The one-hour journey down from London to this most famous incarnation of Middle England is a jarring transition from drab suburb to rolling green. And it was this Arcadian escape that once helped birthed a national joke: a provincial dreamscape of undulating Georgian townhouses and posh schoolchildren had somehow curated an unfathomable discontent. “The Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” were letter writers and moralists, the sort of people who once made sure the bins were collected and sex was kept in the bedroom. So damaging was the archetype that in 2009 the council forced a rebrand: the disgusted were encouraged to give up the act and become the “delighted of Tunbridge Wells” instead.

Ten years on, you have to blend the two to understand the local mood. The busybodying and spleen, now more in step with the national mood, is taking on the behemoth of British decline. “I am using what I would call an application of chaos theory to apply pressure on all agencies through an increase in media relations,” as Hawker confidently puts it. Southern Water is the target: the indebted utility that has paid out more to shareholders than invested in keeping the town’s famous royal waters agush. It helps that the inconvenience also touches on the town’s usual bêtes noires: infrastructure that cannot keep up with the steady flight to Tunbridge Wells from London and a nation that’s lost its common decency.

Residents have organized accordingly. Once the nation imagined them making jam and penning acerbic notes to the Telegraph. Now they’re organizing emergency relief. “It’s the lies, the lack of information and the lack of honesty,” says Mel Alesi, the parish councilor that runs Staplehurst Emergency Help Team, a sort of disaster-focused residential association that now hosts a 24-hour helpline for the things that keep the new Middle England up at night: pandemic, water shortage, the collapse of civic authority. Alesi proudly explains her body was quicker off the line than officials in nearby Maidstone, quickly delivering a private water supply they had been quietly hoarding in anticipation of the worst.

For 114 years, the Tories ruled Tunbridge Wells without ever really thinking about the place. The Lib Dems triumphing in mid-Nineties local election was, as one local journalist recalled, “marginally less seismic than the defeat of Rome.” On a Friday afternoon in the Pantiles, a Georgian promenade that is uncharacteristically thriving for an English high street, no one is particularly sad to see the old empire go. Like many towns in the south east, it’s now an extended suburb of London, where young couples rub up next to proprietorial men in corduroys who look like John Simpson.

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By Fred Sculthorp

Up in the hills you can find the Conservative Club, what looks like a run down colonial villa gazing over its erstwhile patch. A photo of the former Tory MP, who lost his seat to a Lib Dem rout of the Home Counties in 2024, still hangs in a dusty frame. Yet it is Reform that now hosts its meetings here, having now tripled its local party membership. By the party’s local headquarters, next to a cottage where Thackeray once lived, two elderly burghers quickly disappear inside when I announce myself. No one in the local Conservative Party wants to talk at all.

In a place that never had to think much about politics — not for nothing is its town’s motto “Do Well Doubt Not” — what’s now unfolding is a new dynamic in British politics, where Reform and the Lib Dems, two parties that could as well come from different planets, find themselves battling for the middling soul of the country.

The idea of Middle England, as Joe Moran argues in his essay on the term, is one of the foundational myths of recent British politics. In an age when parties won from the center, discerning the sensibilities of the market towns and suburbs became something of a national sport. Class: A View from Middle England, a 1979 book by Jilly Cooper, was the first to popularize the term; the book’s forensic obsession with the vagaries of taste and class soon leaked into the politics. From the early Nineties onwards, somehow “Middle England” came to represent everywhere from Tunbridge Wells to Woking to Peterborough, encompassing grammar schools, aspiration, “Pebbledash People” and “Mondeo Man”, foreign holidays, family values and the sort of budding jobsworths who called up John Major’s famous “cone hotlines”.

The stereotype was always confused and shapeshifting because it was designed to be fundamentally apolitical, a “small-c conservatism” forever moving with the expanding middle classes. The concept, by those who sought to court it (and those who despised it) was always ripe for abuse. Philip Gould, reflecting on New Labour’s triumphs, settled on a suitably broad definition: “A rich vein of empirical common sense that has always been central to the British people.” It is exactly this sort of sophistry, Moran argues, that led to the “tenacious idea that the key median voters decide elections.”

In the country’s present upheaval, it’s an idea being tested to extinction by everything from recent immigration arriving into the shires to failing water firms. In their survey of Britain’s fragmenting political landscape, More in Common evokes seven political tribes — in response to the majority that now believe “the system is at fault” for the county’s decline. In practice, they range from “established liberals”, who believe in moderately reforming Britain’s existing institutions, to the “rooted patriots and dissenting disruptors” who seem on the verge of marching on London.

Taken together, the More in Common analysis is a spotters guide to voters in the towns and villages of the Kent High Weald — where neither of the two major parties have featured prominently. All the while, it seems clear that “Middle England” has now become little more than a centrist sop, bound together by docile slogans about family, stability and home. Now, though, all that’s unraveling, a portent not only for political volatility beyond 2029, but also for a corner of the country changing far faster than the old myths can cope with.

Ed Davey, the cricket-playing, bungee-jumping leader of the Liberal Democrats, has emerged as the last great defender of this apolitical calm. In the great tradition of Middle English politics, he has attempted to raise a big tent: exploiting the latent if superficial snobbery of places like Tunbridge Wells to form a sort of moralistic anti-populist front. “There’s just this massive space, call it ‘Middle Britain,” he told the New Statesman last September, “decent people who think Labour haven’t provided change but who are deeply worried about Reform.”

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I ask the local MP Mike Martin to dig a bit deeper. The former Army man, a Pashtun speaker who made his name calling out the follies of British strategy in Afghanistan, is both patrician and progressive, the sort of Tunbridge Wells hybrid who could inspire the town’s sixth formers to take their Duke of Edinburgh to the Donbas. “If you go out on a Saturday morning, the people look like me,” Martin tells me over the phone. “They’ve got two kids, they want a sensibly run economy, they’re socially liberal and internationalist and they reject the parochialism we are seeing from the Conservatives.”

His undeniable popularity comes with a caveat: everyone likes the idea of Martin, but no one I speak to seems able to explain what the Lib Dems actually stand for when it comes to keeping the water running and the “disgusted” at bay. “I don’t think that’s fair,” the MP responds when I put it to him. “It’s about being radical in a way that is also credible. And we’re not there yet, but I think we are moving in the right direction.”

A short drive from Tunbridge Wells is an ominous reminder of how vulnerable this vagueness now feels. For the last three months, the pretty market town of Crowborough has seen a coalition of public sector workers and retired investment bankers mobilize for weekly protests via an organization called Crowborough Shield. This is a community group that has trumped the old rigmarole parish politics and unearthed a mood — via legal challenges to the Home Office and self-funded community patrols — that feels borderline insurrectionist.

The sense of rebellion is jarring. This is a place where Arthur Conan Doyle once went to play golf and die. The morning I arrive, the Government has quietly been moving asylum seekers into the town’s army base, part of their operation to end the use of commercial hotels. Crowborough’s disquiet has curdled into outright paranoia. Walking up the hill from the station, the sight of a lone male sends pensioners scuttling inside. As they pass, vigilant Land Rovers give me the once over.

In the White Hart Pub at the bottom of Chapel Green, I meet Nick Jones, former scout leader, and founder of the Crowborough Watch. Another community-funded patrol group, its mix of school teachers, ex-bouncers and councilors has come together to put local minds at rest. “Last night on patrol, we found a woman quivering in a hedge,” Jones tells me. “It could have just been paranoia on her part, but the slightest thing now is unnerving because of the vacuum of information from the Home Office.”

To reach Crowborough’s new asylum camp, you have to travel through the very heart of this new Middle England. Management consultants in lycra jog past forbidden Tudor mansions that look out over manicured golf clubs. A road hazard sign reads: “Elderly People.” At the entrance to the new asylum base, you arrive at a newly built estate that aspires to the gentler Crowborough of yore. Walking back towards the unsold houses, one family approaches with a pair of huskies and a sullen toddler in a pram. They moved in November and have already had reporters knocking to ask if they’ll sell for £20.

I try to strike up a conversation about politics. Are the Conservatives still relevant in their spiritual home? “Everyone I’ve spoken to in Crowborough is voting Reform,” the mother says bluntly. Further up the road, a group of policemen are trying to encourage a YouTube streamer in a van to move on. Tomorrow, the town is preparing for a set piece protest, with rumors that everyone from Tommy Robinson to Rupert Lowe will turn up to steal the show. “You don’t really care unless it’s in your town,” the mum adds of the new arrivals. “I expect they’ll get bored of Crowborough and travel into Tunbridge Wells. They’ve got no idea what’s coming.”

Away from the camp, I seek out some of the town’s older residents, wandering down one of Crowborough’s winding private roads. The big mansions were built for people who wanted to drift off into the sleep of deep England. I find a smart, polite woman in a pink Gore-Tex jacket and black sunglasses out for a walk. Did she ever imagine the country’s present chaos finding its way here? “I think it was inevitable,” she says with rehearsed drollness. “Since Covid, those wilderness years, we all hoped our life would go back to normal but it hasn’t.” I ask her if she still believes in the Tory party, the shires, the old idea of Middle England. “I just like the middle ground,” she says. Does she think it still exists? “Probably not.”

Reform’s emergence as a government-in-waiting has stirred an out-of-sorts patriotism in Britain’s pallid center-left as it attempts to present a vision of Britain and Britishness to compete with Nigel Farage’s insurgent one. “The battle in the next election is between us and Reform,” their leader Ed Davey told the conference. And indeed, the whole event was colored by the idea that there is no more Left and Right, only Liberal and Reform. If “the Nationalists” intended on hoisting flags on A-roads, then the Lib Dems would jolly well get theirs out too.

For four chilly days in the Bournemouth International Center, the Lib Dems spoke of little but the threat the “Nationalists” — that incongruous troop of Reform voters, Tommy Robinson supporters and the occasional stray Tory — posed to “British values”. But they struggled to conjure a positive and distinct vision of Britishness in response.

Instead, in a clownish attempt at middle-class populism, Davey invoked a Britain of “Lionesses”, “cricket pavilions”, and “Male Voice choirs” — a post-twee, reactionary, commuter-belt idyll. And Farage is at the gate. In an attempt to frighten the Lib Dems into action, their leader painted an alternative picture of the country where Reform has the whip hand. Where Reform would roll back gun laws until “schools have to teach our children what to do in case of a mass shooting”. They’ll let Elon Musk expose your kids to porn. They’ll turn your son into Andrew Tate. They’ll denigrate the countryside with fracking and untrammeled development. And, worst of all, they’ll privatize the NHS. “That is Trump’s America,” Davey said. “Don’t let it become Farage’s Britain.”

“Reform is the most serious threat liberalism has ever faced, and we have to put all our effort into beating that,” Davey said. Yet the irony is that the Lib Dems need Nigel Farage if they hope to have a shot a power. In shattering the old duopoly, Reform has offered the Lib Dems a route to electoral success: mopping up the Tory moderates and Labour progressives, as both parties stagger in a futile pursuit of the Reform vote. In 2024, the Lib Dems won more seats (72) than any third party since the collapse of the Liberal Party more than a century ago, and in May’s local elections, Lib Dems finished second to Reform. But so far it has failed to articulate an alternative vision for government. The latest poll from More in Common has the Lib Dems in fourth place with a meager 13% of the vote.

Davey has expended much of his mental capacity on Reform’s success. “Here’s the intellectual bit,” he said in a Q&A. “They make people laugh.” And so that is what the Lib Dems must do too. Davey marched through Bournemouth Gardens pursued by a band playing “Sweet Caroline”, he dressed up as a beekeeper, and he had “a blooming good time” planting flowers. And as usual, he didn’t quite pull it off. Farage’s humor isn’t affected in the way that, say, waving a scepter buffoonishly whilst leading a marching band is. Boris Johnson is, perhaps, the model, but he did that all naturally: no one ever wondered why he was acting like a buffoon.

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Davey thinks that “making people smile is the way to win them over”, but the polling disagrees: a majority of voters think his clowning makes the party look unserious and tin-eared. At a time when the electorate has never been so disaffected, when they have a “moral duty” to defeat Reform, and when they’ve never had a better shot at becoming a serious force in British politics, goofing around doesn’t make good policy. It’s just “bullshit”, one MP was reported to have said last week. Besides, it isn’t cutting through. Only a third of Britons can identify Davey’s face, with “Ed Balls” being the most common wrong answer. Those who do know him tend to think he’s just nice. But can “just nice” win an election?

That’s the unavoidable question, especially when it comes to the Lib Dems’ approach to immigration. Not everyone at Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” march was a nationalist or racist, Davey said; some just “felt like no one was listening to them”. But are the Lib Dems? Their home affairs spokesperson Lisa Smart seemed flippant at best. She spoke breezily about how migrant hotels are places “where people had their wedding reception… and, of course, [the hotels are] rubbish for the taxpayer”. Elsewhere, for all the Lib Dems’ suggestion that they’d combat Reform with a positive argument for immigration, that petered into some brief mumbling about the economy and the popularity of integration. “There is no harder brief for a liberal [than home affairs],” Smart said, and the Lib Dems seem determined to prove this.

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But the delegates need only look outside the conference center to gauge the problem. Of late, Bournemouth has become one of the most hotly-discussed epicenters of British decline, as photographs of litter-strewn beaches, antisocial behavior, and Muslims praying circulate amongst the online Right. Local hotels have said that bookings are down as a result of this attention, and a volunteer Safeguard Force has been established in response to a perceived increase in crime. “All towns change,” a taxi driver told me wistfully. “It’s more vibrant than it was. Just, well, different.” As the delegates arrived for the conference, 300 locals joined the “Bournemouth Patriots” to protest against the town’s three migrant hotels. And yet, last month, the Lib Dems beat Reform in a local council ward by-election. Surely if the Lib Dems could win here, one overly confident party member reasoned, they could win anywhere.

“We could certainly see a Lib Dem government,” Kamran Hussain, who was canvassing to be the party’s vice-president, told me. “If we keep on spreading our message, moderate people will come to the Lib Dems in droves.” But how? “Operation Leapfrog” is one means to ensure this: they will target Blue-Wall Tory seats, where they finished third in 2024, such as Central Devon, and Fareham and Waterlooville. And yet all the pollsters seemed to caution against this: “They’ve virtually picked up all the seats they could pick up from the Tories,” said John Curtice, while Luke Tryl, the director of More in Common, said that they’re more likely to attract “Progressive Activists” than One-Nation Tories. But are there any moderates left?

An even greater existential problem for the Lib Dems, if they really are serious about fighting Reform, is that only 24% of voters think they represent change, compared with 51% for Reform. And change is what voters want. But Farage’s Britain is the only future that Davey sees: there was no sense that the Liberal Democrats could change Britain, or especially wanted to. Beyond their dismissal of the “turquoise Tories”, the policies they unveiled could have been implemented by any government since 1997. An energy security bank to offer £10 billion in affordable loans to homeowners and small businesses. Solar panels in supermarket car parks. Health warnings on smartphones. All that was followed by sclerotic debates over ID cards and nuclear energy, and the late-woke silencing of a trans debate via trenchantly polite reference to procedure and “namecalling”. One quiffy-haired Young Liberal told me his party was a “party of fucking nerds”, known for their obsession with forensic policy analysis. And so they were as angry as Liberals can get when, on Monday, the BBC led with Reform’s decision to scrap Indefinite Leave to Remain, because, of course, their overnight policy release — a two-hour “doomscrolling cap” for under-18s — was so much more radical.

The trouble is, centrism is a hard sell these days. One evening in the Branksome Suite, the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) hosted a fringe event on “disruptive delivery”, where the Lib Dems were urged to assume the mantle of radical centrism. This, they said, is how to beat Farage. Sam Sharps, an ageless technocrat from the TBI, told the party’s deputy-leader Daisy Cooper that “there is no reason why you can’t be radical and sensible… There is no reason why you can’t have a transformational, thought-through, nicely-packaged, costed, implementable policy programme.” That, of course, is what the TBI’s other pet project — the Labour Party — offered with their “fully funded and fully costed” 2024 manifesto: this way lies madness, spending-cuts, tax rises, and an ever-accreting fiscal blackhole.

One disgruntled crowd-member asked them why nobody was speaking about the economy at this conference, and later three other questioners broke into tears: one had lost their seat on a parish council; another’s pub had been bought by the Chinese; another was scared of being a minority in today’s Britain. This is what Britain does to you: it grinds you down until you’re crying in a gray conference room as a think-tanker explains the benefits of bloodless technocracy.

The Liberal Democrats spent four days saying that they would address such griefs, but never did. They can criticize Farage, but they can’t combat him. And try as Davey might to put fire in their bellies, they can only see themselves as an opposition-in-waiting, not a government; they are the new reactionaries who’ll meekly defend the institutions as the Reform party blazes through them. The orders were clear: sharpen your best Farage insults, and prepare yourselves for opposition.

For all his now-global renown as an environmental sage, guide and even prophet, Macfarlane retains a day-job as a Cambridge don (at Emmanuel College). Though Is a River Alive? nods rarely to his own academic hinterland, several centuries of English literary hymns to nature’s majesty and mystery course under, or on, the fervent surface of his prose. Yet his awestruck ecstasy beside the divine onrush of the Mutehekau Shipu — “the river’s voices say and sing what I cannot comprehend” — reminded me not so much of Wordsworth’s Prelude, or some other hallowed Romantic favorite, as a rather more humble riparian vision.

The river for Macfarlane becomes an inscrutable god that can be heard, felt, but never fixed by human minds. Curiously, his Canadian rapture sent me back to a little tributary of the Thames. There, in the glimmer of a midsummer dawn, two frail creatures hear a “heavenly music” and apprehend a watery divinity. It leaves one of them “possessed in all his senses by this new divine thing that caught up his helpless soul and swung and dandled it, a powerless but happy infant in a strong sustaining grasp”.

