Governing parties have suffered even heavier defeats and have still gone on to win a majority at the next election (as David Cameron can testify after losing Clacton to the UK Independence Party before going on to win his surprise majority in 2015). But this defeat has already become symbolic of a much deeper crisis engulfing Johnson.

Beyond the leafy lanes of Shropshire, the symptoms of this crisis are not hard to find. Amid chaos in Downing Street and rebellions in parliament, Johnson and his party are now consistently trailing the Labour Party in the polls. Labour has surpassed 40% of the vote, a barrier it has not breached since the start of the year. And the Conservatives have just slumped to 32%, a low they have not encountered since the very depths of the Brexit crisis in October 2019, since before Johnson’s election victory.

Even without the polls, we can all see and sense that Johnson is on the ropes; that what began with the largest majority for any Conservative for more than 30 years now looks bizarrely, perilously fragile. This was further reflected this week when a visibly exhausted Johnson suddenly found himself confronted with one of the most significant parliamentary rebellions in history, when almost 100 of his own MPs revolted against his decision to introduce yet more Covid restrictions.

This revolt was bigger than the one David Cameron faced in 2011, when his MPs rebelled to push a referendum on Britain’s EU membership; it was bigger than the one John Major faced in 1997, when his MPs rebelled over gun control measures in the aftermath of Dunblane. It was almost as big as the rebellion Theresa May faced over Brexit, in 2019, which with the notable exception of Labour’s rebellion over the war in Iraq was the biggest since the revolt over Corn Laws in the 19th century. This, in short, does not bode well.

In just 24 months, Johnson has gone from appearing as the political equivalent of Logan Roy in Succession, fully in command of his Conservative family while surveying the landscape with a clear sense of purpose, to appearing more like Connor Roy, the hapless, politically naïve eldest son who is not entirely sure where he sits within his family or what his purpose is.

And so Mr Johnson finds himself under fire from all sides. On the Right, they say he is not the Prime Minister they hoped he could become; on the Left, they say he is everything they predicted. Either way, amid all the frustration his leadership ratings have crashed to the lowest level on record: this week, Survation put Johnson’s net favourability on minus 29, a new low.

Remarkably, ask the British people today who would make the best prime minister and for the first time for more than a year, Starmer leads the pack. Were an election held tomorrow, Labour would emerge as the largest party, albeit one short of an overall majority. Starmer would be PM. Rachel Reeves would be in charge of the economy. David Lammy, Angela Rayner and perhaps Nicola Sturgeon would be sitting alongside them around the Cabinet table. Johnson would go down in history as a busted flush.

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The battle for North Shropshire

By Tanya Gold

What lies at the root of the crisis? It is impossible to answer this without considering how Johnson won power in the first place. The reason he won the largest Conservative victory since Margaret Thatcher’s final majority in 1987 is because he grasped what so few others did: the unfolding realignment of British politics, a structural correction that has made available an entirely new and formidable coalition of voters.

Forget what people say. The realignment was never just about Brexit or the unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn, even if these elements helped it along. It was always rooted for far more strongly in a deep and profound disillusionment with the political consensus that has dominated Britain for half a century. EU membership. Mass immigration. Hyper-globalisation. Radical cultural liberalism. And a politics built by middle-class graduates for middle-class graduates.

Johnson’s electoral dynamite always came from the fact that he was the first mainstream politician to offer a genuine break from that consensus: to leave the EU, strengthen the country’s borders and level-up a forgotten blue-collar Britain. And this is why he was able to completely transform the Conservative Party’s electorate along the way.

It is why he won three-quarters of the Leave vote. It is why he demolished one flank of the Red Wall and left another vulnerable. It is why he mobilised a new coalition of voters who are spread across the country far more efficiently than Labour’s voters who are concentrated too heavily in big cities and university towns. And it is why he had an almost 20-point lead over Labour among the Greggs Guys — Britain’s plumbers, mechanics and factory workers who, like the True-Blue Tories in the south, rallied behind Johnson because they believed he offered a genuine alternative to our dreary politics.

