson because they are like him. When Johnson said “voting Tory would cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3” — and it is, in retrospect, a very truthful manifesto, in that it is dreams — he was talking to Essex Man and the things he wanted and understood. And, so, when I ask people in Southend about Johnson and the parties, they either admire him or forgive him.

“I broke the [pandemic] rules,” says one man. “I saw my Mum. I wasn’t going to not see my Mum. The thing before the funeral [of Prince Philip]. That was a bit a naughty. God bless her.” But “Naughty” is an indulgence. It is not a critique. “I didn’t get caught but he did,” he says, “I don’t give a monkey’s.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Boris,” says another man, angry even at the insinuation that there might be. The only critical man is a fishmonger, and he only says, “Better the devil you know.” Fish are swimming in the estuary, he says, and customers are plentiful. Things are looking up.

I am looking for the parties to the right of the Conservatives. With Labour and the Liberal Democrats — and also the Greens and Reform — absent from Southend, they have the field to themselves. (The Conservative candidate, the barrister Anna Firth is, as is usual when defending a constituency in a by-election, so elusive as to effectively be a myth. I only email her campaign to exercise my finger joints.) You can learn a lot about what people think when you talk to what is called the far Right, because almost no one begins their political journey there. Something took them there. And sometimes, if you are unlucky, you can predict the future.

But not always. I meet Jason Pilley, the Psychedelic Movement candidate and party leader in the Utopia Coffee Shop off Southend’s main drag. He is wearing a pin-striped jacket. He was once a Green — “they hate each other,” he says, because he has no filter to speak of — and his candidacy is a piece of performance art, or scream. He speaks fast, like a man who is never listened to enough, and calls Southend, “heaven and hell. You can’t win in this town [as an MP] unless you are a Tory.” He says, “I’ve never gone into an election thinking I can win. There’s a couple I’ve thought: ‘I won’t come last’. I write novels and poetry and I kind of see politics as part of that.” He hands me his manifesto. He is for allotments and renewable energy and martial arts training for children and cannabis and LSD clubs “around Southend”. He would burn incense in all public buildings and would replace the Queen with the Christian stabbed at Speakers’ Corner last summer: Hatun Tash. He wants to make Tommy Robinson a peer. It ends: “RIP David Amess”.

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As I read, he shouts at me because I criticised Tommy Robinson, and I have not read the Koran. Pilley is in politics for personal self-renewal, like the Corbynistas, and I leave wondering whether it is even responsible to interview him. He is very interesting, but he speaks for no one but himself. His policies are a collection of personal dreams, and prejudices, and I think he knows it.

I also speak to the English Democrat candidate Catherine Blaiklock by telephone because she is not in the constituency to campaign. I think she is too frightened. She lives in Norfolk, where she runs a B&B. Blaiklock left Ukip due to its links with Tommy Robinson under its former leader Gerald Batten. She co-founded the Brexit Party with Nigel Farage but left when Hope Not Hate publicised her anti-Muslim tweets. She has landed with the English Democrats. She sounds strained but pleased to be speaking to a journalist.

“Standing on an anti-immigration, anti-terrorism, anti-crime, Right-wing platform is a very unpleasant and nasty experience in Britain,” she says. “Anyone who has spoken out about illegal immigration has had to have protection and anyone who has spoken out illegal immigration and mass immigration has had their characters thrown through the mud”. She doxed herself, she says, by putting her address on public record and TripAdvisor customers posted fake reviews of her B&B. “Some of them were funny.” But it was hard to get them taken down, she says, which, when you consider the misery some migrants suffer, sounds slightly self-obsessed. Even so, “This should be a referendum about mass migration per se. Nobody has ever never had a vote on it. People are frightened and people are frightened to talk about it”. In her guesthouse, Blaiklock sounds as isolated as a woman can be.

I go to the Daddy Dragon rally, which is filled with people on mobility scooters wearing the bright yellow sweatshirts of the English Constitution Party and listening to a history of England, courtesy of Daddy at the microphone and the enormous copies of Magna Carta which travel with him. Some people are here merely because their friends are here. They sit calmly at the café drinking beer. There is even a 75^th birthday party for an ex-soldier called Nobby bolted on to the rally. The groups combine, fall apart, combine again. Nobby shows me photographs of his father, who was also a soldier, and I see a vaccine appointment card gleaming in his wallet. Splitter.