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I’m not sure whether Macfarlane, or his publishers, would welcome a comparison between his glimpses of transcendence beside the great menaced watercourses of the world and the cozy adventures of Rat and Mole. Never mind: in the “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” chapter of The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame found a voice for a sort of native riverside pantheism. The great horned god Pan, “Friend and Helper”, briefly appears to the animals in a reverie that has bewitched its readers since the book first appeared in 1908. Shaggy, bearded and piping, the sacred spirit of Nature manifests itself among modest winding brooks, culverts, ditches and runnels in the “silent, silver kingdom” of the Thames. Thanks to that anguished pop visionary Syd Barrett, Grahame’s mystical “song-dream” by the river even gave Pink Floyd the title of their 1967 debut album.

Far away or close to home, rivers run through human dreams, and fears. Home Counties waterside enthusiasts — the human counterparts of Grahame’s Rat, Mole and Badger — may feel their force as acutely as (say) the Innu poet and seer Rita Mestokosho, who blesses Macfarlane’s kayak journey downstream. His book begins at, and returns to, a fragile chalk-stream in woodland near Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, imperiled by development and drought alike. It branches out to other waterways around the world, where mining, damming, pollution and climate change have changed — or threaten to change — the “blue commons” of rivers into “limitless source and limitless sump: that which supplies and that which disposes”. Along the way, he meets campaigners from the “Rights of Nature” movement. They bring improbable court cases to establish the “legal personhood” of rivers, and their right to run free of pollution, damming, diversion and abuse.

So, is a river alive? A landmark judgment in New Zealand, the Te Awa Tupua Act, decided so in 2017. In both Ecuador and Canada, the scientist-activists Macfarlane consults have also enjoyed successful days in court. Even in Chennai, where chemical-blighted tracts of water ooze poisonously through the “sacrifice zones” of unchecked industry, cases to protect the lives of rivers have been filed. Macfarlane’s full immersion in the language and outlook of the eco-radicals, and their militant hostility to the “death-extractivism” of states and companies, may leave some of his former fans stranded. Compared to the eerie subterranean explorations in Underland — for this reader, one of the non-fiction masterpieces of the century so far — Is a River Alive? feels tighter, fiercer, more didactic. Campaigning urgency, and the impulse to punctuate his journeys with heartfelt advocacy for “ecocentric legislation”, pushes Macfarlane’s prose into swifter but narrower channels. He knows from the get-go where these journeys should lead: into the branch of radical conservationism that enlists the ritual pieties of traditional spirituality as it advocates for rivers — or forests, or mountains — as “rights-bearing entities”.

That means that Is a River Alive? can feel less like a voyage of discovery than the pursuit of an agenda. Which is not to say that it lacks cascading passages of bejeweled prose in Macfarlane’s keynote manner. He notes that “The history of literature is littered with the debris of attempts to utter water”. If that voyage is doomed to failure, then his counts among the more honorable. However far they choose to travel with Macfarlane’s politics, any reader should thrill to his passage down the white waters of the Mutehekau Shipu with a motley bunch of companions. It leaves him “slowly flooded from within” by the churning rapids and pulsing channels his kayak shoots. By the end, “I am rivered.”

It may seem a long way from such heroic escapades to the gloopy business of river contaminations, and clean-ups, close to Wind in the Willows country. The bulk of Macfarlane’s followers may not care for splashy activist stunts. But they do fret that, as he writes, “Clean rivers” on their doorsteps “have become rivers you cannot drink from without falling ill, which in turn have become rivers you cannot swim in without falling ill”. Yet rivers, as he insists, “heal themselves with remarkable speed”. Only a handful of his admirers will find themselves embroiled in courtroom wrangles over the legal personality of waterways or woodlands: such cases date, it turns out, to a 1972 paper by Christopher Stone entitled “Should Trees have Standing?” Many, however, will be the sort of conscientious citizen who may this week be taking part in the Rivers Trust’s annual health survey, the “Big River Watch”.

Skeptics and scoffers will dismiss Macfarlane at their peril. He speaks to and for a broad constituency — more of a meandering delta than a racing torrent — for whom disgust at the reckless degradation of nature matters more than the finer points of green doctrine. In Britain as elsewhere, rivers (and the crimes committed on and in them) run close to the heart of the cause. Let’s return to Kenneth Grahame country. The writer, after all, derived the idyll of The Wind in the Willows from his childhood beside the Thames at Cookham Dean; later, he lived upriver in Pangbourne.

A few miles west of Cookham lies Henley-on-Thames, once the reliably true-blue constituency of a certain Boris Johnson. Since July 2024, however, the Liberal Democrat Freddie van Mierlo has represented Henley with a handy 6,000 majority. Here, and in dozens of other constituencies, the “blue wall” of guaranteed Conservative hegemony has been washed away in a mainly orange — but sometimes red or green — surge. There’s good reason to believe that one non-trivial factor behind this rural vote collapse was what Macfarlane calls the “gradual, desperate calamity” of England’s rivers.

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The facts are often recited. Not a single English river is in “good overall condition”. Merely 14% have a healthy ecology; 83% count as “highly polluted”. In 2024 water companies made 450,398 discharges of raw sewage into English rivers: a total of 3,614,428 shit-hours. Thames Water, chronically indebted and keen to raise bills by 59% over the next five years, contributed 300,000 hours to that brown tide. Macfarlane rightly celebrates the chalk-stream: one of the rarest ecologies on the planet, with most located in southern Britain. In the crap vanguard as ever, Thames Water in 2024 managed the equivalent of 154 days of sewage discharge into the chalk-stream of the Misbourne.

Abandoned by Pan, Rat and Mole would now paddle through liquid manure. People notice, and care. The state of the Thames became a crucial doorstep issue in Henley and a score of other places drowned in the filth of a botched privatization that benefited only rentier parasites with a monopoly stranglehold. Since the transfer of debt-free public bodies into the private sector, water companies have distributed more than $78 billion in dividends.

They have become, in effect, debt-servicing shareholder-return machines that skimp on vital investment while pumping the results of corporate failure into our waterways. True, some factors behind the rivers’ plight lie beyond water managers’ control, from the frequency of extreme weather to the pressures exerted by rash housing development. But institutional dereliction has made every problem worse. Look at our water corporations, mired in a toxic sludge of monopolistic greed and state-backed impunity, and you could almost tweak Gandhi’s famous riposte when he was asked about Western civilization. British capitalism? It might be a good idea.

For now, the system stinks. Voters know that. Last year they kicked out apologists for the stench. Therese Coffey, the Environment Secretary whose feeble irritation with sewage-dumping companies did nothing to stem the noxious tide, lost her solid Suffolk Coastal seat to Labour. In Chichester, where waterborne fury also swung many votes, a huge Tory plurality crumbled away. The Lib Dem majority there now exceeds 12,000.

North Herefordshire elected a Green MP, as did Waveney Valley in Suffolk. In South Cotswolds, where the Thames rises, the Lib Dems won 44% of the vote. Conservatives lost four out of five seats along the Wye: another storied river choked with sewage. As for Witney, whose quondam member David Cameron blithely sneered at “green crap”, blue-branded ordure helped to bury the Tory candidate. Far from Macfarlane’s Andean streams and Canadian rapids, mucky waters have drowned political careers all along our riverbanks. Innumerable instinctive conservatives, by temperament or principle, have whiffed the dank sludge and fled from the party of polluters with that name. Chesham and Amersham, where the pretty, fragile Misbourne for so long ran Thames Water brown, was of course a Lib Dem gain.

Passions mobilized by wounded rivers have little to do with the contingencies of any governmental drive towards “Net Zero”, or even wrangles over the causes and consequences of climate change. The cherishing of natural goods — and hatred of their defilement — precedes green activism of a more systematic kind. Those headwaters of environmental concern spring from a shared sense of the immeasurable value — if you like, sacredness — of natural life. For growth-seeking politicians of Right or Left to decide that advancement lies in trashing that concern — anti-Net Zero claptrap polemics on one side, a bonfire of planning regulations on the other — would be, will be, a fatal error.

Swipes at Nimby selfishness may appeal to short-term vote-fishers. But that stream soon runs dry. Rivers flow, after all. The gunge that runs through my backyard may soon end up in yours. At home or abroad, the “river defenders” Macfarlane lauds can plausibly claim to merge care for their own lands, and waters, with commitment to the common good. His own water-politics plants him firmly on the left bank. From the stream-fed Los Cedros forests in Ecuador to the toxic trickles of the Cooum and Adyar rivers in Chennai, he pays heed to deep-green campaigners with piratical corporations and corrupt governments in their sights. Look elsewhere for accounts of the towns lit, hearths fed and crops raised by prudent hydro projects — although, to be fair, he targets vandalistic depletion, not sustainable stewardship.

In a wider historical frame, however, critiques of what Macfarlane calls the “delusion of resource inexhaustibility” hardly belong to the modern Left alone. No act of the late pope’s pontificate struck a wider or deeper chord than his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si. Francis’s great plea to humanity to hear the divine voice of nature had, by the way, plenty to say both about the pollution of water sources, and their profit-driven transfer from shared to private assets. For Francis, “access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights”.

In Macfarlane’s own catchment area of English literature, the champions and celebrants of rivers, seas and lakes have emerged from diverse families of thought. One especially gifted prose-poet of English rivers, and the animal lives they nurture, was not even a traditional conservative but an outright fascist: Henry Williamson, even if the sad, warped politics that has disfigured the legacy of the author of Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon owed more to personal misery than ideological frenzy. Williamson was a traumatized outlier. Much more common is the reverent respect for ancient liquid powers that flows, for instance, through “The Dry Salvages”, the third of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. “I do not know much about gods,” begins the poet, “but I think that the river/ Is a strong brown god — sullen, untamed and intractable.

Eliot’s brooding river divinity — “Unhonored, unpropitiated/ By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting” — occupies a place in the same pantheon as the water-gods sensed by Robert Macfarlane by the raging whitewaters of Canada, or by Kenneth Grahame along a placid backwater of the Edwardian Thames. River-worshippers may sound sentimental, or sanctimonious. But watery deities still roar, or whisper, to millions, and even sway their votes. Those who jeer at “green crap” may find their prospects sunk in the stinking sewers they defend.

In the run up to the election, the papers mostly gave Davey an easy ride (as it were), seemingly unwilling to be scathing about what might yet turn out to be the inspired manoeuvres of an emerging national treasure. International media outlets didn’t help, seizing the opportunity to resurrect one of their favourite national stereotypes, the loveable British eccentric. And another factor enabling the horror to hide in plain sight was the general level of cringeworthy memification throughout the campaign, with Dawn Butler rapping, Jeremy Corbyn pretending he knows how to wash a car (or indeed what a car is), and Nigel Farage garnering 8.5 million TikTok views while doing an Eminem impression. Viewed in passing, the Lib Dem approach just looked like more of the same, but in fact it was much worse.

Of course, politics has long included gimmicks from MPs hoping to make a splash: who could forget David Cameron being pulled along by Norwegian huskies in 2006, or the much-derided “Edstone” in 2015? And then there was the biggest and most cunning stunt of all during the  2012 London Olympics:  the ne plus ultra of making a self-referential tit of yourself, apparently endearing Boris Johnson to a large part of the public for a generation, and followed up by various daft photo opportunities when he was running for national office. But even those ridiculous exploits were as nothing to the single-minded intensity of the Davey project, which saw him pratfalling in various locations around the country for a full six weeks: not so much offering lots of speeches punctuated by the odd bit of shenanigans, as 90% shenanigans interspersed with occasional bits of chat and weeping to camera about his dead parents.

Some of the appearances were justified by party masterminds as being vaguely connected to a particular policy objective — though, rather like their leader’s Zumba dancing, the explanations given were often a bit of an awkward stretch. Bungee-jumping in Eastbourne was supposed to tempt people into trying something heartstoppingly terrifying for the very first time: namely, voting Liberal Democrat, which seemed to be saying the quiet part out loud. Repeatedly falling from a surfboard into the Cornish foam was allegedly done in order to highlight the problem of sewage in our seas, though the degree of enthusiasm Davey conveyed for the experience tended to suggest exactly the opposite. Careering down a waterslide was about improving mental health for young people — yet it remained unclear how incipient adolescent anxiety would be improved by the sight of a 58-year old political leader perched precariously on a rubber ring, gurning ecstatically like a giant toddler as he hurtled down the slope.

Another explanation for Davey’s behaviour resembled the sort of justification sometimes offered by Just Stop Oil activists or, for that matter, school shooters: namely, it was the only way to get media attention for their cause, otherwise known at Lib Dem HQ as winning the “air war”.  This defence would perhaps have worked better had more people been able to work out what the cause was supposed to be, exactly. And in fact — like Farage’s memes on behalf of Reform — the main point of the appearances seemed to be to convey something about the leader in particular, and nothing very specific about his party and their policies at all.

Yet even here, the level of information offered was remedial. We mostly learnt that Davey doesn’t take himself too seriously: “I’m quite happy to have some fun,” he declared, shortly after skidding downhill in Wales on a bike with legs cartoonishly akimbo, just in case anyone had missed the point. Equally, we discovered that behind the smile lies heartache, with several affecting personal tragedies in his past. In a video, interviews, and press releases, Davey saw Starmer’s touching tale of a disabled mother and raised him  two dead parents at a young age, a dead Nanna, and a disabled son for whom he has significant caring responsibilities. So heavily was the latter mined for relevance to a manifesto pledge to increase the Carer’s Allowance, it sometimes seemed as if the policy had been designed around Davey personally.

It’s hard to be rude about someone whose public persona is so guileless: an enthusiastic, kindly, hammy Church of England type, as written by Richard Curtis on a good day and Armando Iannucci on a bad one. But politics isn’t care work nor is it a sitcom. The fact remains that despite some of the positive headlines it attracted, Davey’s CBeebies-style campaign indicated a staggeringly infantilising attitude towards the electorate. It seemed clear that either senior members in the Lib Dems are childish morons, or that they believe that voters are.

Perhaps it was assumed that by minimising the use of words altogether in their campaign material, they could maximise voter appeal while avoiding gaffes and the spectre of future broken promises. Political slogans already tend to be vacant and indecipherable anyway, allowing hearers to project whatever they want into the void. Labour’s key message argued gnomically for “Change”, while the Conservatives went with “Clear Plan. Bold Action. Secure Future” — though it was a testimony to their history of incompetence that even this vague statement of intent seemed patently unachievable.

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Yet there are also signs that Lib Dem strategists assumed that Davey’s clowning would be of interest to middle-class former Tory strongholds in particular, stuffed as they are presumably thought to be with soft-hearted, financially insulated types, low on political analysis but big on heartwarming feels. This seems indicated by what they called the “Gail’s strategy” — targeting wealthy Southern towns with a Gail’s bakery in the vicinity for a bit of the Davey magic, anticipating these as the places with the biggest chance of shifting disgruntled voters towards Liberal Democrats. One might question the sagacity of this plan on a number of levels: not least because what makes a sourdough-lover from Chichester smile ruefully or wipe away an empathic tear is likely to grate heavily upon a sausage roll-lover from Bolton. But there’s also the fact that even in the most insufferably smug of Southern enclaves, chock full of Dryrobe-wearing wankers nursing spelt loaves and worrying about property development in their area, most voters are just not that stupid.

The most likely explanation of any Lib Dem victories emerging today is that people were utterly fed up with the Tories, not that their heads were positively turned by the sight of G-forces acting on the face of an otherwise rather dull man on a rollercoaster. If anything, for all we know, the inanity of the campaign might have worked against the party: even among the positive press coverage, there were signs of ambivalence in onlookers. Meanwhile, there is also evidence that younger voters found the use of electoral memes patronising and off-putting generally. It would be good if pollsters would make an attempt to confirm these hypotheses now, for fear that correlation is lazily taken to indicate causation and we are subjected to even more fatuous levels of japery in five years’ time.

Satisfying as it may be on some atavistic level, I don’t want to see political figures shot into the air, toppling into water, or bouncing around on giant inflatables; I’d rather just hear them talk about what they intend to do and how they will do it. In a supposedly democratic society, it doesn’t seem a lot to ask. There’s a lot of work to do in the next four years, and many massive challenges lie ahead; not least the multipartisan challenge of making politics serious again. In whatever other ways politicians will fail spectacularly, I wonder if they can at least manage that.

To understand Sheffield Hallam, you first need to forget everything you thought you knew about Sheffield. Unlike the city’s industrial east, Hallam’s neighbourhoods are invariably described as “leafy”, and its houses – stacking up the hills in sometimes alarming angles – climb up into the Peak District.

Its politics are similarly at odds with the rest of Sheffield. While Margaret Thatcher was reviled across the rest of South Yorkshire, the constituency gave her its strong backing. Then, as the country at large swung towards New Labour in 1997, Hallam’s Labour vote actually dropped. Previous Tory and Labour voters both threw themselves behind a new loyalty — the Lib Dems, who kept a tight grip on the area, with more than 50% of the vote, for several elections; first with Richard Allan, and then Nick Clegg. 

But at the end of the coalition years, Labour support soared, with (the now metro mayor of South Yorkshire) Oliver Coppard contesting the seat in 2015. He didn’t quite manage it, but two years later Nick Clegg was ejected anyway. In the most recent election, Labour’s majority was wafer-thin: just 712 votes, or 1.2% of the vote. It’s now the only Labour/Lib Dem marginal in the country.