But what Shropshire and the polls tell us, clearly, is that today, though, many of these voters are reaching a very different conclusion: their gamble on Johnson simply has not paid off. Between all the talk about net zero, tax rises and trying to be all things to all voters, he is adrift from the coalition that propelled him to power. Since the aftermath of his victory in 2019, the share of Johnson’s voters who plan to vote for him again has crashed from 95% to 73%.

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Will Boris lose the Blue Wall?

By Tanya Gold

The Leavers are leaving him: the disgruntled and the disillusioned— his core voters — are off. By failing to make the most out of Brexit, by failing to robustly defend British history and heritage, by failing to get his arms around illegal migration, by failing to take on the radical progressive Left, by failing to define and deliver a serious strategy for levelling-up, by transforming the Conservatives from an aspirational party of low-tax to a government that is introducing the highest tax burden since the Fifties and by putting the state on steroids, he has given the new Conservative voters more than a few good reasons to walk.

And walk they will. Over the past two years, the percentage of Leavers who say they are loyal to Johnson has collapsed from 76 to 55%. As a result, the big leads the Conservatives once enjoyed among the working-class are also dwindling, with the party’s support in blue-collar Britain sliding from 51 to 38%. His coalition is falling apart.

Yet they are certainly not going to Labour. These voters have little time for Keir Starmer and a Labour front bench which, with the help of Ed Miliband, David Lammy and Emily Thornberry, appears determined to remind voters why they rejected Labour at the last three general election and the Brexit referendum. On the economy and immigration, similarly, the Labour brand remains toxic in the eyes of so many. The fact that its vote declined by 12-points in Shropshire, while nationally is at the same level that it was a year ago speaks volumes.

Some of Johnson’s voters are certainly defecting to Reform, a new revolt on the Right which is attracting a far from insignificant 11% of Johnson’s 2019 voters. Put Nigel Farage on top of Reform for a month and in the current climate, that figure could quite easily double, not least because Johnson appears determined to reignite the radical Right bonfire his party spent years trying to put out. But much larger numbers are simply giving up on politics altogether, drifting into apathy. In recent weeks, the percentage of 2019 Conservative voters who say they will not vote at the next election, who do not know who they will vote for or who refuse to say either way has more than doubled, surging from 18 to 38%.

Johnson’s voters are giving up on politics because he is giving up on the realignment, no longer sure what he should say or who he should be saying it to. So many of his voters are returning to what they did in the 2010s: sitting it out, waiting, watching and looking for an alternative. They thought Johnson was that alternative. Now, they are not so sure.

It is the defection of these Leavers which poses the biggest problem to Johnson. He reshaped his entire premiership and political party around them. If his core voters go, then the realignment collapses and the Conservatives will be finished. The party will haemorrhage middle-class graduate votes to the Liberal Democrats in the south and pro-Brexit, working-class votes to apathy in the north. They will come under attack from all sides and no longer have a viable coalition.

The only way forward for Johnson now, for his increasingly rebellious party too, is to reconnect with the very people who put them in power to begin with, to double down on the realignment and forget about everybody else. It’s not popular but it is politics. Brexit may be fading into the distance but there are many other issues that could just as powerfully unite the new Conservative electorate particularly ahead of a general election at which a Labour-SNP coalition is a serious prospect. Immigration is one. Crime is another. Defining and delivering a serious levelling-up strategy is another. And so too is robustly defending British identity, history and culture from an increasingly radical progressive left (just ask Republicans in Virgina).

There simply is no alternative. If you think that after everything we have witnessed in the past two years — Brexit, Cummings, Covid, Johnson’s personal failings and the utter chaos in No. 10 — that the Conservative Party can win back the Londoners, Remainers and professional middle-classes in time for the next election, then I have a bridge to sell you. No, the only way forward for him now is to start ditching advisors and doubling down on where he began.