But there are true believers too. “Even though you are English, living in England, you are not actually English living in England,” a man tells me. They are all hungry to be listened to, and courteous, because they are used to be being despised. “You are just a British citizen living in Britain which actually makes no sense because there are four countries in the United Kingdom,” he says. His eyes widen, as if in pain. “I’m not Scottish and I’m not from Wales and I’m not from Northern Ireland. Everyone else has their culture pushed to the front and we’re not even allowed to talk about it in case you offend someone who’s just come over.”

I also meet a man with two greyhounds who runs a group called Mad Mick’s Conspiracies — alongside his own splinter group Mad Mick’s Resistance — who calls Covid, “the PLANdemic. None of it is real.” Why does he feel failed by conventional politics?” It’s in the words,” he says, as if giving me the key to a great secret, “they tell you themselves. The Left-wing and the Right-wing are two wings of the same bird. So, it doesn’t matter which one you vote for. You’re still getting the same bird in power. I don’t vote. I will never vote again.”

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“We’re the last indigenous group that doesn’t have a parliament,” says the next from his mobility scooter. “We just need to get England recognised as a country, to get us sorted out so we can get some stalwarts of the community in parliament: every day working people like Graham, myself, yourself, anybody.” What he says is not extraordinary. This is the common disconnect between those who have power, and those who feel they have none. But that he weeps continually as he says it is extraordinary. “The politicians are there for themselves,” he says through his tears. “You pull my strings. I’ll pull your strings. You just can’t warrant it. We need to get in, take our parliament back, get our people right and look after ourselves. And get rid of the mainstream politicians, the judges and get them starting thinking English again. Because there’s a lot of people who believe in England.” I don’t know if he is aware that he is calling for an end to parliamentary democracy, and it will not be as sunny as he thinks. If he is, he does it weeping.

At the end of the rally, Kay Shemirani, a former nurse, now struck off, speaks her combination of conspiracy theory and health advice. “They think you’re stupid,” she says. “We are the slaves, the slaves in debt. A whistle-blower right from the very top [of the NHS] told me, ‘They are doing black magic, they refer to us as toilet rolls’”. I have been here an hour, and it doesn’t even sound strange anymore. This is a parallel universe, though it shares some elements with mine. I believe in their powerlessness, and their grief. I just don’t think it was immigration that brought them here.

I also meet the remnants of Ukip, sullen and dispirited. They have erected a gazebo in a park and have placed Ukip mugs and Ukip badges on a table. Vote Leave says one badge. Take Back Control says another. This is a campaign from 2015, when they came third in the general election by percentage points with 12.6%, and they know it. Some of them are self-aware and ask me, privately, how the respectable element of Ukip can divorce itself from the racism I hear that day.

The Ukip candidate, Steve Laws, is slender and pitted. He was politicised by illegal immigration. He likes to stand at the edge of Channel in Folkestone, where he lives, making notes of the number of migrant boats in the English Channel: “8,500 in the year 2020; in the year 2021 it was 28,500. This year I am predicting at least 50-60,000 will arrive, all at the taxpayers’ expense and all placed into hotels and then into social housing”.

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Laws is a painter and decorator. “I believe immigration should be controlled because otherwise it affects the working class and ultimately housing becomes an issue,” he says, “jobs become an issue, wages remain low.”

I have followed Ukip for years and I have never seen them so bereft. It is, among other things, an education in getting your heart’s desire. When I find Laws at the end of the day, and ask him how it went, he says, “Nobody had much to say, not the people we met today anyway. A lot of people I don’t think are going to vote. But we don’t know until the ballot day.” Even so, “I haven’t been shouted at or abused which I kind of expected if I’m honest, being Ukip.”

Laws is an aggrieved man spending his life staring at the Channel when the true cause of his misery is behind him. I think that about all of them except Pilley, who speaks only for himself. The issues Laws grapples with — failing public services, housing, wages, the gap between rich and poor, the sheer disconnect — are not invented or untrue. They are real and they will get worse. Laws is right about everything, it seems to me, except the solution. That is, he sees the crime scene clearly, but he has no idea who the murderer is.