Here’s another statistic that tells you just how unusual Sheffield Hallam is: Labour’s current candidate and until recently local MP Olivia Blake won in 2019 with just 34.6% of the vote. That was the lowest vote share for a winner anywhere in Britain, as the Conservatives still took a big chunk of the votes. In fact, looking at the numbers, Hallam should still be a Tory seat.

Sheffield-based geographer Alasdair Rae has produced a fascinating chart from the 2019 election (see below), showing how constituencies voted by their level of deprivation. At the top left is the UK’s most deprived constituency, Liverpool Walton. And at the bottom right is the UK’s least deprived constituency, Wokingham. There’s a clear blue/red pattern, as more deprived constituencies generally voted Labour (though Johnson’s Tories made some big inroads), while less deprived constituencies generally voted Conservative, or occasionally Lib Dem.

Hallam (circled), however, bucks the national trend. It’s the ninth least deprived constituency in the country — its children are well-educated, its people are relatively healthy, its crime rates are low. And despite all that, it elected a Labour MP.

Blake’s theory is that Hallam is not immune to the problems faced by the country, rather the constituency embodies them. “It’s definitely been trending Left,” she tells me, which she thinks is related to an influx of groups like young families: “The demographics have shifted quite considerably in our favour.” She also argues that Hallam’s apparent affluence can be misleading. “On paper, you might look at Hallam and think ‘it’s the wealthiest seat in South Yorkshire, they’ll be isolated from the cost-of-living crisis,’ but that’s certainly not what I’ve been picking up.”

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Data on constituencies can be a bit patchy, but it’s not clear that age is a big factor in this Left shift. It’s true that the number of people in their 20s has gone up. But among people in their 30s, it’s pretty flat, while there are now far more 70-somethings. Perhaps there’s some truth, though, in the notion that the younger middle classes now tend to be more Left-leaning than in previous generations, and maybe the broader Left-wing bent of the city has seeped into this wealthier outpost. Brexit is also likely to be a factor — Hallam voted strongly for Remain.

But national trends can only tell us so much, particularly when a race is as neck-and-neck as it is in Hallam. So much for the parties then, what of the personalities of the two people in with a chance? 

I’ve spent time with both, and there’s quite a clear difference in style between Blake and Shaffaq Mohammed, the Lib Dem contender. Where Blake is bubbly, Mohammed is more sedate. Mohammed lives in industrial Tinsley, has a family background in steel, and speaks with an accent that blends his Kashmiri heritage and a Sheffield inflection. Blake’s middle-class background, meanwhile, hews closer to most Hallam constituents; her Yorkshire accent is nearer to what some describe as “Northern RP” — clean consonants, flat vowels. Mohammed is only ever seen wearing a suit and tie, Blake is a bit more dressed down. The snap election has been awkwardly timed for them both: Mohammed is in the midst of renovations on his house, while one of Blake’s dogs needs to have an eye operation.

When I join them, the gathering of Labour activists for Blake’s round of canvassing includes a few local councillors and a student who has been out every day since his exams finished  Despite being elevated to the House of Lords a few years ago, Baroness Blake of Leeds clearly still relishes street politics. 

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There’s an odd mix of houses along the canvassing route near Endcliffe Park — palatial Victorian villas, more modest bungalows, and low-rise blocks of flats. The voters are similarly eclectic. One describes himself as “apolitical” and refuses to buzz Blake into his block of flats so she can post her leaflets. Another is delighted when he clocks who Blake is: “The animal lover!” he cries. “Yes!” agrees Blake. He goes on to talk to her in quite some detail about recent happenings among the local badger populations — before confirming he will indeed vote Labour. 

At another home, a crisp voice over the intercom is apologetic, but firm. “Ok, I’m going to stop you right there,” she instructs Blake. She would vote for Labour, were it not for one issue: their policy of levying VAT on private school fees. “Under no circumstances whatsoever will I ever vote Labour unless that policy changes,” she tells Blake, explaining that she works for a private school that may have to close. “I would not send any child of mine to the state schools in the area,” she avers. As we walk away, Blake says that she believes claims of school closures are a bit “overblown”, and that this isn’t the aim of the policy.

Blake herself is on the Left of the Labour Party, having served in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and being less in tune with the current Starmer leadership. I ask her how concerned she’s been about the way figures on the Left, such as Diane Abbott, have been treated. “Everyone was a bit concerned about Diane, but I’m pleased we got to the right decision about that,” she says.

The following week, Shaffaq Mohammed suggests a meeting outside at Endcliffe Park café, meaning right next to the funfair. It feels very on brand for the Lib Dems, whose national campaign has been themed around Ed Davey doing various silly stunts. Mohammed discloses that he was invited along to Thorpe Park with Davey, but “me and rides don’t get on”.

Mohammed — or “Shaff” as his team call him — is also the leader of the Lib Dem group on the council. On the doorstep, he explains that voters’ biggest issues are the NHS and the environment, in that order. He draws particular attention to dentistry, explaining that he, like many, has been waiting for an appointment at the Charles Clifford Dental Hospital to have a tooth fixed.

On the environment, he talks at length about sewage dumping, describing the number of spills in Hallam as unacceptable. He’s tried to create a wedge with Labour on this — one of Mohammed’s recent leaflets claimed that “our Labour MP voted with the government to let [Yorkshire Water] off the hook”. The vote he’s referring to is an amendment to bring Ofwat, the water regulator, under the Growth Duty — which requires regulators to have regard for promoting economic growth. Mohammed claims this could allow water companies to escape fines for polluting rivers. Blake doesn’t comment on the specifics of that piece of legislation, but her spokesperson told me: “This is a feeble attempt by the Lib Dems to claim credit for the hard work through which campaigners and the Labour frontbench raised the issue to the top of the political agenda.”

Despite losing his seat more than five years ago, Nick Clegg still looms large over Hallam. As revealed by the Financial Times, Clegg has donated to the local Liberal Democrats — though how much exactly is unclear. Mohammed tells me that they’re occasionally in touch. He admits that the student fees issue — which did so much to put some voters off Clegg — still comes up on the doorstep. Whether that’s fair or not is one thing (Mohammed points out none of the parties are now proposing to cut tuition fees), but it might still linger with some of those late 20-somethings who have moved to Hallam.

So who will win come 4 July? On one reading, Labour should have it sewn up. In 2019, “Peak Corbyn” was well and truly over, while Sheffield Hallam’s Labour MP in the previous parliament, Jared O’Mara, was booted out of the party for making misogynistic and homophobic comments, and was later convicted of fraud. If the Lib Dems couldn’t take the seat even then, surely an ascendant Labour Party will do so comfortably? Most bookies are currently backing Labour to hold it — offering only 1/5 on this outcome, vs 3/1 on the Lib Dems. 

But things aren’t quite so straightforward. Not least because 2024 may well see a collapse in Conservative support as their campaign continues to falter. The party only chose its Hallam candidate a few weeks ago — Isaac Howarth, currently a student at Sheffield University — and there’s no sign of Tory leaflets in the constituency. It’s fair to say they’re not looking to put up a big fight here.

If the Tory vote crumbles, things become unpredictable. Should those supporters break for the Lib Dems, as in 1997, then they could yet snatch Hallam back. And Mohammed points out that if you tot up the votes from this year’s local elections across all of Sheffield Hallam’s five wards, the Lib Dems come out comfortably on top — with 13,133 votes to Labour’s 9,814. 

But the momentum Labour has at the national level will be hard to overcome. Blake describes herself as “pretty confident” about winning. “[In 2019] we had to go back three or four times, just to our voters… this time we’re trying to persuade other people to vote for us.” For those of us staying up to report on the election, a long night is likely. The smart money is on a recount — but as ever in Hallam, I wouldn’t bet on it.

***

A version of this piece appeared in The Sheffield Tribune.

“There’s nothing happening here,” the man says, when he stops laughing. “They’re just letting this town run down to the ground. They aren’t doing anything. You walk down through there” — and he points at a road — “they were going to take a building down, make more room for the market. They’ve scrapped that now. Why? Nobody knows.”

This is dairy country with undulating, sun-wilted hills from Exmoor to Lyme Bay. The towns are golden and ancient: less sleepy than necrotic. Londoners buy second homes and treat the landscape, which looks like an advert for butter, as a garden while common issues — low pay, lack of housing, infrastructure, local services — have been ignored. Still, it was safe for Tories: farmers are conservative. Parish’s majority in 2019 was 24,239 votes: 60.2% of the vote. Labour came second in 2019 and 2017 but the Liberal Democrats, the professional opposition, hope to repeat their successes in Chesham and Amersham and North Shropshire with their candidate Richard Foord, a former major in the army.

Three hundred activists a day come from out of the constituency to help: angry Tories don’t vote Labour. If it goes Liberal Democrat, it means Johnson is still in danger. If it doesn’t — and even Liberal Democrats are unsure — it means Partygate is forgotten, and he has hope: to continue his personal redemption through destruction.

“I would like,” the man continues, “to think the Liberal Democrats will get it. Make a completely new start. Because the Conservatives — what have they done?” But this is a by-election: just one less brick in the wall. It will change nothing. Does he know that? He answers his own question, enunciating carefully: “Very, very little. Did he [Neil Parish] make a mistake? Would you walk into the Houses of Parliament and produce a phone and start looking at porn?”

“Is he the only one who’s doing it?” asks his friend, and they guffaw for a while. In east Devon you must be patient. They think in decades. To them, Parish is a fool, not a fiend. There is not the same anger towards him as there was towards Owen Paterson in North Shropshire. Those who liked him still like him. (One man says he loves him.) Those who hate him hated him anyway.

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At the edge of Tiverton, where it segues from golden town to sprawl, I find the Community Arts Theatre. Public hustings are almost unknown nowadays because they are unpredictable but, since it is organised by the Fund Our Tivvy High campaign — the school needs to be rebuilt — the main candidates agreed to it.

I arrive early and watch the For Britain candidate, a ruddy, pinched boy called Frankie Rufolo, who carries aggrievement like a cartoon cloud over his head, attempt to infiltrate the hustings. He was not invited. “You’re a racist,” a youngish man tells him. “I’m an anti-racist,” Rufolo pleads back. (For Britain is endorsed by Tommy Robinson.) A security guard approaches to remove Rufolo. I ask Rufolo if he is local. “I have relatives in Devon,” he says sulkily. “No, you don’t,” says the security guard (though, in fact, he does), and leads him away, head hanging like a daffodil.

I listen to the Labour candidate Liz Pole, a genial woman essentially trying to climb a mountain in slippers, giving a TV interview: “The Conservative vote has collapsed, even people who are voting Conservative are doing so through gritted teeth, a lot of people are staying home or are switching…” Her press officer, who is presumably decorative, won’t brief me on or off the record but I think it is less tactics — an informal non-aggression pact with the Liberal Democrats is a persistent rumour — than laziness. Later, when I call out to her, she places a finger in the air and walks to the carpark with it.

As the audience muster, a group called LIFT (Local Independents for Tiverton) unfurl a banner that says: The Party’s Over, Prime Minister. Post confidence vote, it is an ancient slogan. It could be by Cicero. “The Conservatives have taken us for granted,” says a LIFT supporter. “The only time we were on the news is when our MP was caught looking at pornography in the House of Commons.” He talks about local food poverty, which is “remarkable” (donations have flat-lined and the church that stores them is empty), the dangerous condition of the school and lack of representation, homes for locals and well-paid jobs. There used to be a clutch of thriving factories around Tiverton, he says. Now they are shuttered or small.

He is by far the angriest man I meet in Devon. This is not raging North Shropshire, where former Conservatives would denounce Johnson on street-corners, or Chesham and Amersham, where the atmosphere was a kind of gleeful transgression in sunlight. It feels sadder than that: splintered, tetchy, defeated, as if Johnson’s corruption is settling over everything like dust, leaving people bewildered and exhausted. Many people tell me they won’t vote, and never have: “I’d rather sit in my garden and have a cold beer.” “They’re all the same”. One Labour woman voted Liberal Democrat tactically in 2010, and never will again; an old betrayal haunts her and so she will help Johnson by voting Labour. A youngish man is one of the few Tory splitters I find: “I was a paid-up member of the Conservative Party and there’s no way I can vote for the Tories in the state they are in. They’ve lurched to the Right.”

Some people are gently awed that politics has fallen on them. A man in a checked blue shirt with exquisite RP accent, who is here to find out if the Conservative candidate is pro field sports, says: “I’m not going to tell you who I normally vote for, but I am much to my own surprise” — and he does look very surprised — “a floating voter.” If he is anything other than a Conservative now leaning Liberal Democrat, he needs a better disguise.

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Inside, it is packed with political obsessives who know how they will vote: anti-Tory. The Tory candidate Helen Hurford, a former teacher who now owns a beauty salon — Corbynistas smirk at this because they are snobs — sits with Gill Westcott, the Green Party candidate, who is the sort of woman who sags under her obvious intellect. Liz Pole sits with Richard Foord. He looks open-faced but exhausted, as if a burden is upon him. That’s the disease of by-elections: the idea that they matter for anyone beyond the lobby’s Kremlinologists. They are only runes.

I have covered many by-elections and Hurford is the worst candidate I have found. Initially she says she wants to share “all my ideas and my aspirations for the Tiverton and Honiton”. The definite article is singular to her; she considers everything from her own perspective; her speech is filled with exclamation marks; its content is banality meets rage. “I know what it’s like to raise a family and be brought up in this area,” she says. “It’s beautiful! I’ve had lots of ministers coming down to support me and they’re saying, ‘isn’t it gorgeous?’ and I say, ‘Yeah it is, why would you want to live anywhere else?’”

A woman in a straw hat rises to ask: “In light of the resignation of two ethics advisers in less than two years, what is your personal view on the moral character of Boris Johnson?” “It’s hard to know where to start, just the lies, the repeated lies,” says Liz Pole, looking phlegmatic because the alternative is screaming: “The brass neck of the man.”

“The first part of that question, I believe, was about the resignation of the ethics advisers,” says Hurford. “It’s very Westmistery. That’s the expression I use. I’m not in Westminster but my understanding is that it was a commercially sensitive issue.” There are heckles at this, but she moves through them like a tank: “That’s what I’ve been told, thank you very much!” The chair presses her: do you have any concerns about his character? “I have no concerns that his pledges are honest”. Foord says: “To lose one ethics advisor could be regarded as misfortune, but to lose two ethics advisers can only be carelessness.”

Hurford is pressed on the cost of living (“I’m feeling it too!”) the environment (“I don’t have the answer!”) and the policy of sending refugees to Rwanda: when the refugees get there — “and it will happen” — they should “be treated kindly and fairly!” She summons Zelenskyy in her support and, at the end, when she is asked who her favourite thinker is, she names her grandfather. (Westcott names Gandhi, Pole Dickens and Foord W. B. Yeats and Paddy Ashdown). “You know, I hated school,” Hurford says conversationally, and it sounds like the truest thing she has said. “Slightly ironic that I became a head teacher.”

I think of May Welland from The Age of Innocence: Hurford has that hard, unyielding brightness. It shines. It lets nothing in. She is a typically Johnsonian Tory; evasive, anti-intellectual and self-obsessed; quick to anger when threatened, slow to change her mind, if she ever does. Every time she speaks, I feel materially closer to autocracy. At the end she says: “This is a fantastic opportunity for a girl that was born and raised and absolutely adores this constituency Tiverton and Honiton”. I wonder if she will burst into song. “Everything that I do will be for the benefit of Tiverton and Honiton because I am Tiverton and Honiton.”

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Later I meet Richard Foord. He is not as interesting as Hurford, not being a mad kind of nadir, but he has spoken to hundreds of former Conservatives and, like Pole, he believes the Conservative vote is ebbing. “There are a lot of long-term traditional Conservatives who don’t regard Boris Johnson as a Conservative,” he says. “The most cited reason is that they regard him as lacking in integrity and honesty and for some people these traits are part of their own identity as Conservatives. Some Conservatives do put that above everything else.” There are Johnson loyalists, he adds, “who will stick with him, but I think they are outnumbered by the number of Conservatives who feel they should be better led.”

The next day I find the Liberal Democrat office on Honiton High Street. It is swagged with Union Flags. There are no chairs inside to discourage sitting down, which is not a sign of confidence. An elderly man returns from canvassing in Axminister. He moans that people aren’t budging from the Conservatives — “We are Conservatives,” he reports them saying to him — takes another bundle of leaflets, and leaves disconsolate.

The Honiton Conservative Association, a few doors down, is shuttered. There is a rumour, which I cannot confirm because it is shuttered, that the officers of the Honiton Conservative Association are voting Liberal Democrat. There is a Liberal Democrat sign on the Honiton Conservative Association, but I cannot say who put it there. I think it is a joke.

This by-election is the most depressing I have covered. It feels sunken and shameful, which is not surprising when you consider its origins: a by-election not for constituents, who feel ignored no matter their stripe, but for other people. The media is here, mugging locals and holding up queues in the butchers. They gawp at the nerve of it: as if we are more interested in a prime minister’s fate than a constituency’s. They wonder why they were not always so interesting to us; why we never came here before; if we are irreparably trivial.

I meet aghast and defensive Tories, thwarted Leftists, the undecideds who will choose whether Hurford gets to parliament or not and the eternal, maddening non-voters. But I can’t find the purity of the anger I heard in North Shropshire like a bell. “It’s quite amazing,” a Left-leaning bookseller tells me, his fingers stroking their spines, “how much people will tolerate before they rouse themselves.” I can’t escape the sense that the Tiverton and Honiton is just another distraction: another tiny chapter in the incremental narrative of Boris Johnson’s will to power. I wonder if he is more afraid of boredom or hatred. And we are back to him, again.