If Johnson reconnects with his core voters hie will extend his premiership until the end of this decade. If he loses them he will lose his premiership and party. This core vote strategy would not be popular in SW1 but it is now the only thing that will keep him, the Conservative Party and those Red Wall MPs in power. Two years ago, Johnson was swept into power because he challenged the consensus on Europe. Whether he is willing to keep challenging that consensus will now determine whether he stays there.

“I was sent out as a child to go and canvas for the Conservatives,” he says. “I was sent out to get money and you would come back with half a crown if you were lucky and a load of abuse.” He removes his pipe, replaces it, and sucks on it again. “I done my little bit, and these are not the people I grew up with. These are not the people I voted for. When I grew up there was an old lady down the road. The thing she used to say, it stuck with me all my life: ‘You can hide from a thief. You can’t do anything with a liar’. And he [Boris Johnson] is. He wouldn’t know the truth if he fell over it.”

North Shropshire is farm land, dotted with medieval wool towns and small villages connected by pot-holed roads on which expensive buses run infrequently and late. The landed class is wealthy and well-established; the working class is white, conservative, un-unionised and earns less than the average wage. The largest minority is Bulgarian.

This constituency never sought to be a referendum on Boris Johnson’s leadership, but fate said otherwise when Owen Paterson, MP for 24 years, resigned for breaking lobbying rules, and the Prime Minster allowed his advisors to break lockdown rules and feast as people died alone. Paterson’s majority in 2019 was an enormous 22,949: 62.7% of the vote on a turnout of 67.9%. It seemed an insurmountable wall of blue, but then Boris Johnson came with chaos in hand.

The electorate here is raging, and combustible; party loyalty no longer matters, as voters behave like consumers. In May, they turned the council of Oswestry – the largest town in the constituency – Green, because, I am told, the Greens worked hard and the Conservatives neglected the constituency, because it is so safe. (There isn’t a Labour or Liberal Democrat councillor in the whole of North Shropshire.) Even so, the Liberal Democrats think they can benefit from protest and repeat their victory in Chesham and Amersham. They are, as they always do, busing in activists from all over the country, and painting the constituency orange. Doormats are buried under their campaign literature. They phonebank ferociously, “trying,” says the Green candidate Duncan Kerr, “to create a tidal wave of perception that it is going their way”. If they behave like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, driving in and cleaning up, it is working. They are now the bookies’ favourite.

Meanwhile Labour, which came second in six of the last eight General Elections and took twice the number of Liberal Democrat votes in 2019, is wielding a local candidate in the manner of a magical object: like Excalibur. He was born in Oswestry itself. “I’m Ben Wood,” he tells my Dictaphone because he is young, “I’m Labour’s local candidate in the North Shropshire by-election. I’m fighting a local campaign on local issues and the big message we are getting across is that our towns have grown but our public services are shrinking.”

The ambulance station in Oswestry just closed, he says, alongside ambulance stations in Market Drayton and Whitchurch. (People wait eight hours for an ambulance here.) There are fewer police on the streets and the school receives less funding than the national average, he adds; this election, like all rural elections, is about centralisation at heart. “I’ve got skin in the game,” he says. “I want to be a local champion and get people to buy, sell and make more locally.” For emphasis, we stop at a bread stall to buy bread made in Wrexham. “Strong trade here?” Wood asks the bread-seller. “It is a good market,” says the man, “[from] years of building it up. It’s like any market. You can’t flit in and flit out and expect the trade to be there.”

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Corbyn still haunts Labour

By Tanya Gold

Wood is campaigning with Daniel Zeichner, the shadow minister for food, farming and fisheries; they walk together, with a local activist taking their photographs for social media. “Labour is reconnecting with the whole country,” Zeichner says. “What we are finding is that we are absolutely back in the game and people are really pleased to see a genuine alternative.”

