Uxbridge and South Ruislip is part of the tongue-shaped Tory stronghold in northwest London. It is a land of highly skilled, self-employed non-graduates. It has a Conservative council, was immune to Blairism, and is so Conservative in spirit it still has a Conservative Club whose carpet is the colour of Margaret Thatcher’s suits. It was Boris Johnson’s constituency (a 7,210 majority on 68.5% turnout in 2019) until he resigned from Parliament, rather than face a by-election as punishment for misleading it.

Johnson may be a coward and a fool, but he is still liked here by the people he mirrors: white, semi-affluent, late middle-aged. I think he might have won if he had stood, and it was as good an opportunity for a personal redemption as any. Uxbridge Woman is close to Essex Man: they forgive him Partygate because they would have done the same. “We love Boris,” a woman says, adding: “He just didn’t care.” She laughs. “He’s down to earth. He’s human.” But he baulked, and into the vacuum he made in Uxbridge and South Ruislip — the vacuum that is his legacy, and his mirror — all the oddities floated in.

The numbers are on a whiteboard outside the Underground station courtesy of Star Sports betting. They have sent a political analyst for the day. He says Labour will win this seat, and, in homage, their activists sweep through the high street with their candidate, Danny Beales, 29, a local councillor who grew up in Ruislip, the child of a single parent. They avoid journalists, and then retire to Wagamama. I see the deputy leader of the Welsh Labour Party browsing a charity shop in a straw hat. I am not so sure about Labour: the only certainty is that voters are volatile and emotional, and Uxbridge Person has a problem with Keir Starmer. Voting is a consumer act now — something generated in the subconscious — and they don’t trust him. He doesn’t have Johnson’s fake authenticity and will to drama: a powerful drug when you are trying to avoid reality. The most common responses to questions about Starmer are “I don’t like him” or “I don’t know”. Johnson, one woman says, “doesn’t bother to bury the bodies”.

The analyst is so sure Labour will win, he is now wondering which of the novelty candidates will do best: there are 17 in all, so many that “mainstream” candidates avoid hustings, for fear of looking like attendees at a politicised fancy dress party. There used to be one or two novelty candidates in any by-election: now there is a glut. Now he is calculating Laurence Fox (Reclaim) versus Count Binface (Count Binface Party). Fox is slightly ahead because he did nine series of Lewis and Binface is mostly on Twitter. Novelty candidates fish in the same pool. The main battle is happening off-scene. I do see the Tory candidate Steve Tuckwell — a former postman, a fact that is presented like a jewel on a velvet cushion — in the Three Tuns Pub, but his press man won’t let me approach him. I stare at him as if he is a flamingo while he holds his pint.

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The most devoted novelty candidate is Piers Corbyn of Let London Live. He is Jeremy Corbyn’s brother, and he looks like Albert Einstein made homeless. He parks his blue Vauxhall opposite the station. It has a loudhailer on the roof from which plays a song to the tune of “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas”. It substitutes the word Christmas with Genocide (“with every jab you take”). Later, he plays conspiracy-theory rap. I can only think: what happened at a Corbyn childhood Christmas? He is accompanied by a press officer who says he is banned from sleeping rough in Westminster. “I am the candidate the Establishment fear,” Corbyn says, which is not true.

He is opposed to Covid lockdowns and Ulez (ultra-low emission zones, a tax of £12.50 a day for non-compliant cars that Sadiq Khan is extending here next month). Corbyn reminds me that he was arrested 16 times for protesting lockdown. He says the Underground is 40 times more polluting than roads. He says that if Sadiq Khan cares about pollution he would shut down the Underground, and that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant: we need more of it. Corbyn is a constant by Uxbridge station, performing his dark carnival, and the council have their revenge at teatime. They give him a parking ticket.

It is obvious that conspiracism, incubated under Covid, has mainlined in British politics, walking from Facebook to life. This is the first by-election where working-class Tory-leaning women tell me it doesn’t really matter who is in charge. If this is Johnson’s legacy, they don’t yet know it. “Rishi is trying,” says one, “but it’s hard to do a job with your hands tied behind your back. Somebody kicks him down. They’ve already got their person to put in.”

A retired bricklayer tells me the Tories have done nothing wrong; that people are greedy for benefits; that the state can’t do everything for people. I meet another who doesn’t know why he votes Tory but will anyway, like a contraction. Another is sorry that Johnson left: “Who’d have a pandemic?” I find no Tory who is happy he has gone.

I meet raging Labour voters. “They [the Conservatives] are for the little people, not the big people,” says one: he can’t afford to go out after he has paid his rent, and is aghast at Sunak’s wealth. Another thinks the Tories “are idiots”; yet another calls Sunak “Fishy Rishi”, but as a former Liberal Democrat alienated by the coalition government of 2010-15, his main complaint seems to be against Jo Swinson’s wardrobe. He has a resentment against her cardigan: “You do have to look the part. And then she just disappeared like a house of cards collapsed. She just vanished into thin air like AI. Like she never was.” Two young men say they will vote Labour when they can vote — they are 16 — as “we are falling apart now”. They are sophisticated, and despondent. “Everything is going downhill. Every year it just gets worse and worse. Imagine what it be like in ten years. Everything has doubled in price. It’s not very safe. Somebody gets stabbed every day.” They never saw Johnson in the constituency. Then one says what I think is the most profound thing anyone has ever said about him, and he says it with great seriousness: Johnson was a meme.