This is the land of plenty at the end of the Metropolitan Line. The charity shop has a wedding hat section. There is a bespoke gentleman’s tailor and a town museum, so you can investigate Amersham’s plenty of yore. The Britain in Bloom awards are stacked vertically on a post by the Old Market. These golden discs, and the pride in the physical perfection of Old Amersham that they convey, are an indication that Boris Johnson’s luck might sag there this year. Is the Prime Minister conservative enough for Amersham Old Town? They doubt his dedication to their bloom. These are visual lands: you see it in the costumes, the cars, the homes, and the rage against HS2, currently being hewn into the hill beyond their paradise. They hate HS2 with the fervour of children because they usually have their way in everything, and in that is the possibility of rebellion.

If Amersham Old Town is in denial about it being 2021 — it is largely medieval with fiercely repointed Georgian frontage — so are most of its voters. I wonder if the residents consider the Chiltern Hills to be an extension of their gardens; they are enraged about HS2 because it will benefit the Midlands and the North and leave them and their excellent transport connections with a glut they did not seek.  Benjamin Disraeli similarly courted the working classes from nearby Hughenden Manor, but perhaps the descendants of his voters have forgotten this happy coalition of manor and slum. HS2 is the only teardrop spilling onto their plate, and this, not pandemic, is the story here. Pandemic was unfortunate, but they are vaccinated now, and the shops are open.

There is jeopardy for the Prime Minister, then: when Dame Cheryl Gillan, Conservative MP for Chesham and Amersham, died in April, a by-election was called, scheduled for Thursday. Gillan’s majority was immense, a blue hill in a land of hills: 16,223 in 2019, or 55.4% of the vote. If you listen to constituents the result was barely conscious. As a pub landlord says from behind his tidy bar: “I vote Conservative. If you ask me why I vote Conservative I couldn’t give you an answer.” He makes it sound like an existential question singular to Tory Buckinghamshire: “Why do I vote Conservative? I think the majority of people don’t really look into that much – of why they vote.” He tells me he was born to a working-class family in Wales — his Welsh-based family have “nothing” — lives in a £1 million house in Chesham Bois, drives a new Range Rover and educated his children at private schools. Then two elderly ladies come in for lunch, and we must stop talking, because he is busy spoiling them with a professionalism that looks like rapture. He has been working since 5am — he works hard — and he is almost the most analytical voter I meet, but this election is about flowers and potholes.

The Tory majority is vast, but the Liberal Democrats sense an opportunity to beat the new Conservative candidate, one Peter Fleet, formerly of the Ford motor company. His centre of operations is a flat above an award-winning iron mongery in Amersham; from here he rides out to promise mitigation of the impact of HS2, a national park in the Chiltern Hills and a crack-down on anti-social behaviour (he is against it).

To combat him, there are 500 Liberal Democrat activists in Chesham and Amersham, placing banks of posters near notorious potholes. It is uncanny, and I wonder if they are consulting psychologists. Hit a pothole and you see a Liberal Democrat poster or, more likely, four Liberal Democrat posts. “The roads,” I am told by an upper-middle-class woman, “are shit”. I fantasise their slogan changed to: “Potholes winning here.”

Opposition parties do well in by-elections, and there is rage with the liberalisation of the planning laws, which I think is the equivalent of Total War in Nimby-land.

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By Tanya Gold

There is a theory that for each brick he removes from the Red Wall, Boris Johnson loses a third of a brick, or maybe more, from the Blue Wall, as businessmen voters fantasise about which lie they would fire him for, and liberal-leaning voters flee London for the Home Counties, taking their Remain politics and rustic fantasies with them. These fantasies are helpful to Liberal Democrats, if irritating: what is the point of living in a village where everyone looks like Philip Green? Where be the cows?

I hear that after a bad poll the previous week, Johnson made a surprise visit to the constituency. The Liberal Democrats were second in 91 seats in 2019 and took Amersham Town Council in May. They wonder if this by-election is the beginning of a recovery; of a Conservative rebellion against itself. Amersham Old Town is quite the place to stick it to the man, his optics — last week he was gambolling in the Cornish surf  and toasting Peter Fleet with a pint — and his national polling average of 44%.

I meet the Liberal Democrat candidate Sarah Green in a coffee shop in Amersham. Amersham is not Amersham Old Town. It does not have a bespoke gentleman’s tailor, or a personal museum. I watch an attempted burglary of a post office, just opposite the Conservative campaign office. The postmaster chases the villain with a baseball bat. No one is injured.

Green is young, open, emphatic. “People feel ignored,” she says, “people feel taken for granted.” I heard that in Hartlepool, from Labour voters; here, I struggle not to laugh, which is slightly unfair because pain is pain. “It’s been true blue for decades – council, local, national. It’s like, ‘it’s always going to be blue so why should they listen to us?’ The idea that if you live in Tory area you get investment is manifestly not true. All the issues feed into that underlying theme of being taken for granted”. No one is exempt from self-pity nowadays; and so, a Liberal Democrat activist tells me, excited former Tories are stopping her to say, “I’m voting for Sarah!” Another says she heard a group of “dyed-in-the-wool Tories” were surprised, on meeting in the pub, to discover they are all Liberal Democrats now, from a combination of, “planning changes, the way you just have to ring Bojo, bung him some money and you’ve won the business”. I wonder if Chesham and Amersham will surprise itself with its audacity tomorrow. It’s a by-election. The stakes are low. Even if they do elect a Liberal Democrat MP, their taxes will not rise. It will be a murder without blood.

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Estate agents are too busy to talk — though one shouts over his shoulder that the Prime Minister wore the same tie to Amersham as he wore at the G7, and he has dandruff too, which matters in a village in bloom — but the man in the art gallery says: “There are an awful lot of people moving out [to here]. Every one of the flats here,” he points upwards “has gone on the market, with the exception of one. Every weekend I see people coming into the shop saying, ‘it’s fantastic round here, we want to move, we want a garden, we’ve been living in the city’”.

I meet such women in Chesham, which is a sadder Amersham Old Town; there is a foodbank with a request for sponge pudding and tinned chicken taped in the window. They are an NCT group; they sit by their babies’ prams, drinking large cocktails. They are from London, and vote Liberal Democrat here, though one voted Labour formerly — “I don’t think Labour know who they are [now]”. They are not angry about the Government’s response to pandemic: “I’m not sure how anyone would have handled it,” says one. But they are worried about child poverty, the future of the NHS, and the lack of affordable housing.

There is almost no Labour presence in this constituency, and the voters know it. Labour say they are campaigning, but the evidence is flimsy. (They are speaking to the press via email). Labour took 12.9% of the vote in 2019. I meet a Labour voter smoking on a bench. “They don’t bother round here,” she says, “it’s a shame. It’s [the political dialogue] all about Boris Johnson, and what he’s doing. It makes you laugh. It’s always about Boris”.

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I don’t find the candidate Natasa Pantelic, a councillor in Slough, but I am sent a statement which includes the words: “This is an opportunity for change — a fresh start — for Chesham and Amersham. They [the Liberal Democrats] don’t care about progressive politics; they just care about power.” There is a Chilterns4ProgressiveAlliance group standing in the centre of Chesham “campaigning for opposition party cooperation in Chesham & Amersham, Batley & Spen and the next general election”. They are genial but they do not have the support of the opposition parties themselves, which is a maddening for them and pleasing to Boris Johnson.

Under these gentle currents is the possibility of future anguish. There is a Cassandra here: Brendan Donnelly, a former Conservative MEP who is standing for Rejoin EU. He sits outside a coffee shop in Chesham and tells me that Brexit will hit us like a thunderstorm soon enough; then the tarmac drives of the mighty Chalfonts will tremble. I watch a pro-Rejoin band perform with a toy cat (a “catidate” and member of Cats Against Brexit Mayhem) that stood in an election “and won more than 200 votes”. The vocalist sings: “Boris Johnson he said he swore he’d never leave me /and Boris Johnson said he swore he’d always love me.” Did he?

Donnelly and the ladies with cocktails aside, I meet few people who are prepared to voice anger about anything other than HS2 or potholes, and I am slightly stunned. So: the worst thing that might happen to Boris Johnson this summer is that he loses a by-election over potholes, and to the Liberal Democrats, with their 11 parliamentary seats and national polling average of 7%. Or that he nearly does. That does not sound like a crumbling blue wall. The political map is not that simple or beautiful.

As I prepare to leave Amersham Old Town, I go into a shop and look at a rack of clothes decorated with embroidered flowers. There is a live bee lurking at the hem of the dresses, disorientated by the flowers that are not real, and, I imagine, increasingly bereft and frightened. I wonder if the voters of Amersham Old Town will ever have a similar awakening.

Back in 2012, as the Lib Dems were really starting to suffer for their role in the Coalition government, some commentators  and some Conservatives started to speculate that growing unpopularity could force the smaller party out of government.

Others, perhaps more familiar with the Lib Dems, saw more resilience in the party. One of the more colourful bits of analysis noted this extreme resilience, comparing the party’s ability to survive political damage to the apocryphal cockroaches that will supposedly survive even a nuclear winter.

Most people would be mildly unhappy at being called cockroaches, but the Lib Dems wore it as a badge of pride — literally.  The party press office had yellow cockroach badges run up for that year’s party conference. The joke stuck, and at the 2013 party conference, Tim Farron, then the party president, cheerily called his party “cockroaches and nutters” from the podium.  Party members loved it.

Fast forward to 2020, and winter has well and truly arrived for the Lib Dems. This weekend, they will meet, virtually, at an online party conference that will attract little attention — and not just because of the huge events taking place elsewhere in British national life right now.

The story of the Lib Dems in 2020 can be told in two numbers. The first is 2 – that’s the percentage of voters in Wales who backed the Lib Dems in a recent poll.  Dismal, but hardly inconsistent with the party’s general standing. The Politico Poll of Polls currently puts the Lib Dems on 6%, far behind the Tories on 41% and Keir Starmer’s Labour on 39%.

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A year ago, that same tracker put the Lib Dems on 20%, snapping at Labour’s heels on 24%, and even Jo Swinson’s general election failure in 2019 saw the Lib Dems take 11.5% of the vote last December.

The other number that explains the state of the party today  is 998. That’s the number of words in the official party definition of transphobia that the Federal Board of the Liberal Democrats (more about party structure in a minute) recently adopted as the party’s official position on what constitutes discrimination against trans people, and people who suport them. (“Transphobia, whether through words or action, may be targeted at people who are, or who are perceived to be, trans or trans allies…”)

Really, the various Lib Dem sub-groups and working parties who laboured over this epic could have saved themselves a lot of time, because those 998 words can be expressed in just three: everything is transphobic. Still, the words do merit some attention here, because that statement says rather a lot about the Lib Dems today. How on earth does a party that can count JS Mill among its forebears end up seeking the outlaw the use of the phrase “biological man”?

To be clear, I am not suggesting that the Lib Dems are tanking in the polls because they are staunch supporters of trans rights, or that the British public is deserting them as a result. I’m suggesting that the Lib Dems are tanking because they’ve become fixated on things that are of no urgent interest to the majority of that public. British voters, by and large, are neither pro- nor- anti-trans: they’re just more interested in stuff like the pandemic, the NHS and the fate of the economy.

People aren’t even that interested in Brexit: the most recent Ipsos Issues Tracker showed barely a third of voters mentioned it as a top priority. Whatever the outcome of the Brexit process, voters have mostly moved on, and Keir Starmer has proved it. The Remain-voting leader of Remain-backing party has recently been urging Boris Johnson to get on with Brexit — with barely a murmur of protest from his party.

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By James Kirkup

Brexit, of course, was the adrenaline shot that restarted the Lib Dems’ failing heart in the years after coalition. Under Vince Cable and then Swinson, the party took increasingly stark positions against the policy chosen by more than 17 million voters in 2016. That drew in a new wave of members, the sort of people who spend time on #FBPE Twitter inveighing against extremist elements in British politics and not seeing the irony.

The new Lib Dems were delighted when Swinson promised to “cancel Brexit”, but the old cockroaches weren’t so sure. British history might have been rather different if Swinson had listened to Lib Dems like Norman Lamb, then the MP for North Norfolk, who warned that the “cancel Brexit” stance would help to polarise politics and “open the door” to Boris Johnson to win big.

But the Lib Dems didn’t listen, and actually rushed to open that door: it should not be forgotten that the 2019 election only happened because Swinson believed it was in her party’s best interest to allow Johnson to go the country.

Today, Brexit is not done but, endorsed in a referendum and a general election, it is a settled fact of British politics. That has left the Lib Dems, once again, searching for a purpose. That brings us back to transphobia, and the identity politics that seem to be all the party has to offer.

Log on to the Lib Dem website today the first thing you’ll see is a crowd of earnest young people holding rainbow flags and #LoveisLove placards. It’s the site of a Pride rally, not a political party.

Again, to be clear, this isn’t an argument that the Lib Dems should take a different position on gay rights, trans rights or any other part of that rainbow-flag agenda. For a party targeting younger, degree-educated urban voters, there’s a certain sense in that positioning, especially when Starmer is so carefully trying to avoid Tory attempts to draw him into a culture war where he can be painted as the head of a “woke liberal” party.

Nor is that different position really an option for Ed Davey, the Lib Dems’ sober new leader and a cockroach who first worked for the party in the early 1990s. One of the things that makes the Lib Dems different is their insistence on internal democracy and rules. The party machinery is a network of committees and boards, all with real internal power. If a small group can control an official “Specified Associated Organisation” such as LGBT+ Lib Dems, they can and do help set party policy and priorities.  Weaning the Lib Dems off identity politics probably isn’t an option for Davey.

A better approach would be to put the rainbow flags in perspective: make them part of the Lib Dem offer — but not all of it. Once, not too long ago, the Lib Dems were the most effective think-tank in British politics, an outfit relentlessly churning out policy ideas that were perfectly sensible but just a little too far ahead of their time for bigger parties to embrace.

Yet Davey has taken the leadership of a party that has little to say about the bread-and-butter issues of politics and government that still motivate the typical voter. The party did develop some sound policies last year — insulating low-income homes; a £10,000 training allowance for all adults — but these were inevitably drowned out by noise about Brexit.

The irony of Lib Dem irrelevance on policy today is so sharp you could shave with it.

If it were to be revealed that Dominic Cummings was a card-carrying Lib Dem who used to sit on the Federal Policy Committee in the early 2000s, no one familiar with the party in those days would be remotely surprised. Industrial Strategy, regional policy, unpicking pension tax perks for high-earners and obscure local government reform: these are all things Lib Dems spent years talking about, to no avail. Anyone looking for the policies that flesh out the Johnson-Cummings promise of “leveling up” could do worse than look at the unread policy papers that Cable and others used to churn out.

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Likewise on the green economy.  It has been reported recently that the PM has become fascinated with the role that hydrogen could play in a new low-carbon economy.

If only he’d attended a few Lib Dem conferences in the cockroach days, when Lib Dems enjoyed nothing more than a day dreaming about the carbon-free economy of 2030. When I chaired a fringe meeting on energy policy at last year’s Lib Dem conference, everyone enjoyed it when a very detailed row broke out between audience members about the precise size of hydrogen molecules; Davey, a panelist, cheerily joined in. This is a party that takes the detail of policy seriously.

What happens to the Lib Dems next will depend in part on who is left in the party. The FBPE crowd were largely not “proper” Lib Dem cockroaches; many of them were happy to have a membership card and a direct debit, but not for them pounding the pavements delivering Focus leaflets or going to conference for Glee Club. There are still some very serious Lib Dems in local government, however, and I suspect many of the old cockroaches are still there, even if some younger types with blue hair and pronouns now make more noise.

Will that be a solid enough foundation on which Davey can start to rebuild? And if so, what will he construct?  What is the role for the Liberal Democrats in a political system that is starting to look at least partially post-liberal? A fair bit depends on what Starmer does, but all the signs are that he’s listening to his very clever policy chief Claire Ainsley and trying to reconnect Labour with the values of the voters it lost to Johnson last year: Rule Britannia, VE Day and even Get Brexit Done.

Some Lib Dems may think that leaves a gap in the market for a truly progressive party: more rainbow flags and BLM slogans, and rejecting voters who believe the “wrong” things. In other words, offering sort of politics that Americans call “liberal left”.

As an outsider who runs a centrist think-tank, I’d suggest the Lib Dem aim should be something else: to make the case for a rather older idea of liberalism, one where personal freedom and responsibility go hand-in-hand and people are trusted to make their own choices within a clear set of rules.

The two big parties are quietly agreeing a broad consensus that the size and power of the state should grow: assuming Johnson leads his party into the next election, don’t be surprised to see him battling Starmer over who can promise to do the most, spend the most, in the Red Wall and elsewhere. After all, money is cheap and the huge challenge of the pandemic demands a new paradigm, right?

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The Tories are facing a new revolt on the Right

By Matt Hancock

Economically, we have already entered the new world: the Conservative Party is waging political war on allies and institutions in order to obtain the power to use state spending to support companies favoured by ministers and their super-bright advisers. Likewise the rules and instructions rolled out in response to Covid-19, some of which constitute a remarkable extension of state power in daily life.

Who speaks for the dissenters, for those who’d like some more checks and balances on the people in charge? Who will make the case for rules on the role of the state in markets and in people’s lives? I am no liberterian but the absence of a clear liberal voice in British politics unnerves me sometimes. And as someone who still thinks Mill’s On Liberty is probably the most important book I’ve ever read, it saddens me to see “liberal” attached to causes and ideas that are keener to smother dissenting opinions than protect them.

Is there yet a role for a liberal Lib Dem party? Do the Lib Dems want to be that party? Here, Davey might want to pay attention to the detail of some recent YouGov polling on those Covid interventions, which asked people if they would follow ministerial encouragement to shop their fellow citizens to the police for meeting in groups of more than six.