It is easy to laugh at Laws and Daddy Dragon and Mad Mick. I have laughed. I went to Ukip conference in 2004 and laughed. All the correspondents did. We laughed at their clothing and their speech and their manners. We laughed at their earnestness. We laughed at their class. We laughed at how they didn’t know how to conceal themselves for us, and how they always got everything wrong. We printed the laughter in newspapers, and we congratulated ourselves on the quality of our satire, and assumed they existed for nothing other than our satire. You know, of course, what happened next.

The parliamentary seat of Southend West had only three MPs in 86 years, which itself reflects the sense of cultural and community continuity in the area. Channon was succeeded at Westminster by his son Paul, who after almost 40 years himself was succeeded by David Amess, who was murdered doing his job as an MP last Friday. Sir David’s atrocious killing appeared random: we may never know why his murderer settled upon him, and upon committing an act that astonished and horrified quiet, ordinary Southend, which had until then remained in its own distinct corner of Essex, harmlessly going its own way – exactly like its late Member of Parliament. The murder of Jo Cox in 2016 was a comparable atrocity: but insofar as these acts of wickedness can ever have a rationale, her murder was committed by a constituent with a neo-Nazi obsession, who is now serving a whole life sentence, rather than by an outsider who seems to have settled on the MP for Southend West for reasons yet to be determined.

Leigh-on-Sea, the part of the Southend conurbation where Sir David was holding the surgery where he was murdered, still has evocations of this part of the Essex coast from the age before it became suburbanised. Leigh is a place with one of the best qualities of life in the country. The housing stock is mainly of high specification, though not extortionately expensive, and the marine views come with easy proximity to London. Crime is not considered a problem: all of this underlines why the shock of Sir David’s murder has hit the community so hard. It is not merely because of his well-attested popularity, but because this relatively sedate and unpretentious part of Essex is not remotely used to experiencing shocking events of this nature. In a different age, Channon made frequent visits to his constituency — more so than most MPs of the era — and found his constituents diverting. From his occasional descriptions of them — mayors who would like a knighthood and the odd internal wrangling in the Conservative Association — not a lot has changed in that respect either.

Historically, on the main shipping route from the northern continent into London, Leigh was once a prosperous port. These days, quite a few of the local residents have little boats of various descriptions that they play about in on the water. One can see them grounded on the vast mud flats offshore when the tide is out. The North Sea is but a few miles away to the east, and quite a few locals take their craft off past Shoeburyness and Foulness Island, and fish for a hobby. Leigh started off as a fishing village, and what remains of that enterprise notably harvests the cockles that still give visitors the definitive Southend experience.

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But, then, in the 18^th century, the channels that led to Leigh silted up and the marine trade dried up; while at the same time, tiny Southend, to its east, was becoming a popular resort. Much of old Leigh — vestiges of which still exist in a few wood-framed buildings and in the medieval church — was demolished in the 19^th century when one of Southend’s two railways was constructed. It starts at Fenchurch Street and leads through the mainly charmless flatlands of south Essex, calling for the last few decades at the new town of Basildon, which Sir David represented from 1983 until moving on to Southend in 1997. A second railway, from Liverpool Street, takes a more northerly route, through a Brentwood now made famous by the delights of The Only Way Is Essex, and comes into Southend from the north. Their arrival, 140 or so years ago, marked the transformation of the area into part of the commuter belt, and initiated the wave of late Victorian building that has marked out much of outer Southend ever since. It also represented a social change that brought a large, respectable middle class into the area, further waves of which have arrived ever since, their aspirations sustained by the town’s excellent grammar schools. It has also helped secure a Conservative majority in what since 1950 have been Southend’s two parliamentary seats, and which had been held by the party since the constituency was carved out of the former South-East Essex seat in 1918. In political as well as in most other respects, the area is one that over decades has undergone no radical change.

Leigh is also an artists’ colony, with an estimated 70 painters, ceramicists and other creative people working in the town, selling their work through several galleries. Not least because of this, it has become the smart end of Southend; as elsewhere in Essex, the decline of the high street has led to premises being filled with bars and restaurants, and the service economy taking over while many of Southend West’s inhabitants take themselves off to London every day. It’s not exactly the Côte d’Azur, but it serves a remarkably similar purpose for the those who live in and around it. And it is emphatically the sort of place where people don’t get murdered in cold blood, least of all a hugely popular Member of Parliament.