Are they an alternative here: in a by-election, which is different from a general election?  The Liberal Democrats call themselves the opposition based on the undeniable truth that angry Tories are more likely to vote Liberal Democrat than Labour. The Liberal Democrats are both a brand and a bath of protest; you step in, lie down, and get out when you wish. Then there is their deceptive graph, which shows a “two horse race”: the Liberal Democrats closing in on the Conservatives.

The graph is based on the May Shropshire council elections (North Shropshire wards) in which, thanks to the Greens standing aside in many wards, they took second place for vote share, and lost their only seat in North Shropshire: in Wem.

Labour’s other problem is that their former candidate, Graham Currie, who stood for parliament three times, was prevented from standing this time for over-enthusiastic and unsanctioned Corbynism and posted a furious missive on Facebook: “These Stalinist tactics of the NEC flies in the face of the calls for unity within the Labour Party. I am now an outsider in my own party where I have campaigned and fought for many years alongside my fellow party members for a more equal, socially just and non-discriminatory society. Labour has a corruption in its soul.” Many local activists are staying home in protest, and some Labour voters might too.

So the opposition is divided. But the anger is not. I meet the landlady at the Bailey Head pub, opposite the town museum, which tells me that Barbara Pym and Wilfred Owen were born in Oswestry, and she says the Tories are now considered indecent; barely Tories at all. And if they aren’t Tories, you can abandon them, and remain a better Tory.

“This is a traditional community,” she says. “You have to be honest and decent in a small community because you will get found out. You can’t lie to people and deceive people and expect to get away with it. It’s really quite offensive to people who live like this, where everyone knows each other, we all know what’s going on, and people do look out for each other, to then realise someone you trusted has been so deceitful”. She repeats the party’s line on Paterson, bitterly: “He broke the rules, we will change the rules to suit him.” And then on the parties in Downing Street: “There wasn’t a party, or maybe there was, or we don’t know.” She continues, sounding astonished: “You are dealing with people who have faced losing their business or they had relatives die in hospital who they couldn’t be with and meanwhile Boris’s friends have had a party, and they are lying about it and they are laughing. There are people who have voted Conservative their whole life, now saying, ‘I can’t support that, I haven’t been able to see my kids’. And they have been taking the mickey out of us. There is a real sense of rage”.

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The prostitution of Cornwall

By Tanya Gold

One friend, she says, a man in his 70s, has always voted Tory but is now voting Liberal Democrat, “because he wants to give them a bloody nose”. She pauses and says with absolute conviction: “They can lose 20,000 votes here in a heartbeat.”  Many, she says, will stay home. Others are going to the Right: to Reform and Reclaim.

I cannot find Neil Shastri-Hurst, a barrister, for the Conservatives, but I am used to it: in four by-elections I have not met a single live Conservative candidate. They are shy, semi-mythical beings ever in peril of being chased into cupboards by Newsnight reporters. To appear in public is an opportunity to err. Shastri-Hurst is from Birmingham, which shares few issues with rural North Shropshire; he is a victim of the famous Conservative Party Central Office map, which pronounced that a farmer should stand in Hartlepool of all places. Shastri-Hurst’s enemies say he is from Birmingham in the same tone as you might say he is from France, or Iran. (One man suggested it was “dog-whistling”.) In any case, the Conservatives do not help themselves. During a flying visit to Oswestry, Boris Johnson called him Neil Shastri-Hughes [sic] and later, “Dr Neil”. “I’ve had much worse,” said the candidate, phlegmatically; and there was worse. “Very positive day campaigning in Wem for the North Staffs [sic] by-election,” tweeted Eddie Hughes MP.

There are novelty candidates too, of course: Russell Dean of The Party Party, who was born in Chester, is now a yacht broker living in Monaco and promises to fight sleaze and engage young people in politics. (His nephew is in charge on the ground.)

Then there is Earl Jesse for the Freedom Alliance standing for “political truth, medical freedom and individual prosperity” and bouncing around near Sainsbury’s in a flat cap hugging people with his party leader Jonathan Tilt. The problem with the Freedom Alliance is two-fold. First, they are too small to be a meaningful alliance. Second, though they have some good instincts — why close small shops in lockdown, when supermarkets stay open? — they rapidly sound completely insane. But they do hug you.