No fewer than 43% of Conservative voters would report strangers to the police, and 29% would make a similar call about neighbours; 15% of Tories would even call the cops on family members. Lib Dems, meanwhile, were the voter-group least likely to snitch: only 26% would call the police on strangers, 21% about neighbours, and 7% on family.

https://twitter.com/cagyarrow/status/1306920845911224321?s=20

Britain may be heading down the road of post-liberal politics and a bigger state, but liberalism is neither dead nor doomed to irrelevance. Lib Dem cockroaches need to decide if they want to keep scuttling on.

It’s hardly surprising then, that those hoping for a Labour government might be looking elsewhere — searching for an alternative route to power that runs not through former mining and industrial seats, but instead through the quote-unquote leafier suburbs of Britain’s big cities and some of its commuter belts. Think Guildford, not Gedling. Think also, for instance, Chingford, Uxbridge & South Ruislip, and Wycombe — places where Labour’s vote has increased substantially since 2005 and where it’s now over 25%.

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By Stephen Pollard

Are those doing the hoping right? Well sort of. Talk to some of the Tory-inclined analysts of the UK’s electoral dynamics and geography, including those whose work first alerted the Conservative Party to the potential gains on offer in the Midlands and the North, and they will freely acknowledge the flipside.

As values and culture become as important to British voters as valence and competence, then there are seats in southern (but not exclusively in southern) England full of well-heeled, increasingly well-educated voters which could eventually fall to the centre-Left. Canterbury as canary in the coalmine, if you like.

But ‘eventually’ is an awfully long time in politics — and, with a few exceptions, probably too long for any Labour supporters hoping to turn things around in just four years. The term ‘centre-Left’ points to an important caveat, too. Not all of what we might call the leafy liberal seats, if they do flip in the future, will flip to Labour. For instance, constituencies such as Wimbledon, Esher and Walton, and actually Guildford itself, are far more likely to turn orange than red.

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That needn’t, of course, be a deal-breaker — indeed, it could turn out to be a deal-maker. The chances of Labour making it into office in 2024 on its own and without the support of other parties are, frankly, slim — since even a small overall majority would require a swing of the size last seen in 1945 and 1997, elections which back then delivered the kind of monster majorities that not even the most optimistic of optimists working for Keir Starmer can possibly hope for — especially now Scotland is all but lost.

If the best, then, that Labour can do in four years’ time is to become the largest party in parliament, it will (even if there are still Scottish seats in the Westminster parliament) have to depend on the Lib Dems capturing or recapturing at least the 13 seats that Ed Davey (presuming he’s still leader by then, too) stands to snatch from the Tories on, say, a 5% swing.

On the upside — for both of England’s ‘progressive’ parties — there is now next to no electoral competition between them. There are now just nine seats in the entire country where the Lib Dems are the key challengers to Labour, down from 76 in 2010. And none of the 11 Lib Dem MPs currently sitting in Westminster faces a credible threat from a Labour challenger.

In fact, a division of labour between Labour and the Lib Dems may, some might argue, be no bad thing since it would theoretically allow Starmer to leave the socially-liberal, pro-European stuff to Davey, while he beats a more patriotic, even authoritarian drum in order to win back the seats the party has lost since 2005.

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By Tim Bale

But there’s a problem with that horses-for-courses, red-orange strategy. Not all the leafy liberal seats that might swing away from the Tories — especially if they really do decide to wage the kind of ‘culture war’ that some Conservative MPs clearly see as their best bet — are winnable by the Lib Dems.

The hard truth is that Labour will have to try to win a whole bunch of seats outside the Red Wall by itself, whether they be leafy liberal or, perhaps more promisingly, some of the socially-heterogeneous seats in home counties towns that it managed to win in 1997. And doing so almost certainly rules out a transparently desperate (and as such probably ultimately unconvincing and internally divisive) attempt to embrace cultural conservatism in order to close the yawning ‘values gap’ between Labour and the voters who switched from it to the Tories in 2019.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Labour need give up on most, all or even any of the seats in which those switchers live.

In part, that’s because those more culturally conservative, provincially-minded voters are not the be-all-and-end-all of those seats. Some of those constituencies contain significant proportions of ethnic minority voters still inclined to vote Labour. And even those that don’t are not, believe it or not, like those small towns in a sci-fi movie where all the kids, the teenagers, and the young adults have mysteriously disappeared. Moreover, you wouldn’t know it to read some media commentary, but some people living in them — yes really — have even been to university. And even some of those that haven’t share the broadly ‘progressive’ views of the majority who have.

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By Graeme Archer

In any case it’s a common misconception that, when it comes to elections (and referendums) demography is somehow destiny. Of course it matters that many of those seats have (or can certainly be caricatured as having) large number of older, less educated, white working class voters who were repelled by Labour’s London-Left-liberalism — especially when it appeared to accelerate under Corbyn. But that doesn’t mean that at least some of them can’t be brought back into the fold by a palpable change of direction or at least an emphasis under a Labour leader savvy enough to steer clear of the supposed excesses of identity politics and away from any suggestion that Brexit can be unwound.

It’s an equally common misconception that all or nearly all of the northern seats that switched had never before elected a Tory MP — many of them (Barrow-in-Furness, Bury North and Bury South and Bolton North to name but the ‘b’s) did so in the 1980s before going back to Labour again in the late nineties and early noughties. In other words, a fair few of the seats that Labour needs to win back are seats that the party has lost (and often lost quite badly) in before but won back, sometimes with seemingly stonking majorities.

Nor should we discount the economic shocks resulting from both Covid and Brexit, deal or no deal. By the time the next election rolls around, the UK might not be firing on all cylinders, let alone have been ‘levelled-up’. As a result, there is really no earthly reason why Labour — decently led and with a little bit of luck — can’t snatch back many of the seats Boris Johnson captured back in 2019, in addition to winning a bunch of home counties and leafy-liberal constituencies further (but not always: think Rushcliffe and Altringham and Sale) south.

Keir Starmer would doubtless deny being a Blairite. But he is going to have to pull off basically the same trick as the man who only a small minority of his grassroots membership still regard with much, if any, residual fondness and respect.

For all the inevitable calls for him to define himself this week, in the months and weeks to come, Labour’s new leader would be far better off becoming, like Blair, a protean politician onto whom a bewildering variety of voters can project their own aspirations and concerns — and so see in him both the radicalism and reassurance they simultaneously crave.

So it is for me and my politics. I haven’t had one political awakening; I’ve had dozens. I’m still not sure that the way I see the world today is the right one. Frankly, the level of conviction most political writers seem to have these days strikes me as indulgent narcissism.

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By Polly Mackenzie

My first political memory is staying up late in 1992 with my father, nestled on the sofa in the upstairs living room of our house in Birmingham. As the results ticked in, and his hopes for a Labour victory expired, I felt his sense of despair as if it were my own. I believed it was my own for a long time: I had a sort of lizard-brain level conviction that I was Not a Tory.

Around this time I remember walking home from school with my good friend Catherine, who had no such in-built disdain for the Conservative party, and wanted to know why I was so passionately against them. In an instant, I conjured up a rationalisation for my stance: the mess the government had made of child support laws had pitted my parents against each other during their divorce. They had stayed friends, I maintained, until the Child Support Agency ruined things.

Catherine nodded wisely, and said that made sense. But I felt awkward, because I knew it wasn’t true. Yes: I had a vague inkling that my parents had found the CSA hard to deal with. But I knew the truth was that I hated the Conservatives because I loved my father. The feelings came before the reasons, not the other way around.

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I continued to consider myself Not a Tory for years, with other vague political identities layered on top, like George Bush is a Bad Guy and Northern Ireland is Important (I had a boyfriend whose dad had served there, and who had friends caught up in the Omagh bombing). But honestly, I paid almost no attention to politics.

In 2002 I had an interview for a graduate trainee scheme at Reuters where they asked me to name “a news story from the last few months”. I stared blankly until the interviewer generously reminded me of a few: a Foot and Mouth epidemic, a postponed General Election, the Soham murders, the death of the Queen Mother. I didn’t get the job.

In the end, I came to politics through policy. I was a journalist at a magazine called Property Week, where I was assigned the job of reporting on tax and planning policy (as well as industrial warehouses). I loved it. I saw how incentives and rules create system-level change, or system-level failure. I never got the hang of reporting on deals — the life blood of the magazine — but discussing and explaining policy? I had found a metier.

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By Peter Franklin

So I went to work for the Liberal Democrats, as a policy adviser on housing and local government — that’s when I fell in love. Because joining a political movement is exactly like falling in love. The feelings come before the reasons.

I went to party conference, in Harrogate, and I stayed up until 3 in the morning, then kept myself awake during the day by chain-drinking caramel macchiatos. I felt like I was part of something. I belonged. I gazed longingly at the most senior political advisers, like Charles Kennedy’s handsome press officer, and his handsome speechwriter, and I dreamed of being like them.

My addiction to The West Wing bears a lot of responsibility for this, of course: this was my Aaron Sorkin phase, where I believed earnestly that all problems could be resolved if we were all just a bit more articulate, clever and brave.

Then came the coalition, in which I worked as Nick Clegg’s senior policy adviser. I’d long since been able to observe intellectually that the Conservative Party was not the exclusive force for evil I’d been brought up to believe it. But I think I only emotionally absorbed this when I was working day after day alongside talented, wise, compassionate and thoughtful people who chose to wear a blue rosette at election time. There are still Conservatives I’d cross the road to avoid. But there are far more I’m privileged to call friends.

I shared an office with Steve Hilton, the maverick adviser to David Cameron. At one point he introduced me to a policy specialist who was advising on the introduction of elected Police and Crime Commissioners. “You know how I’ve told you that everyone who’s against PCCs is just an establishment bore who has to be ignored,” Steve told this adviser. The adviser nodded. “Well, Polly’s the exception. You can listen to her.” And most of the time, this was the spirit of the coalition. We mostly found ways to listen to each other, instead of starting with the assumption that our opponents were wrong. It made for better government. I believed in it.

But my illusions that you could win hearts and minds with decent government and reasonable compromise were shattered by the 2015 General Election. The morning after, Paddy Ashdown stood in our Lib Dem HQ among the hungover and the heartbroken hangers on, who couldn’t bear to face the reality of going home. Perched on a chair, his voice cracking, he asked: “Why would anyone compromise in the national interest ever again?”

He reminded us that politics is feelings, not facts. We’d placed our faith in facts, and reasonableness. We’d tried being clever, articulate and brave; and discovered that the public preferred intransigence.

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By Polly Mackenzie

I miss being partisan. It’s so comfortable to be right all the time, and there’s no view better than the one from the moral high ground, from which your enemies are the ranged forces of evil. It’s the way to make money as a columnist. It’s the way to win votes at the ballot box. But even these victories are less valuable than the feeling of being surrounded by your tribe and the warm fuzzy glow of righteousness. I miss it. I just don’t feel that tribal belonging any more. I’m a political apostate.

In fact, I think we do better when we listen to each other with an open mind. I think politics should be about finding a way forward together, not winning and making the other guys shut up for a few years. I think all our parties, and every individual within them, are wrong on some things and right on some others. And I think the same of myself.

Humility needs a place in our politics. I hope some day it will take the place of the hubris we see from our current crop of leaders.

We asked a representative sample of 2,000 voters on the day of the election how they had voted and why. Of those who said they voted Conservative, 85% put ‘to get Brexit done’ in their top three reasons. That was also the choice of almost nine in 10 of the people who voted Conservative for the first time yesterday.

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By Douglas Murray

How was this message so successful, when only two years ago, another three-word slogan, “strong and stable”, helped deprive Theresa May of her majority? The differentiating factor is that it was not a phrase cooked up by some grand strategist — but one that came straight from the public themselves. It was not an enthusiastic call to arms for Brexit, but instead a tired longing for closure. It was the refrain of people up and down the country, desperate for the EU infighting to stop and for proper issues to be given attention once more.

I have heard the phrase repeatedly in focus groups from as far back as January, when I was in Downing Street. But the unfortunate truth was that when Theresa May said “get Brexit done”, MPs thought she was trying to brush the detail under the carpet. An apparently true believer such as Boris Johnson could embrace the phrase with no problem at all.

More than a saying, though, it was also a quiet thought in the back of voters’ minds. The power of this latent thought is what most probably explains why the narrowing we saw in the polls in the final week did not come to fruition. People may have been talking about public services and the NHS in the last few days, but when it came to putting the cross in the box, they were thinking about putting an end to the Brexit process. And if public services were on their mind, it was in the context of the Conservative Party’s message: they can only be improved if you get Brexit out of the way first.

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By Paul Embery

Of course, the election was not all about leaving the European Union. Focus groups throughout the campaign consistently showed Jeremy Corbyn to be toxic for the working-class voters who abandoned Labour in droves. He may have won them over in 2017, but he went into this contest as a much better known quantity. Crucially, anti-Semitism cut through in a way it hasn’t before: of direct switchers from Labour to the Conservatives in our poll, almost one in five cited Labour’s anti-Semitism problem as an important factor in deciding their vote.

Other past episodes hurt Corbyn. His obfuscation on Brexit is an obvious one, but when I ran the polling at No 10, we found his fudged response to the Salisbury attack fatally undermined him. Although little reported, his reversal on his pledge to abolish student debt in the summer of 2017 eroded his reputation for authenticity with many of his more enthusiastic supporters.

This time round, the Conservative strategy fit the leader. In 2017, pollsters on that campaign (read: not me) saw that Theresa May was popular and accordingly recommended her name went on the side of a bus and she run a presidential style campaign. This was an approach which did not suit her. It does suit Boris, and he has clearly had quite a fun time over the last few weeks.

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May's fatal flaw

By Various Contributors

The role of the economy was also more relevant in this campaign than in 2017. It was the third-most cited reason by those new Conservative voters. This is doubtless linked to concerns about Labour’s economic record and spending plans. Labour’s individual policies might be popular, but voters had very little faith they could ever be delivered — or, if they could, voters feared the economy and their own livelihoods would suffer. Eleven years on from the financial crisis, it is striking how often the phrase “it could be just like last time” comes up in focus groups. This is borne out by the data: if you stuck with Labour from 2017, then the manifesto was a big issue, but none of the other key groups cite the manifesto as a reason for their vote.

Finally, the electoral dynamics favoured the Conservatives more this time round. The Brexit Party was more popular than UKIP was in 2017, and though there were some seats where they did seem to curtail the Conservatives, they also seemed to take a significant number of votes from Labour — making the Tories even more competitive.

The Liberal Democrats had a truly woeful evening, with the British public delivering the ultimate punishment for chutzpah by depriving Jo Swinson of her seat. But their vote share was up on 2017, and the effect was to erode Labour’s support, and provide room for the Conservatives to not only hold seats such as Cities of London and Westminster, but also gain seats such as Kensington.

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The danger ahead for Boris Johnson

By Mary Harrington

It all combined to create a big win for Boris. Big enough that he can define the Conservative Party — and the country — in his own image. A lot got him to this point. But those three words, Get Brexit Done, did more than anything else.

For full results of the UnHerd/J L Partners survey see HERE and for full tables see HERE

Which means that at any other time, the fact that she has built an election platform on the twin planks of making it impossible to measure sex inequality and eliminating women-only spaces, would get her rightfully trashed as a hypocrite.

But we don’t live in any other time. We live in 2019, when the actual “sex” part of sexism makes the most fastidious of progressive speakers squeamish, and talking about women’s rights is seen as dreadfully passé. We’re not supposed to think that oppression occurs on the basis of bodies any more. Instead, it’s framed as question of feelings: everyone has a gender identity, we’re told, and injustice occurs when people aren’t treated in accordance with the identity they claim to have.

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The birth of the transsexual empire

By Julie Bindel

It’s a supremely liberal logic, because it’s wholly individualistic. The problem is no longer to free women from male violence and exploitation, it’s a matter of personal liberty. As Swinson said during her interview with Andrew Marr, she supports gender self-identity so that “everybody can be themselves and be free to live their lives”. Under this reasoning, it would be a deep cruelty to turn a transwoman away from a women’s refuge because it would be a denial of the transwoman’s deeply held sense of self.

But what about the women who need the refuge? There are services for male victims that a transwoman could access. Female victims, who need female-only refuges as a sanctuary from male violence, don’t have that option. They aren’t trying to access women’s services to validate their identities: they’re trying to access women’s services because they’ve been terrified and traumatised by men.

This obvious truth — that women and transwomen both need refuges from male violence, and that there must be separate institutions for everyone to have the security they deserve — is an unspeakable act of transphobia in the eyes of anyone who has accepted the rule of gender identity. Women who have already suffered violence from males who identified as trans to access supposedly female spaces (such as the victims of the rapist Karen White, who sexually assaulted fellow inmates after being moved to a women’s prison) are merely regrettable collateral.

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Has trans activism gone too far?

By Douglas Murray

Single-sex refuges, changing rooms, sports, prisons and toilets were established for women’s protection. When women are forced to share them with males — however those males identify — women are not “free to live their lives”, because they can’t be free from male violence. And there is no test we can apply to reliably identify men who will abuse a system of gender self-identity. Despite the Lib Dem MP Layla Moran’s claim that “I see someone in their soul and as a person. I do not really care whether they have a male body”, soul reading is not yet an objective test.

One of the Lib Dems’ other commitments is to “improve diversity in public appointments by setting ambitious targets”. Ambitious targets sound great, but they’re meaningless without any mechanism for achieving them, all the more so if there’s no way to measure them. Replacing sex with self-identified gender (rather than recording both sex and trans status) immediately renders any sex-disaggregated data farcical. It only takes a handful of male executives ticking the “woman” box in wage-gap reporting for the underpayment of hundreds of junior women to be obliterated.