Many of Sir David’s constituents would fit the profile for Essex Man, or his wife. The various waves of new, ambitious residents who have moved in to Southend since the war had their roots in the East End of London: they may even have first seen the place on one of those days trips to paddle in the sea and eat cockles, ice cream and sticks of rock, or to play in the one of the amusement parks, the most famous of which was the Kursaal. It was one of the first such entertainments in the country when it opened in 1901; it closed in the Seventies and the building it was situated in stands empty near the town’s so-called “golden mile”. The local government ward around it records one of the highest levels of social deprivation in the country; Southend is a town that has extremes of wealth and poverty. Much of its centre was redeveloped in the Sixties as the tourist trade collapsed with the advent of cheap foreign holidays, a succession of ugly concrete blocks being built to try to transform the place into a business centre. To an extent, it worked: the town is now home to the central VAT administration, another tribute to its sedateness.

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Essex veered to Conservatism from the moment most agricultural workers were enfranchised in the 1880s. At the 1886 general election, which put Salisbury’s Unionists in for six years, most of the county returned a Unionist MP. The great agricultural depression that hit rural England after 1873 hit the newly-enfranchised men hard, and Liberal free trade policies were held to blame for it. Even at the Liberal landslide of 1906, when all of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk and all but one seat in Suffolk went Liberal, about two-fifth of Essex remained Tory. After the Great War the party’s grip on the Essex electorate stiffened, helped by the enfranchisement of women who followed Mrs Pankhurst’s example and voted Tory. A story told by the distinguished journalist Colin Welch, when campaigning for Rab Butler in Saffron Walden at the 1945 election — when Labour won a landslide — sums up the independent and, indeed, aspirational mind of the locals even then. A local titled lady, who felt she was doing her civic duty in getting a Labour government elected, approached a yeoman farmer leaning on his five-bar gate to tell him why Mr Attlee deserved his vote. The farmer raised his tweed hat, listened politely and at the end of the lecture simply said: “Ma’am, oi’ve made moi poile, and yo’ can go ter buggery.”

The new towns and the influx from the East End post-war, especially in Sir David’s part of Essex, brought in Labour voters in large numbers for the first time: but the combination of essentially 18th century temperament of the indigenous population — who, like the farmer, just wished to be left alone to make their pile — and the barrow-boy inheritance of the East End proved a lethal cocktail to socialism. Mrs Thatcher’s promise in 1979 to create a new class of property-owners by allowing the sale of council houses to their tenants, and her subsequent deregulation of the City that broke the stranglehold on it of the old boy network and allowed the barrow boys to become filthy rich lit the blue touch paper under an Essex economic boom. New private estates popped up, wine bars opened, and Essex Man was invented: it was a short step from there to TOWIE. Essex became a county of small businesses: the Tory betrayal of such people after Black Wednesday led to half of Essex’s seats going Labour in the Blair triumph of 1997. Today every single seat in Essex is Conservative, reflecting the local, still Thatcherite ideology of hard work, aspiration and reward. More than ever they are making their piles, and socialism and any other doctrine can go to buggery.

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Southend is, but in other ways is not, the Essex of what has become the popular imagination. It has a very high population density, yet its conurbation is bordered by marshlands where it is not bordered by the sea. It has a relatively unchanging culture, a tribute perhaps to the high proportion of its residents who are over 55. Yet it also has a strong youth culture, as its nightlife testifies, but many of the young people’s grandparents were putting themselves about on the Front back in the early Sixties, when mods and rockers would gather there in the hope of a pitched battle. As with all Essex towns, there have been new housing developments in recent years, though mainly on the periphery: and Southend, with what in recent years has been renamed London Southend Airport, looks outward in a way that perhaps much of Essex does not.