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Will Boris lose the Blue Wall?

By Tanya Gold

I find Boris Been-Bunged – also known as Faux Bojo — for the Rejoin EU Party in Oswestry by a yellow Mini that says Bollocks to Brexit (“vote tactically, we will be back”). He is a comedian and a Boris Johnson impersonator, who once pole danced with strippers as Faux Bojo in Secrets the nightclub and has burned his scalp from bleaching his hair blonde. His real name is Drew Galdron.  He believes that Westminster “isn’t a democracy, it’s theatre” and he would know. The resemblance is uncanny. He amuses passers-by (he takes on the voice, which is nothing like his own) and he seems, as is usual for a comic, far more at ease as the man he despises than as himself. “People imagine I get a lot of stick,” he says. “Actually, what annoys me far more has been the sheer amount of sycophancy I’ve seen from a lot of people who like him”. Later, he is heckled by a drunk woman, who calls him a cunt, which clearly dismays him. He takes refuge in the Liar Liar coffee shop, but some lads spot him through the window. “It’s Boris!” they scream, giving thumbs up but sideways; a half thumbs up, then. But I sense the love still: for his courage – it is a mad kind of courage. I wonder if they will vote for Faux Bojo because they think he is Boris Johnson, and this has all been a terrible mistake.

Laurence Fox is here too with his candidate Martin Daubney, a former journalist. They spend a lot of time in the Fox Inn, tweeting about living in a one-party state, and how Covid is just like a cold.

I meet Duncan Kerr for the Greens. “This place is similar to many places in England,” he says. “It’s been Tory for so long that they’ve got very complacent. They don’t listen to people. They haven’t got a plan. There is an awful lot of Cake-ism [in the campaign literature]. We will fix the potholes; we will fix the ambulance service; everything is promised”.

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What does Laurence Fox stand for?

By Tanya Gold

In Whitchurch, another fine medieval town with a pinkish Baroque church, I find hope for the Conservatives: if you can call ennui hope. The landlord at the Bulls Head pub says no one is discussing sleaze “and we have been quite busy. There doesn’t seem to be any take-up for it really. Everybody thinks its crazy; everybody does the same thing. I think people are fed up with it.”

But not all: “I’m appalled,” says one woman, formerly a lifelong Conservative, of the “party business. I felt really let down. He should be good and stay good.” But she twinkles at the thought of him, and in that twinkle is, potentially, his salvation. “Tell him.”

They still talk about him as if he were a naughty child; and they still believe in his redemption, which they think has a universal meaning: the king and the land are one. “I do like Boris,” says another in Costa Coffee. “I don’t know why. I’m not going to let him down now. He’s trying.” The relationship Johnson has formed with the voters is not broken yet. But it hangs by a thread.

It is easy to assume the Conservatives will win with a greatly reduced majority. Superficially at least, the Liberal Democrats have a harder task than in Chesham and Amersham, where the Conservative majority in 2019 was much smaller than it is here (16,223 or 55.4% of the vote) and Labour barely campaigned. There was almost a levity to the protest vote in Buckinghamshire. But here people feel more betrayed; their objection is less trivial, and more heartfelt. In Old Bexley and Sidcup, the by-election held this month after James Brokenshire died, the Tories lost more than 18,000 votes – though they won. Brokenshire was liked and admired. Paterson is not; and the electorate has never been more volatile.

Not everyone agrees. I meet a man whose job is to decide if Christmas lights can be hung on medieval houses in Whitchurch. He stares at them, holding a clipboard, pondering.  “Even if the Prime Minister came here and said he would sacrifice their first-born child they would still vote Conservative,” he says. He turns and looks at the line of medieval houses, thrilling in their irregularity, wondering which, if any, are sturdy enough to bear light.