Actually, Swinson has personal experience of the strange distortions of gender identity applied to sex inequality. Writing in Equal Power about her time working at Viking FM in the 2000s and how male-dominated radio is, she says: “In fact the gender balance was slightly better than we knew at the time, as our anchor breakfast presenter was Stephanie Hirst, at the time known as Simon.” She does not appear to be joking.

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All the world's a stage for the trans ultras

By Stephen Pollard

Hirst was, by all external warrants, a man; was hired as a man; was treated by colleagues as a man. Subsequently coming out as a transwoman is personally brave, but it doesn’t retroactively alter the maleness of Viking FM in the previous decade, any more than Swinson would stop being the Lib Dem’s first female leader if she were to declare herself non-binary.

The party’s festishisation of “freedom to” means that it’s offering freedom in name only, which is no kind of freedom for women who need protections for their sex rather than permission for their self-expression. Judged by her feminist credentials, Jo Swinson is a disaster.

But for someone like me, a conservative social democrat reconciled to Brexit, there is an interesting paradox at play: to make Britain safe for moderate social democracy, you really have to lend your vote to the flamboyant metropolitan Conservative Boris Johnson (or at least hope he wins convincingly).

The Brahmin Left cannot see this, though, and believes the future for social democratic politics over the next decade is “dire”, as Will Hutton put it in the Observer.

But the logic is plain. If Johnson wins a decent majority, it will only be because a sufficient number of mainly lower income voters in the North and the Midlands has switched from Labour to Tory. If this happens, it will shift the voter base of the Tory party and thus the interests that the party represents.

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What will survive this seismic election?

By Matthew Goodwin

Of course, the party will still also represent a solid block of the most affluent in the South and elsewhere, but why have the 2017 and 2019 Tory manifestos been so relatively quiet about the free market and tax cuts and so noisy about investing in public services? Brexit has forced the party to seek a new segment of the electorate and, contrary to all the talk of lurching to the Right, this strengthens the hand of One Nation Tories who are happy to see the party becoming more like a cross-class Christian Democratic alliance — minus the confessional attachment.

The party will remain in favour of the market economy and enterprise, but it is no longer going to be the party of small government, because its new voter base wants quite high public spending and plenty of redistribution. As Daniel Finkelstein put it in the Times: “If you win Bassetlaw or Hartlepool, you have to become the party of Bassetlaw and Hartlepool.”

You remain the party of the shires and the affluent suburbs too, and this will no doubt create interesting policy conflicts over the coming years — over housing for example — but the Left’s de-regulatory, small-state caricature of the Tories is going to look increasingly unbelievable.

Apart from getting Brexit done, the only other Johnson slogan that I have noticed, particularly evident at the manifesto launch, is that decent public services and public infrastructure underpin a successful market economy — and isn’t that almost a definition of market-friendly social democracy?

There are, of course, many Conservatives whose economic instinct remains more Thatcherite, and who tend to see the public sector as a sort of necessary evil, but they are a political hangover. And incidentally, although there is still a highly disproportionate number of Tory MPs who were privately educated, the proportion has dropped from 75% in the 1970s to 45% now (and possibly below 40% after the election) — so many more will have been dependent on public services most of their lives. Tory candidates look and sound more like the voters than ever before.

By the same author

It's a bad time for an illegal immigration amnesty

By David Goodhart

There is a second leg to this story about making Britain safe for moderate social democracy: it is the breaking of the hold of the true-believer socialists who currently control the Labour party. A thumping victory for the new Tory party described above is a necessary condition for that outcome.

This change will not happen swiftly and could entail a more complete break-up of the Labour party than the minor splintering we have seen so far. How swiftly exactly will depend on many imponderables, such as how serious the defeat is, which Labour MPs are left standing, and whether, after a second defeat (and maybe a heavy one this time), the Momentum surge might start to lose momentum. This itself might also depend on the medium term socio-economic fate of what one might call the ‘educated just about managing class’ — people with degrees from non-Russell Group universities who end up in jobs not so different from those of their parents.

In any case, a big victory for Johnson surely increases the chances of the sensible centre-Left either recapturing the Labour Party, or leaving it as a hard-Left rump party and establishing a new (Brownite) centre-Left party. This new party would be a few notches to the Left of the new Tory party on economics, and several yards to its Left (if that is the right word) on social and cultural matters.

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How Labour's Left has stitched up selection

By David Kogan

So here is the second paradox of this election: at least in the medium term, it will shift UK politics in a European direction, with two cross-class “peoples’ parties” (like the CDU and SPD in Germany) with similar approaches to economic management, but with the Tories representing the more socially conservative strands of the electorate and Labour (or its successor party) representing the more liberal strands.

That will also mean that the most free market of the big European countries does not have a party that enthusiastically represents the free market (it is hard to see the social democratic Liberal Democrats filling that gap). But the free market can probably look after itself for now, and if Britain becomes too statist, the electorate will sense it and reshuffle the pack at some point in the future.

One doubt that some people, especially on the Left, will have about this thesis is whether a modest increase in NHS investment and a slogan or two about public infrastructure really amounts to a social democratic shift in the Tory party.

It is true that the Tory manifesto in the end was more modest on public spending commitments than I had hoped, and implicitly less redistributionist than I had wanted, with the promise not to increase any of the main income related taxes. The lack of a proper commitment to a partial socialisation of adult care costs, while understandable politically, was also a disappointment.

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What if everyone loses this election?

By James Kirkup

So is the Tory party just putting on a more centrist mask to appeal temporarily to the Brexit-voting lower-middle and working classes? I do not think the world works like that. Even for our short-termist, adversarial political culture, that would be an impossibly cynical move. It also ignores the fact that the party has almost certainly lost a section of the middle class over Brexit that needs to be replaced — and not just for one election.

No, from my own observations (and I work part-time in a centre-Right think tank and meet plenty of Tory MPs), I would say that the party — thanks to Brexit — is going through another of its great evolutionary shifts. My own think tank Policy Exchange recently produced a major piece of work calling for the socialisation of adult social care costs (with a supportive forward by that well known 19^th century mill-owner Jacob Rees-Mogg).

The last Tory party conference had a mantra of three policies for post-Brexit Britain: sort out social care, build a lot more houses (including public ones for rent) and invest more in non-university, post-school education for the 60% who do not go into higher education. If this is the plan for de-regulated, race-to-the-bottom Britain, it is very craftily disguised.

So why are so many Tories so passionate about leaving the EU if it is not to loosen protections that their new voters are strongly attached to? No doubt there are some who are keen to see the back of the Working Time Directive and so on, but de-regulation and autonomy are here too often confused. The moderate nationalism that Brexit appealed to is the localism of our more globalised world.

Brexit now allows us to make our own choices about immigration, about farm subsidies, about regional aid and state subsidies, about contracting out rules in the public sector, about VAT levels, about the future of our legal system and much more. In many areas we will stick close to EU rules, in other areas we will diverge, and pay some economic price for doing so, but it will be our choice.

Is all this just the grumpy rationalisations of a privileged 60-something who flirted with leftism in his youth and is now returning to his Conservative/conservative roots? Well, I was a member of the Labour party for about 35 years and continued to vote (and sometimes even canvas) for them right up to 2015. I voted Tory in 2017, largely on Brexit grounds (as a Remain voter who wanted the decision implemented), and I might vote Liberal Democrat as an anti-Corbyn tactical vote in 2019. So to the extent that beliefs are expressed through political acts, I think I can now claim a pretty sound centrist record.

Everyone agreed this could only be a good thing, so towards the end of 2019 a UK television production company decided to monetise it further with a new reality TV show called I’m An Ideologue … Get Me Out of Here! In a radical experiment, the format saw 100 members of distinct political tribes marooned on one of five islands in a small Pacific archipelago. They received basic survival training before being put ashore to see how they would fare over the course of a year in the wild.

Conservatives
It’s not really the Conservative way to start a society from scratch — they being a crowd for whom, at least until the 2016 referendum, the key to happiness is gentle bottom-up tinkering with the institutions you inherit from your forebears. Nevertheless, the castaways made a fist of it. With Burkean efficiency, they organised themselves into “little platoons” — hunters, gatherers, cooks and fire-makers, builders of shelter — and agreed that the division of labour would create a rising tide that lifted all boats.

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Why conservatism is failing

By Mary Harrington

Problems first arose when the platoon who discovered the island’s sole source of fresh water started charging exorbitant numbers of seashells — the standard unit of exchange — for access to it on that grounds that they should be entitled to profit from their entrepreneurship. There were likewise restive elements among the women — whose “traditional” role as cooks and fire-makers was expected to go uncompensated in currency. Sufficient shelters having been built a month or two in, the shelter-builders were soon largely unemployed. The monopoly water suppliers, meanwhile, amassed more and more seashells, which they lent to the lower orders at considerable rates of interest.

The experiment ended, unfortunately, before the violent revolution many were predicting came to pass.

Labour
The hope of establishing a paradise — “socialism in one country” — got off to a rocky start on the Labour island. Before they even started to forage for food, shelter and drinkable water, the 100 participants became mired in a ferocious ideological disagreement about the distribution of the island’s still hypothetical resources. A clique of younger members — alarmed by the possibility that those who caught fish or game might assert the unilateral right to eat it — demanded Fully Automated Luxury Communism and forcibly expropriated the remaining stash of Tracker bars and dried apricots. They made camp on the beach on the west of the island and declared “socialism on one beach”.

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Why the Labour Left is doomed

By David Kogan

The remaining contestants, now desperately hungry, trooped towards the island’s interior in search of sustenance. These “centrists”, smarting though they may have been about the loss of their snack bars, nevertheless made a fist of setting up a camp and within a few months, working co-operatively, were getting on pretty well. But, then, having passed a resolution that radical disruption was essential to prevent neoliberal orthodoxy taking hold, the inhabitants of the beach encampment set fire to the centrists’ jungle — which destroyed 80% of the island’s natural resources.

Liberal Democrats
The Liberal Democrat island was a peculiar one. On the face of it, they all got along rather well — and they proved remarkably hospitable to the handful of desperate refugees who swam across from the other islands. At the end of the year they had survived and even prospered, in a very modest, minding their own business sort of way, but ratings figures for Lib Dem island proved so low that their part of the show ceased being televised after six days. In fact, even the production company slightly forgot that they had six islands, so at the end of the year nobody came to rescue them.

Many hundreds of years later, anthropologists would come upon the remains of their civilisation and discover that they had built a primitive religion around the conviction that their island was going to win a reality TV show.

The Alt-right
This was the most violent of all the island experiments. A collective commitment to “free speech” was the only rule on this paradise of libertarians, but flare-ups ensued every time one freethinker called another a rude name, and got punched in the nose for it — causing a backlash when others punched him in the nose in defence of the original freethinker’s right to robust debate. Unity tended to prevail only when the groups rallied to search the jungle for “antifa”.

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How the alt-Right got stuck in The Matrix

By James Bloodworth

The competition for the conch became more and more intense, and the unity of the island’s various freethinkers broke down as policy divisions emerged between white nationalists, white supremacists, evolutionary psychologists, Randian rationalists and those who remained unwaveringly committed, even on this undeveloped tropical island, to promoting the cause of ethics in videogame journalism. The suggestion among some radical freethinkers on the island that women be held as a common sexual resource showed alarming signs of gaining traction and threatened to unite the warring subtribes — until it was pointed out that there were no women on the island at all.

Extinction Rebellion
A substantial crew of die-hard Thunbergites — with the under-16s and over-60s disproportionately represented — volunteered to participate in the show, citing their wish to “reject the neoliberal industrial-capitalist machine”. Within a few hours, however, a number attempted to swim away when they realised they would no longer have iPhones or be able to use Instagram or Twitter. Some of those who survived this attempt and returned to the island formed a cargo-cult. Its devotional rituals included “hashtagging” disapproving messages in the sand of the beach on the south of the island in the hopes they would be visible to passengers on overflying aircraft.

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Brexit, Thunberg and the dangers of blind hope

By Daniel Kalder

Organisation on the island was agreed to be anarcho-syndicalist, and a great deal of energy in the first year went into the debate over what anarcho-syndicalism actually was. The first monsoon season went badly after the commune decided that nobody was to light fires to keep warm and dry on the grounds that to do so would release an unconscionable amount of carbon into the atmosphere. But by sheltering under the bodies of colleagues who had glued themselves to trees, a number of the island’s inhabitants were able to make it through to the dry season.

So it is for me and my politics. I haven’t had one political awakening; I’ve had dozens. I’m still not sure that the way I see the world today is the right one. Frankly, the level of conviction most political writers seem to have these days strikes me as indulgent narcissism.

More from this series

Don't let Brexit become the next Troubles

By Jenny McCartney

My first political memory is staying up late in 1992 with my father, nestled on the sofa in the upstairs living room of our house in Birmingham. As the results ticked in, and his hopes for a Labour victory expired, I felt his sense of despair as if it were my own. I believed it was my own for a long time: I had a sort of lizard-brain level conviction that I was Not a Tory.

Around this time I remember walking home from school with my good friend Catherine, who had no such in-built disdain for the Conservative party, and wanted to know why I was so passionately against them. In an instant, I conjured up a rationalisation for my stance: the mess the government had made of child support laws had pitted my parents against each other during their divorce. They had stayed friends, I maintained, until the Child Support Agency ruined things.

Catherine nodded wisely, and said that made sense. But I felt awkward, because I knew it wasn’t true. Yes: I had a vague inkling that my parents had found the CSA hard to deal with. But I knew the truth was that I hated the Conservatives because I loved my father. The feelings came before the reasons, not the other way around.

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Why shouting 'traitor' is a fool's game

By Giles Fraser

I continued to consider myself Not a Tory for years, with other vague political identities layered on top, like George Bush is a Bad Guy and Northern Ireland is Important (I had a boyfriend whose dad had served there, and who had friends caught up in the Omagh bombing). But honestly, I paid almost no attention to politics.

In 2002 I had an interview for a graduate trainee scheme at Reuters where they asked me to name “a news story from the last few months”. I stared blankly until the interviewer generously reminded me of a few: a Foot and Mouth epidemic, a postponed General Election, the Soham murders, the death of the Queen Mother. I didn’t get the job.

In the end, I came to politics through policy. I was a journalist at a magazine called Property Week, where I was assigned the job of reporting on tax and planning policy (as well as industrial warehouses). I loved it. I saw how incentives and rules create system-level change, or system-level failure. I never got the hang of reporting on deals — the life blood of the magazine — but discussing and explaining policy? I had found a metier.

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Our politics of impossible promises

By Polly Mackenzie

So I went to work for the Liberal Democrats, as a policy adviser on housing and local government — that’s when I fell in love. Because joining a political movement is exactly like falling in love. The feelings come before the reasons.

I went to party conference, in Harrogate, and I stayed up until 3 in the morning, then kept myself awake during the day by chain-drinking caramel macchiatos. I felt like I was part of something. I belonged. I gazed longingly at the most senior political advisers, like Charles Kennedy’s handsome press officer, and his handsome speechwriter, and I dreamed of being like them.

My addiction to The West Wing bears a lot of responsibility for this, of course: this was my Aaron Sorkin phase, where I believed earnestly that all problems could be resolved if we were all just a bit more articulate, clever and brave.

Then came the coalition, in which I worked as Nick Clegg’s senior policy adviser. I’d long since been able to observe intellectually that the Conservative Party was not the exclusive force for evil I’d been brought up to believe it. But I think I only emotionally absorbed this when I was working day after day alongside talented, wise, compassionate and thoughtful people who chose to wear a blue rosette at election time. There are still Conservatives I’d cross the road to avoid. But there are far more I’m privileged to call friends.

I shared an office with Steve Hilton, the maverick adviser to David Cameron. At one point he introduced me to a policy specialist who was advising on the introduction of elected Police and Crime Commissioners. “You know how I’ve told you that everyone who’s against PCCs is just an establishment bore who has to be ignored,” Steve told this adviser. The adviser nodded. “Well, Polly’s the exception. You can listen to her.” And most of the time, this was the spirit of the coalition. We mostly found ways to listen to each other, instead of starting with the assumption that our opponents were wrong. It made for better government. I believed in it.

But my illusions that you could win hearts and minds with decent government and reasonable compromise were shattered by the 2015 General Election. The morning after, Paddy Ashdown stood in our Lib Dem HQ among the hungover and the heartbroken hangers on, who couldn’t bear to face the reality of going home. Perched on a chair, his voice cracking, he asked: “Why would anyone compromise in the national interest ever again?”

He reminded us that politics is feelings, not facts. We’d placed our faith in facts, and reasonableness. We’d tried being clever, articulate and brave; and discovered that the public preferred intransigence.

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As a headstrong activist, I was a dangerous thing

By Paul Embery

I miss being partisan. It’s so comfortable to be right all the time, and there’s no view better than the one from the moral high ground, from which your enemies are the ranged forces of evil. It’s the way to make money as a columnist. It’s the way to win votes at the ballot box. But even these victories are less valuable than the feeling of being surrounded by your tribe and the warm fuzzy glow of righteousness. I miss it. I just don’t feel that tribal belonging any more. I’m a political apostate.

In fact, I think we do better when we listen to each other with an open mind. I think politics should be about finding a way forward together, not winning and making the other guys shut up for a few years. I think all our parties, and every individual within them, are wrong on some things and right on some others. And I think the same of myself.

Humility needs a place in our politics. I hope some day it will take the place of the hubris we see from our current crop of leaders.