It is deep Essex not in the way that one often thinks of the term – the picture postcard villages such as Finchingfield or the Bardfields, 30 miles to the north, or the ancient market towns such as Thaxted and Saffron Walden – but in the sense of its distinct culture, bred for three or four generations out of the East End, and which made its new home on the mudflats of the Thames Estuary. It is in that that its Conservatism lies, why it and Sir David Amess took to each other so naturally and so well, and why despite its pockets of poverty the Left has never made any impact there. And in this generally happy world of its own making, it is no wonder the shock of what happened to an entirely innocent member of the Essex family on Friday is so visceral, and so hard to absorb.

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 2): 1938-43, edited by Simon Heffer, is published by Hutchinson.

Basildon was originally forbidden from having a railway station. When it was built, in the 1950s, it was meant to be Somewhere. As a shortcut to developing that sense of place, and with the breathtaking arrogance of the age, the planners simply decreed that Basildon would be an inward-focused town. It was designed to be a patchwork of low-rise suburbs, heavily zoned — its new community life located around the big new factories that formed its economic motor.

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That isn’t to say that it has been an easy ride. Britain’s first lockdown seriously dented drug dealers’ freedom of movement, and their supply has been hit by a number of significant domestic and international drug busts. In the world of narcotics, at least, the past year will no doubt come to be remembered as an era of stockpiling, increased prices and lower quality cocaine as dealers “trod” heavily on their wares with more cutting agents — not to mention the resulting boom in the cannabis market.

Yet in many ways, today’s itinerant drug dealers, able to roam from door-to-door, are perfectly suited to life in lockdown — and that’s a thoroughly modern phenomenon. Once upon a time, punters, users, abusers, junkies and “nitties” (those itching, scratching, semi-feral addicts) had to venture out of their homes and scurry off into the night in search of a little dope.

In the early eighties, when I was barely a teen, I had a friend who wanted to score some weed and made me traipse with him to a “shebeen”, or illegal drinking club, operating out of a dingy squat in Stratford, East London. The place was occupied almost exclusively by Rastas who were either smoking big fat spliffs or selling tiny bags of weed. My pal, despite still being in his school uniform, scored a £5 bag containing a few buds, twigs and seeds and rolled a crappy joint. I took a puff of it, coughed my guts up, pulled a “whitey” and ran out of the gaff as paranoid as hell to the toilets in Stratford Shopping Centre, where I locked myself in a cubicle until I calmed down.

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In seventies and early eighties London, Rastas were to selling weed what the Royal Mail was to postal delivery services; they had a near monopoly on the trade, certainly at street level. In the absence of hydroponic technology, globalisation and, it must be said, what would become the British public’s penchant for exotic and eclectic highs, weed was a cottage industry with deep roots, and routes, to Jamaica. Anything stronger was the preserve of bohemians, the clubbing elite and the rich and famous. Even then, unless you were well-connected or in the entertainment industry, if you wanted drugs you needed to go out of your way to get them.

But in the decades since, Britain’s love affair with narcotics has taken on a whole new meaning. According to the Home Office’s latest figures, roughly three million people took recreational drugs in England and Wales last year, with around 300,000 in England opting for opiates and/or crack cocaine. In terms of valuation, the illicit drugs trade is worth an estimated £9.4 billion a year — which makes it larger than the UK music industry (£5.2 billion) and gaming industry (£2.9 billion) combined, and with an annual turnover bigger than several major high street chains, including Boots (£6.7 billion) and Primark (£5.9 billion).

Given that chronic weed, amphetamine and cocaine use appears to be as British as a Sunday roast, it’s no wonder that, in recent years, enterprising foreigners have moved into the UK drug market, “sniffing” easy money to be made. Indeed, thanks in part to the EU’s obsession with freedom of movement, its porous borders and, it must be said, our police forces’ flawed racial profiling which dictates that only black people sell, buy and consume drugs, Eastern European dealers have been able to force their way into a lucrative market.

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Eastern European dealers sussed early on that consumption is Britain’s metier, and they made hay with it. While scrawny British inner-city “hood rats” thought riding around on stolen scooters selling crack was a major step-up from dealing on street corners and council estate stairwells, Serbian and Albanian dealers were taking orders on WhatsApp and Telegram encrypted messaging services and delivering to punters’ doors in modest, but comfortably air-conditioned saloon cars. These dealers innovated the use of social media, with many advertising flash sales and “buy two, get one free” offers to regular clients, using price differentiation to offer “standard” and “premium” cocaine. Most importantly, they offered a reliable, consistent and relatively risk-free service.