But this constituency is not just an intersection of the great tectonic plates of democracy and capitalism — it is also, and much more prosaically, a place where ordinary people live. Around Paddington and Pimlico, for example, there are areas of significant social need. But more than any other constituency, those who represent this place end up overlooking the everyday lives of the people who live there, and end up narrowly concentrating on the needs of the financial institutions. It is actually quite odd for an MP to be far more concerned about the needs of those who pour off the train at Cannon Street at 7am — who have their own MP somewhere else — than those who wake up and live in the constituency they actually represent. Even odder, for an MP to think of their role as the representative of institutions rather than people.

Ever since the 1950 election, when this constituency came into being, the MP has always been a Tory. The incumbent, Mark Field, himself a former City lawyer, takes a keen interest in the financial City, and is currently Chair of the of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Venture Capital and Private Equity. While complaining about MP’s pay in 2001 — “If you are earning several hundred thousand a year in the City, are you going to give it up for £47,000 a year in the Commons?” — he has also condemned homeless charities in his constituency as being “a magnet for undesirables”. Suspended from his job as a junior minister for grabbing a Greenpeace protester at the Mansion House dinner, Field’s safe seat may look a little less safe than one might expect.

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How Parliament disdains the people

By Giles Fraser

Perfect, then, for that political chancer par excellence, Chuka Umunna, now abandoning the constituents of Streatham, a seat that he won as a Labour MP. Like Field, he is an ardent Remainer — the constituency having voted overwhelmingly to Remain (72%) — and like Field, very much keen to act as a cheerleader for the 1% of the 1% who work there. As he told City AM recently:

“The different service sectors that work in the City are very much the solution to the challenges that the real economy faces. The principle challenge we have is making globalisation work for more middle class families in Britain. If the City can do that, then however people feel about the background of people who work in it, they are more likely to be amenable.”

Once again, the prospective MP for 65,000 voters living in the centre of one of the world’s greatest cities is sounding as though his job was to be the spokesperson for global capital.

Part of the problem is with the City itself. It thinks of itself as different. Indeed, the independent power of the City is so well established it goes back to Magna Carta. The City has its own police force. Its own peculiar local municipality. And even the Queen has to announce her intention to enter the City ahead of a visit there. And while the Lord Mayor of London — the City Mayor, as it were — has by tradition to offer to surrender his pearl encrusted sword to the sovereign every time she or he visits, this little ceremony demonstrates as much the independence of the City as its incorporation into the wider state. The City of London has the feel of a state within a state — a bit like the Vatican. Except, (arguably) unlike the Vatican, its ultimate sovereign is mammon not God.

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Britain needs less speculation, not a smaller financial sector

By Peter Franklin

There is no doubt the City is a weird and wonderful place. When lived there I once happened to meet someone in the pub who worked for the City’s Education Board. There are so few children living in the City that, when I told her my address, she was able to reel off the names of my children. But despite this very personalised service, the City of London, as a political entity, clearly exists to protect the needs of the financial sector as opposed to its residents. And this has long been the case.

City life is also dominated by the Livery Companies. Originally medieval guilds, the membership of which signalled to potential customers the trustworthiness of the trader concerned, these groups have evolved into charitable organisations/fancy dining clubs with considerable political clout. Before the 1832 Reform Act, the Livery Companies held the exclusive right to elect the City’s four MPs. And while this was done away with, the companies still hold great sway in the political fortification of the financial sector.

Not that many of the members of these companies have anything much to do with the areas of trade that their livery once represented. “Are you are fishmonger yourself?” I once rather cheekily inquired of the woman next to me at a dinner, dressed head to toe in Prada. She looked at me as though I had crawled from under a stone. “Of course not.” Later, she left to get the train back home to Haywards Heath.

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By Graeme Archer

Will Chuka fit in with all this? I suspect it will be right up his street. His politics is a very liberal mash-up of right-wing thinking about economics with a topdressing of social progressivism. Like Field, he is keen on “outside interests” — earning more than £65,000 last year for some advisory work to an organisation called the Progressive Centre UK. Like Field, he too first worked as a City lawyer. And not unlike Field, he has described the West End as being full of people he disparaged as “trash”. And, of course, like Field — and most of the big City institutions — he is a massive fan of the European Union.

There is an ancient tradition in the church of what is called “beating the bounds” — historically, congregations going around their parish boundaries with sticks, marking out and symbolically defending their territory. And they still do this in the City. And the schoolchildren that take part in this ceremony come from St Dunston’s College, Catford — an independent school set up by the City church, St Dunston-in-the-East, and yes you guessed it, Chuka Umunna’s old school. If he becomes the MP, I expect him to keep doing the same. For all his shifting loyalties elsewhere, Umunna is very much a company man. And his company is the City.

So, will he become MP for the City? I doubt it. The one thing the Livery Companies existed to promote was trust. Trust is the very lifeblood of trade. “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of …” is written on all our banknotes. And trust is a commodity the City is desperately short of right now. Chukka Umunna has been a member of three political parties already this year. “You can’t trust a word the Lib Dems say,” he once tweeted. Well Chuka, you said it.

That’s why he is anchoring his looming campaign in the claim that while opposition parties want to “surrender” to the EU, only the Conservative Party will “get Brexit done”.

It is also why he is promising vast sums of investment for infrastructure and the NHS. There will, he claims, be a revival of the northern powerhouse, he will speak for the regions, and he also has plans for an Australian-based immigration points system. For the most part, it has all been lifted from the Farage playbook. To further incentivise these voters to switch sides, Johnson has also ruled out an electoral pact with Farage.

The success — or failure — of his gambit will determine the outcome of the next election. If Johnson scoops up just half of the Brexit Party vote, then he will close in on 40% of the national vote. If Labour and the Lib Democrats remain divided, then this could plausibly hand the Conservatives a huge majority of over 150.

There are certainly signs that the strategy is working.

Over the past week, as Conservatives prepared for conference in Manchester, they averaged 32% of the vote and held a healthy 8-point lead over Labour. Were a general election held tomorrow, they would most likely win a small majority — albeit on what would be their lowest vote share since William Hague led them to their second defeat against Tony Blair, in 2001.

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By Ian Birrell

To only look at poll averages, though, is to miss considerable variation. In recent days, we have also seen a 12-point and an 11-point Conservative lead, recorded by Opinium and YouGov respectively. Meanwhile, of the past 40 polls Labour has not led in a single one. The last time Jeremy Corbyn’s party held a lead outside the margin of error was back in July.

Other things are pointing in the same direction. The latest polling from Lord Ashcroft asked voters to choose between a Conservative government led by Johnson, or a Labour government under Corbyn. Voters broke 56% to 44% for Johnson.

Crucially, however, so too did Labour Leavers (by 52% to 48%) and Brexit Party voters (96% to 4%), all of which will boost hopes in No 10 that when it comes to the crunch they will capture the large number of pro-Brexit Labour seats that they will need to offset any losses to Labour and the Liberal Democrats in pro-Remain territory.

So, as I pointed out, while many observers have mocked and derided Johnson and his senior advisor Dominic Cummings, their more populist strategy does seem to be paying dividends. The Conservatives today are in a stronger position than when Johnson first arrived in Downing Street in late July.

Twitter has spent a month laughing at Johnson & Cummings

Yet here's another (12 pt) poll lead for the Conservatives

Of the last 40 polls Labour have not led in 1

Their last lead outside the margin of error was in July

What if the strategy is working?
https://t.co/vvhh6wmNXr

— Matt Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) September 28, 2019

But, having said all this, there are also good reasons to ask whether the Conservatives will be able to squeeze the Brexit Party vote as much as they need to. Many on the centre-Right seem fairly convinced that this is an inevitability. But there are three things that could, at least in my view, quite easily derail the broader strategy.

The first is a sharp and very real disconnect between what Boris Johnson is offering on Brexit and what most Brexit Party voters want.

As I see it, the most plausible route ahead is that the Prime Minister will fail to get a revised Brexit deal through a hostile House of Commons. This, in turn, will trigger a third Brexit extension and, through one mechanism or another, a fresh general election.

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By Peter Franklin

Johnson will then go to the country, asking voters for the majority that he needs in order to ‘get Brexit done’, which presumably will mean trying to negotiate a fresh deal while leaving no-deal on the table.

This will be a familiar story for voters. But it is one that an overwhelming majority of Brexit Party supporters, and a good chunk of Conservatives, do not want to hear. Consistently, Brexit Party voters tell us that they want a ‘no deal’ Brexit and would be prepared to see this outcome. Most would even happily sacrifice the Union for it.

But Johnson will be unable to campaign openly for a no-deal. It would be too polarising. He would instead have to go the country with something like ‘a deal through no deal’, promising to at least keep the option of no-deal on the table. His basic problem is that every time he mentions a deal, he will alienate the large majority of Brexit Party voters who do not want one — but whom he needs for a majority. Farage, meanwhile, will simply throw bomb after bomb, branding Johnson a sell-out.

This is why Farage spent much of this week trying to squeeze Johnson by taking out full-page adverts in conservative newspapers, framing the Brexit choice as between a ‘clean break’ or a ‘bad deal’. He knows what the pollsters know, namely that most Brexit Party voters and a significant slice of the Conservative Party want to leave with no-deal.

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By Matthew Goodwin

Another problem for Johnson is that he is not, like Theresa May in 2017, dealing with Paul Nuttall. He is going to have to face-off against Farage who still enjoys an incredibly strong relationship with Leavers.

This is underlined by the latest polling from Survation, which asks voters who they trust to “work in your interest on Brexit”. Conservative voters break for Johnson over Farage by 65% to 29%. But Brexit Party voters break for Farage over Johnson by 76% to 18%. How many of the latter are really going to jump ship given these numbers?

Meanwhile, the figures for all Leavers are much closer than No 10 would want (44% break for Johnson, 39% for Farage). This reflects how Farage still has serious appeal among Leavers. Might Conservatives overestimate their reach while underestimating Farage’s?

Such findings might help to explain something else that is hidden away in the numbers: very few Brexit Party voters are currently displaying a strong propensity to switch sides.

When Lord Ashcroft asked these voters how likely they would be on a 0-100 scale to vote Conservative, where zero means ‘no chance’ and 100 means ‘definitely’, the mean score for Brexit Party voters was a rather less than impressive 34. One in three said they would never vote for the Conservatives while another third hover around the ‘50’ mark.

Put simply, unless something changes then these do not look like voters who are about to defect en masse. This probably has much to do with the fact that Farage has never just rallied disillusioned ex-Tories but rather voters who are utterly fed up with the entire political class. Why would most of these voters flock to somebody who often appears as the very embodiment of that political class?

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By Matthew Goodwin

A final potential obstacle is something that we do not usually associate with Farage and his followers: economics. One of the most interesting findings to emerge in the past week also came from Lord Ashcroft who asked voters how they feel about globalisation. Is this a positive thing that the UK should embrace, or a damaging thing that we should resist?

Contrary to the once popular idea that Farage’s followers were hardcore Thatcherites who long for a Singapore-on-Thames, Brexit Party voters on average, are the ones who see globalisation as damaging to their national interests — even more so than Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters. Will Boris Johnson, alongside Jacob Rees-Mogg, both standard bearers for a ‘global Britain’, really be able to convince these voters that they are economically aligned?

It is the answers to these questions that will ultimately determine the extent to which Boris Johnson cannibalises Nigel Farage’s vote. If he is successful, then he will almost certainly get his majority. If he is not, then we’re back to where we started. But with the country more divided than ever and Brexit still not done.

The Liberal Democrats took the seat from the Conservatives after sitting MP Chris Davies was convicted of expenses fraud. They overturned a majority of about 8,000, with new MP Jane Dodds securing about 1,400 more votes than Davies, who decided to stand again. Labour did badly, barely holding their deposit. The Brexit Party took 10% of the vote.

These are the facts.

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How the Left lost Wales

By James Bloodworth

They are, variously, proof of the following:

1. The Brexit Party is successfully putting pressure on Boris Johnson, denying him wiggle room and helping guarantee we leave on October 31.

2. The Brexit Party is making it harder for Boris Johnson to get us out of the EU, by replacing a Brexiteer MP with an ardent Remainer.

3. The Conservative vote held up well considering the MP had been convicted of expenses fraud.

4. The Conservatives only squeezed the Brexit Party down to 10% because the sitting MP was so popular locally.

5. The Liberal Democrats are the strongest Remain party and as head of a Remain alliance can become the new main party of opposition.

6. Remain parties got substantially fewer votes than Leave parties, so being the “party of Remain” is never going to work for the Lib Dems.

7. Labour’s collapsing in Wales.

8. Labour needs to adopt a clear policy to remain.

9. Labour needs to adopt a clear policy to leave.

10. Labour needs to ditch Jeremy Corbyn.

The only topic on which there appears to be consensus is that Brecon and Radnorshire is a particularly beautiful part of the country, even if some of its towns and villages remain entirely unpronounceable to the travelling activists who turned up over the last months. The best moment of the night was when the High Sheriff of Powys decided to read out the results exclusively in Welsh, leaving the scores of English speakers in a state of pale-faced panic about who had really won.

But among all this arguing, there’s a lot of clarity. Liberal Democrats are joyful and optimistic. They know what to do next: double down as the party of Remain, stake their claim as the leader of the Remain alliance, and try to get other parties and other MPs to join them. Full steam ahead.

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By James Kirkup

The Conservatives have plenty to console themselves with. I don’t think their strategy was up for debate, but even if it were, the result gives them a clear rationale for pursuing it. Squeeze the Brexit vote, put the Leave coalition back together, and let the Remainers and the moderates go. Full steam ahead.

The only party that deserves to be confused this morning is Labour. Labour used to own Wales: they have topped the poll in seats and votes in every general election in my lifetime, and beyond it. Perhaps Brecon and Radnorshire isn’t a particular stronghold for the party, but to clock in only 5.3% of the vote is truly abysmal.

Brexit is the defining issue of the decade, and it is a binary one. In or out. Leave or Remain. The two camps are getting more and more entrenched in their positions, and Labour’s attempt to straddle both is killing them. They have managed to contort themselves in a way that makes almost everyone who cares about Brexit angry, hoping perhaps that Brexit would no longer be a big deal by the time of the General Election.

But Brecon and Radnorshire makes it harder than ever to avoid a General Election this autumn, before Brexit has happened. In a Brexit election, I struggle to see how Labour avoids tearing itself apart. Too Leave-ish for the Remainers, and too Remain-ish for the Leavers. In politics, you have to take a side. Labour needs to make its choice, before it is too late.

She should be stepping over the threshold and into the job she never believed she’d hold. But instead, she turned back to the cameras for a few more, unscripted words. Her team would go nuts, but what the hell? She would not have the job for very long, so why not enjoy it?

“One other thing,” she added with a grin. “I wanted to say thank you. Thank you to the men who made this possible, the men who gave this great country its third female prime minister. Thank you, Boris Johnson and thank you, Jeremy Corbyn.”

And with a cheery wave, Prime Minister Jo Swinson turned and strolled into No 10 to greet her new staff.

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What if Remain had won?

By James Kirkup

Future historians of the Swinson premiership would spend much more time debating its beginning than its middle and its end; her time in office was, as she knew it would be, almost as short as that of her predecessor, Johnson.

Most of those historians agreed that it was Johnson who made the first move in the chain of events that put a Liberal Democrat in Downing Street and began the realignment of the British political system.

The first few months of the Johnson premiership went pretty much according to plan. The concessions on Brexit he sought from the EU27 were largely refused. That allowed him to confront Parliament: will you affirm or resist my choice to leave the EU on October 31 without a deal? Faced with resistance from most Labour MPs, a number of his own Tories and the prospect of outright obstruction in the Lords, he activated his plan for a general election.

This is where things started to go wrong for him and for Corbyn, and surprisingly right for Swinson, elected Lib Dem leader almost unnoticed in the same week Johnson became PM.

The Tory campaign immediately faced two huge and linked questions: what manifesto commitment would the party make on Brexit, and how would it deal with Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party? Johnson, convinced by his advisers that his first priority was to re-unite Right-wing Leave-voters under the Tory umbrella, opted to buy off Farage. All Tory candidates were required to sign a public pledge that they would vote to end British membership of the EU on Halloween, regardless of the circumstances.

It was enough for Farage to stand down his candidates; there was even a rumour, never convincingly denied, that he would take a peerage and a seat in Cabinet after the expected Tory rout of Corbyn’s divided, demoralised Labour Party.

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But that rout never materialised. For the second time in little more than two years, a Tory campaign directed by Lynton Crosby and focused on Brexit failed to secure outright victory. The campaign started with Tory defections, not to another party but to a new Independent Conservative Party whose members – including several recent ministers – were defending affluent Remain-voting seats across the south of England. The short timetable for the election left CCHQ unable to field “official” Conservative candidates against some of the new ICP candidates.

In some cases, that was enough for ICP members to scrape home. In others, places dominated by affluent graduates – places like Richmond upon Thames, St Albans, Oxford, Cambridgeshire, Mole Valley, Wandsworth, Cheltenham, Woking, Guildford, Waverley, Winchester and Bath – the Lib Dems captured (or recaptured) seats where Remain-minded voters rejected what Swinson repeatedly described as the “Johnson-Farage Brexit Party”, her leaflets and social media feeds heavy with photoshopped images of Johnson and Farage guffawing together.

The Lib Dems also strenuously denied involvement in the first DeepFake political ad in British history, an instantly-viral video of Johnson making a string of racist and sexist remarks while spilling red wine on a sofa. Elsewhere, in places like London, the Lib Dems directed their fire squarely at Corbyn. They were forced once again to deny involvement in another DeepFake video, this one depicting Corbyn addressing a small town hall meeting and speaking of his determination to free Britain of a European Union “that is run for the benefit of big business and Zionist bankers”.