In other words, they run their “phone operations” like businesses, rather than trap house outtakes from Top Boy. This contrast in modus operandi between Eastern European and native drug dealers is down to what you might call a differing account of “psychological subjectivity”. In other words, if you don’t think and act like a drug dealer, you won’t get caught like one.

Only last week, for instance, the Metropolitan Police publicised an operation it led which resulted in 154 arrests in London relating to County Lines activities: Officers “were also proactively on the look-out for suspicious activity in their efforts to tackle violence, the Met’s top priority,” it added. Two operative words here, “suspicious” and “violence”, provide a clue as to why Eastern European dealers have been so successful; they were, for a long time, absent from their crime narrative in Britain.

Just as with stereotypes surrounding the Italian mafia, Jamaican Yardies and Chinese triads, the image of the black-clad Bond-villain Russian invariably springs to mind when we talk about any criminal east of Berlin. But while Eastern European gang members are no strangers to violence, many of the dealers I’ve spoken to are singularly focussed on doing their job, and therefore distance themselves from any violence which may attract unwanted attention. Our conversations are usually prosaic: about football results, their children back home and, increasingly, how the traffic congestion caused by the closure of some bridge over the Thames is affecting their delivery times. If anything, Eastern European dealers in London operate more like Uber than the Barksdale Crew from The Wire. 

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And since lockdown, this work ethic has made it easier for them to adapt. One dealer I know is pretending to be a more orthodox “essential worker”, wearing a hi-vis jacket and driving around in a van as a cover. Others have changed their shift times, now usually working from just 4pm-6pm or weekends only. Some have even upped sticks and left the UK altogether, putting their phone operations on a skeleton staff until the much-anticipated summer boom.

One of the savvier young London dealers I know — who recently escaped a county lines operation after a “nitty” held him up for his stash with a hypodermic needle, and was then nearly stabbed to death by the gang he now owed money to — has gone “freelance”. He bought a scooter and uses a Deliveroo box as a cover story to sell crack, a move that’s become so common that the Met have started to randomly “stop and search” delivery bike riders.

More recently, though, the Met — perhaps realising that it could prove more fruitful — has decided to target the middle-class drug trade. When I worked as a producer on the Channel 5 documentary series Gangland, a constant refrain I heard from dealers was that gentrification is contributing to Britain’s ever-expanding drugs market. The Government certainly agrees; last week, it was revealed that it plans to launch a middle-class “information campaign” to make “snorting cocaine as socially unacceptable as drink-driving”.

Certainly their value to dealers cannot be underestimated. Aside from being spendthrift, reliable and creditworthy, middle-class punters are mavens when it comes to spreading the word about who’s got A-grade cocaine or ecstasy. If you’re a dealer, being able to boast that you have doctors, lawyers and media types in your contacts book is certainly a nice marketing touch. After all, the bourgeoisie love nothing more than knowing they’re in good company, even if they are contributing to a trade that results in Mexican gang members being decapitated every now and again.

Suggested reading

Lockdown won't end the war on drugs

By Anthony Lowenstein

I learned just how valuable middle-class coke users are during the 2019 general election. Having got wind of a high-profile political client who was being “served up” by the friend of a source, I attempted to broker a deal with one of Fleet Street’s finest for the story. But at the last minute, the drug dealer baulked at my offers of fame, fortune and the opportunity to change the course of British political history. “Bro, it ain’t worth it,” he told me. “He’s my best customer.” When it comes to middle-class dealing, discretion is key; another reason why the professionalism of foreign dealers sells itself.

Just days before lockdown, The Sun reported that “London has become a hotbed of international criminals – from Albanian cocaine kingpins and African street gangsters to Turkish Cypriots”. When I asked an old source in the East End scene if this was yet more tabloid bluster, he simply said: “I moved to Essex to get away from that shit. Now they’re moving in here. You can’t compete with them.”

In some ways, I suppose it’s to be expected that a capital city of nine million people has its fair share of foreign dealers — just as it has its fair share of foreign businessmen. And with the UK bracing itself for the end of lockdown restrictions this summer, no doubt these “essential” workers are already preparing for the inevitable narco-bonanza that will follow.