“Honestly, I have no idea where these things come from,” said Swinson. “The Liberal Democrats are committed to the same old-fashioned, honest local campaigning that we’ve always done.”

Repeated demands from Labour and Tory alike that Facebook expunge the fake content were regretfully declined by Nick Clegg, the company’s Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications, who insisted that it would not interfere in the British democratic debate.

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Fast forward to a post-Brexit Britain

By Carl Miller

Labour avoided the sort of formal schism that the Tories experienced, but only because Corbyn did not even attempt to impose a single Brexit policy on his party, allowing Labour candidates to adopt positions ranging from No Brexit in Bristol to No Deal in Stoke-on-Trent.

The results of the election were described by one leading constitutional expert in an emotional late-night TV appearance as “a massive clusterfuck.” Labour technically “won” with 240 seats, marginally ahead of the rump Conservatives on 235. A total of 25 Independent Conservatives returned to the Commons, and the SNP hoovered up 50 Scottish seats.

Swinson marginally avoided losing her own seat, but hung on to cheer as 76 other Lib Dems were elected, taking seats from both Labour and the Tories.

The events that followed led to October 2019 being widely remembered as the most momentous month in British peacetime history. It started with Buckingham Palace signalling that the Queen would not immediately summon Corbyn and ask him to form a Government. As Corbyn’s few remaining media allies fulminated about a constitutional coup, it became clear why the Monarch had hesitated: Tom Watson, still Labour’s deputy leader, announced that he was resigning the Labour whip and would sit as a Social Democrat; he was quickly joined by more than 100 of his former Labour colleagues.

While Johnson, still technically Prime Minister, remained in No 10 facing Tory calls to quit in favour of Farage, Swinson made her move.

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By James Kirkup

Inspired, as she later confirmed, by an old episode of The West Wing, she summoned TV cameras to film her walking slowly from the House of Commons up Whitehall then along the Mall to Buckingham Palace. Accompanied initially just by her Lib Dem colleagues, she was joined on the way first by Independent Conservative leader Rory Stewart, then by Watson, Emily Thornberry and Sir Keir Starmer.

By the time she reached the gates of the palace, she was able to deliver an impromptu speech declaring she and she alone could command a majority in the House of Commons and that she would wait outside until the Monarch asked her in.

For 57 minutes – later recalled as the longest hour in British history – Swinson waited, insisting that the light London rain was “nothing compared to Dumbarton”. Then the gates swung open.

In the hours that followed, the Queen faced immediate criticism for asking Swinson to form a government, because she did not obviously have the numbers to win a confidence vote: even with the SNP’s 50 votes, bought for the price of another Scottish independence referendum, the Swinson Coalition of Lib Dems, Independent Conservatives and Social Democrats would still be well short.

Then it emerged that the putative government would have a single purpose: the passage of a single piece of legislation.

The Democracy Day Bill, introduced on Trafalgar Day 2019, would have a number of consequences: Britain’s Article 50 notice to leave the European Union was withdrawn; the 2016 referendum to Leave or Remain would be run again in the spring of 2020. Prime Minister Swinson committed to campaign to remain, but also to resign the day after that referendum whatever the result. Britain would then hold a general election, its fourth in five years, to choose a government that would be elected having set out in its manifesto how it would honour the result of that referendum.

It took a couple of days of rather undignified taunting (“What are you afraid of, boys?”) but Swinson cajoled enough Conservative Leavers to signal support for her plan, declaring: “Let’s settle this once and for all.”

Barely noticed amid the tumult of debate around the new, temporary government and its single purpose were the clauses in the Democracy Day Bill. It made the holding of that second EU referendum conditional on the ending of the First Past the Post electoral system and the introduction of the d’Hondt method of voting for all future elections.

It’s quiet, tranquil and doesn’t really ‘feel’ like London at all. Play your cards right and you might even bump into the local MP, the Tory Zac Goldsmith, a self-styled liberal conservative who talks passionately about protecting the environment.

Here’s an alternative day out. The small town of Rochford in Essex is about 40 miles east of London. It is known locally as the ‘green gateway to Essex’. Head over to Rochford for the day and you could visit the theme parks at nearby Southend-on-Sea, take the kids to ‘Rollacity’, visit the award-winning Rayleigh windmill or simply take in the coastal views. Grab a pub lunch here and you might bump into the local Conservative MP James Duddridge, or his better known neighbour, the passionate Brexiteer Mark Francois, MP for Rayleigh and Wickford.

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By Matthew Goodwin

Richmond and Rochford offer two completely different days out, but they also symbolise two very different factions in the Tory tent. While they are both represented by Conservatives they have fundamentally different features. For a start, Richmond-upon-Thames is far more ethnically diverse than Rochford, which is 97% white.

In Richmond, one in 10 residents has no qualifications. In Rochford, it is closer to one in four. In Richmond, over half of the local population has at least ‘level 4’ qualifications – such as a diploma, NVQ or university degree. In Rochford, it’s only one in five. Richmond is also younger; Rochford is older. And whereas the share of people who work in managerial or professional positions is twice as high in Richmond as it is in Rochford, the share employed in working-class jobs is twice as high in Rochford.

Such differences are mirrored in the Brexit divide. In Richmond, nearly 70% flocked to Remain. In Rochford, nearly 67% flocked to Leave. This basic tension was further underlined at the recent elections to the European Parliament. In Richmond-upon-Thames, where Goldsmith clings on with a majority of 45 votes, the resurgent Liberal Democrats walked away with a staggering 53% of the vote to the Conservatives’ 8%. In Rochford, meanwhile – where across recent elections the majority of the local Conservative MP has been whittled down to just over 5,000 votes – it was the Brexit Party that stormed it: it won 52% of the vote to the Conservatives’ 9%. The Tories were equally humiliated in both places but for very different reasons.

As Richmond-upon-Thames and Rochford underline, whoever becomes the next leader of the Conservative Party – be that Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt – he faces a daunting task. Across the country, from leafy Remainia to working-class Leave Land, the Conservative Party is in meltdown.

In the polls last week, the governing party averaged just 20% of the vote. It has shed more than 20 percentage points since the general election two years ago. Of the past 50 polls, the Conservatives led in merely two. The party has not held a lead outside the margin of error for more than three months. Unless something changes – and fast – then the party of Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher is destined for the worst election result in its entire history. And nobody really knows what to do about it.

Nor is the reason fully understood. “It’s Brexit, stupid” is the common analysis. Which is right, but only partly. There is absolutely no doubt that the implosion of the Conservative vote owes much to referendum fallout. Ever since it became obvious that the party was more interested in talking about Brexit than delivering it, support has been ebbing. Disillusioned Leavers have turned to the Brexit Party in places such as Rochford while alienated Remainers have moved to the Lib Dems in places like Richmond-upon-Thames.

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By Paul Embery

There was a wobble in the summer of 2018, when Prime Minister Theresa May unveiled her widely unpopular vision of Brexit. But even though most Tories were not particularly happy about the compromises she detailed, they stuck with their party; support recovered and held steady.

Then, though, as Britain drifted toward March 29, 2019 – what was supposed to be ‘Brexit Day’ – it dawned on Conservatives that a once-in-a-generation promise was about to be broken. Whereupon they started to abandon their party in droves.

By the end of March, the Conservative Party’s average had dropped from around the 40% mark to 35%. By the end of April, it was down to 29%. By the end of May, 23%. Now it’s at 20%. How low can it go? Nobody really knows.

The problem for the Tories is that they are, increasingly, being pulled in two different directions. Right now, almost 40% of the Conservatives’ 2017 voters say they plan to vote for Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party at the next general election. These disillusioned Tories, along with one in 10 of Labour’s 2017 voters and a handful of Lib Dems, explain why Farage is sitting on between 20-26% of the national vote.

But to bring down the Tories, he doesn’t actually need this level of support. With, say, 10-15% he will easily throw dozens of marginal seats, such as leafy Richmond-upon-Thames, into Lib Dem hands, and others to Labour. If he is slightly stronger than Ukip were in 2015, then the Rochfords start to fall as well.

The Brexit Party is a big reason why, at elections to the European Parliament last month, the Tories slumped to 9.1% of the vote, their lowest in history. Data compiled by Lord Ashcroft suggests that more than one in two of the 2017 Conservative voters who turned out put a tick next to the Brexit Party, slightly more than what we see in Westminster polls. Only one in five Tories stayed loyal.

As in Rochford, the Conservatives were obliterated across much of Leave Land. Aside from the territory of Mark Francois, Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt would do well to pay these places a visit if they are serious about winning back Leavers from Farage: Arun in West Sussex, Torbay and Torridge in Devon, Swale in Kent, Rother in East Sussex, South Kesteven in the East Midlands and Scarborough in Yorkshire. These are the places where Farage is strongest and where the Tories haemorrhaged around 20 percentage points.

Unless Johnson or Hunt deliver a meaningful Brexit, then their party will continue to inch closer and closer what I call the ‘Canada 1993 scenario’. Canada’s federal election of 1993 is an incredibly rare example in a first-past-the-post system of a socially liberal ‘progressive conservative’ party being effectively replaced by a socially conservative populist right party.

In one election, in one fell swoop, Kim Campbell’s Progressive Conservatives shed 27 percentage points and 154 seats while Preston Manning’s Reform Party gained 17 points and 51 seats. A governing party, with a majority, was almost wiped completely off the political landscape. Could it happen here? It feels unlikely – but then, again, nobody really knows.

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By Peter Franklin

But it is also true that the Brexit Party is by no means the only problem for the governing Conservatives. Cheering about a No Deal Brexit might be popular among grassroots associations; but there is another dynamic playing out and which is reflected in the Richmond-upon-Thames of the world.

Surveys carried out since the European election suggest that about one-quarter of the Liberal Democrat’s support came from disillusioned Conservatives. So while the Tories are right to prioritise Leave Land, the next leader would also be well advised to take a walk through places like the City of London, Vale White Horse in Oxfordshire, affluent Bath and Winchester and South Oxfordshire. It was here where the Lib Dems performed strongly while the Tories fell off the map.

If the Conservatives aren’t careful, the Lib Dems will grow stronger, potentially form an alliance with the Greens and start to eat into pro-Remain voters on both sides, Labour and Conservative.

There are other worrying signs for the Tories. Turnout, for example, was higher in Remain areas and, given the broader fragmentation of Britain’s party system, there are probably more coalition options for Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP and Greens than there are routes into power for the Conservatives. Unless, that is, they want to start thinking about a formal pact with the Brexit Party.

This is all a part of the continuing polarisation of British politics – the consolidation of a process that really began with the Brexit debate and was then entrenched by the outcome of the 2017 general election. Theresa May’s assessment was that her path to power not only ran through the retention of the Conservative Party’s seats, including the nearly 250 that voted Leave, but also by capturing a good number of the nearly 150 Labour seats that had also voted Leave. Conservatives would raid Labour’s Leave territory, while defending seats in more affluent, middle-class and urban areas, like Richmond-upon-Thames, that had voted Remain, or at least that was the plan.

As we now know, that strategy failed. The Tories made their biggest gains in areas that had given strong support to Leave, where UKIP suffered major losses, and in districts which had large numbers of people without degrees, working-class voters, pensioners and white voters. But these gains were simply not enough.

In Leave seats, the Conservatives averaged an increase of 15-points. But Labour’s vote turned out to be more resilient than May and her team had estimated – it went up too, by 7 points. This put lots of seats out of Tory reach. In the end, the Conservatives only captured six pro-Leave seats from Labour. And look at pro-Leave Conservative seats like Rochford. There, the Conservatives added just 2 percentage points to their vote while Labour’s vote increased by more than 12.

Why? Combine disillusionment with Brexit and a desire for greater economic redistribution, something that Jeremy Corbyn is banging on about, and you have your answer.

Meanwhile, the Tories suffered costs that we continue to see. They made no progress or went into reverse in areas that were young, ethnically diverse, had lots of graduates and middle-class professionals. In the most strongly pro-Remain seats, Labour’s average vote jumped by 13-points while the Tories’ crashed by three points. Zac Goldsmith was rather lucky in Richmond-upon-Thames but next time will, I suspect, be much harder for him.

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By Robin Aitken

Whether Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt becomes leader, he will inherit a political party that is now losing ground in Remainia, especially in areas where the Lib Dems surge, and which is also now in reverse in Leave Land, where Farage has reappeared and rekindled his relationship with Eurosceptic Tories.

The delivery of a meaningful Brexit will help to hold up support in the Rochfords; but the next Conservative Party leader will also need a message for those places like Richmond-upon-Thames, not least given the failure of a decidedly pro-Brexit campaign to deliver a widely anticipated majority at the 2017 general election. Eurosceptic Tories are walking away from their party but so too are around six in 10 pro-Remain conservatives.

The next Conservative leader will need to deliver Brexit, to satisfy Rochford, but they will then need to pivot quickly and speak directly to the people of Richmond-upon-Thames. None of this will be easy. And because we’ve never been here before, it’s not entirely clear whether it is even possible.

Day after day, 10 years ago, The Telegraph brilliantly drip-fed astonishing revelation after astonishing revelation on to its front pages. These stories, drawn from a disc it had purchased from an anonymous source, told of how our elected representatives were greedily rewarding themselves to make up for salaries they evidently viewed as being too low.

Such large news events often have a contradictory afterlife. On the one hand, they seem game-changing. But on the other, once the story has died down, it feels as though it had never happened. In fact, this story may have slipped from the front pages but it sunk down to form part of the deep sediment of the whole flow of politics. The effects of that scandal are one of the underlying causes of the current political crisis engulfing the UK.

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By Peter Kellner

One very clear memory I have of the whole affair is when I bumped into an MP in Parliament Square one morning. Another slew of MPs had just been felled by the day’s revelations, and I was returning from the BBC’s Westminster studios. These were good days for journalists. Not simply for those directly involved in the leak and dissemination of the story, but for anybody reckoned to be in the opinion business. Back then, if an MP caught sight of a comment journalist, they would dart over and desperately try to accumulate some small residue of sympathy in anticipation of the Telegraph’s tumbrils.

The MP I bumped into asked what I thought the effects of the revelations would be. I batted the question back to him. “I think we will see the increasing Lib Dem-isation of our politicians,” this non-Lib Dem politician said to me. It was a slightly curious phrase, and I asked for clarification.

The point this MP was making was not – as I had first confusedly thought – that somehow the scandal would cause a great boost for whatever ideological causes were that month being pushed by the Liberal Democrat Party.

Rather, the point was a social one. The Liberal Democrat party had, in recent years, comprised a group of distinctly indistinct individuals. Noticeable among their traits was how unnoticeable they were. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with any of them. Or many of them. But almost all of them gave off the aura of being unremarkable local council officials who had, to their only slight surprise, ended up in the House of Commons.

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By James Kirkup

This wasn’t the case with all of their MPs, any more than the other parties were filled solely with colourful, brilliant and experienced statesmen. But there was enough that was recognisable in the type. My MP interlocutor’s point was that, in the months and years ahead, it seemed likely that the sort of people putting themselves forward for careers in Westminster would change. People with little to lose might make a stab at it, while those with much to lose might think about side-stepping any political calling.

Politics, until then, had attracted a good deal of people who had a variety of lucrative side careers (at the Bar, for instance). There are, of course, those who believe that being an MP should be a full-time job, completely filling every hour of every day, in an endless push of unceasing legislation. But many think politics would be better if MPs were discouraged from being overly busy in the House. One effect of the expenses scandal was to discourage from Westminster anybody who had the skill, ability and sufficient demand for their services to combine two careers. They started to hesitate before considering politics.

The public shaming during that period was such that it (rightly) harmed not just every culprit’s political ambitions but their reputation in every field of their life. As a result, people who did not need this sort of aggravation in their life simply stayed away.

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By Various

The advantages of being an MP inverted in a morass of public distrust and dislike. As their reputation plummeted, going in to politics turned from something that might burnish a person’s reputation to something that could only diminish it. Parliament started to look unattractive to people with a lot of options in front of them, attracting people with very few – if any – alternatives.

“No big loss” some people will say. And perhaps they are right. Perhaps Parliamentarians should be solely dedicated to the one job that they have been elected to perform in the House of Commons. But it is futile to deny that such a settled consensus attracts – and creates – a particular type of person. The type of person who is happiest of all sitting on committees, coming up with minor pieces of legislation and disputing with colleagues over these committee and legislative matters.

Perhaps such people are needed in politics. But for a political scene to be successful, it must attract people with a wide variety of skills and attributes. Among them will be those who are distinguished but impatient, those who are daring rather than cautious, and those who are willing to take risks rather than proceeding timidly according to the moment’s norm.

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How to fix Britain after Brexit

By Various

After a set of embarrassments as comprehensive as those of a decade ago, it was inevitable that things would change. And indeed they did. The expenses system back then was rotten, not just allowing for abuse, but clearly encouraging it. The fact that a number of people went to prison for their extreme version of what most other Parliamentarians were doing was evidence that the system needed exposing and revising.

But as you look around the benches of all the major parties in Parliament today, you will see another effect of the scandal. They are all increasingly filled with people for whom politics is absolutely everything and who, therefore, have very little to bring to it. Few have achieved anything distinctive before heading into it. Few are in demand after leaving it.

The Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, for example, went to run a bus company in 2017, after losing his seat in the previous general election. A year later, he announced that he was leaving the role for unspecified future challenges after having “achieved goals“.

Who knows? Perhaps the consequences of this first political earthquake of the decade were among the reasons that the system was so unable to cope with the second. The House of Commons today seems to be increasingly stacked with people who are timid, limited and fearful of taking risks. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that people with little hinterland of their own can envisage little hinterland for the country they aspire to run.