Then there are the apolitical, the non-voters. One calls himself “helpless. It’s all a game. There is no change. It just rolls on and rolls on. The top people stay at the top.” He is functional, but sounds despairing, as if he carries his sorrow in his pocket. A woman in a Little Miss Trouble T-shirt tells me Starmer “is much of the same thing [to Sunak]. Labour and the Conservatives seem to have meshed together.” Inevitably, I meet someone who thinks Johnson is still prime minister.

In the D2o Boardgame Cafe, the man behind the counter says his clientele “are completely disengaged. This is a Conservative constituency, and we are an LGBTQ+ board game cafe. The younger people are red-leaning, but I don’t know if they are even going to vote.” Like many in the constituency, he is against Ulez; it is cross-party anger that the Tories hope to exploit. “I think anything that uses a fine as a method of discouragement is classist,” he says. “If you can afford a flat in central London, you can afford to pay the Ulez charge. All it is going to do is affect the people who need to work in London but can’t afford to live there.”

I walk the high street with the Rejoin EU candidate Richard Hewison; Uxbridge voted Leave, alongside four other London boroughs and the whole of Essex. We meet two repentant Brexit voters in 30 yards. “I got caught up in the narrative, and me and my whole family voted to leave the EU,” says one man, “in hindsight, a terrible mistake.”

David Simmonds, the MP for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner, is “the candidate’s friend”. He sits in the bar of the Conservative Club, which has a quasi-Italian stone garden: wet, aesthetic Toryism. He looks phlegmatic, calm. The Conservative Council is very popular here, he says and voters are proud that Uxbridge is different from the centre of London (“there are deer in the woods, there are rivers, there are lakes”). Tory voters, he says, are most worried about the tax burden.

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I meet Leo Phaure, a business analyst and independent candidate, on the square. His campaign is gaudy. His children are leafleting. “Vote for no-Ulez-Leo,” he tells a man who looks like him. “We send a strong message to the Labour Party that they potentially lose Labour voters in next year’s election. We have got a unique opportunity in this town — no one else has got this opportunity — to send a message to Keir Starmer that we reject Mayor Khan and Ulez.  We send a message that if you still support him in next year’s General Election, you are going to lose London boroughs. You can’t have any policy where you [are] persecuting the pockets of the working man.”

He turns to a bystander and says: “I’ve got nothing to hide, I’m not Danny Beales.” (Beales didn’t turn up at the Brunel University hustings on Thursday). They hate Ulez because they think it is unfair: one couple say their daughter had to sell her car and buy a BMW. “And the buses are rubbish,” says a woman. “My seven-year-old grandson says to me: ‘That’s the bus that lies, Nanny.’” Even public transport is deceitful, and in homage to this fear, Beales now says that Ulez should be delayed.

The thing that unites Uxbridge voters is mistrust. If by-elections are a weathervane, this one points to disconnection, to ennui. Five years ago, a car singing about genocide would be an outlier: something bizarre. Now it feels common. Johnson’s danger was always in his precedent. His unseriousness — his sense of carnival — is toxic. Novelty candidates are all his children.

At dusk, the Star Sports betting white board has changed. It is now wondering which minor candidate will get 5%. As I leave, police surround a woman in pink. She has written “Army and Police Traitors” on a pillar under a cross. She starts to shout, holding her Bible in the air: “I am a homeless with a Bible! In London! Hallelujah!” They handcuff her. Corbyn takes his loud-hailer — it seems attached to him — and accuses them of torture as they take her to the van. He identifies with her sorrow: “I have been arrested…”

I ask a policeman: what is happening? “We didn’t arrest her. She is threatening to kill herself. We can’t just leave her.” He indicated his iPad: “I am telephoning her Mum.” This is Metroland. Anything can happen.

According to Ipsos Mori, Corbyn sets records for public disdain: 62% disapprove of his record and his net score is miserable -39. But Johnson is hardly the people’s darling: 44% give him an unfavourable rating and his net rating is also underwater, at -8.

Could it happen? Could they both lose — personally? By that I mean: could they both lose their Commons seats, sacked by their own former constituents? It is, of course, wildly unlikely, but this is 2019, and you know what that means about political probabilities.

***

It was shortly after 2am on 13 December that British politics opened the door to a new circle of hellish turmoil. After inspecting the piles of votes on the tables in Islington Town Hall, and accepting that the grinning Lib Dems weren’t bluffing, Jeremy Corbyn’s agent quietly confirmed to his candidate what they’d suspected for a few hours: “You’ve lost.”

To describe that loss — confirmed by the returning officer at 2.30am — as seismic was not hyperbole. When the Lib Dems announced they were pulling their campaigners out of Islington South to allow Emily Thornberry (“our fellow Remainer”) a clear run and focusing their fire on the Labour leader (“Since he won’t get off the fence on Brexit we’re going to knock him off,” said Jo Swinson), no one took them seriously. Yes, they’d won Islington in the (worthless) European elections, but Corbyn had held Islington North for 36 years, claiming almost 75% of the vote with a majority of more than 30,000.

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At best, the Lib Dem push against Corbyn was supposed to help Swinson rebut Tory claims that “a vote for the Lib Dems is a vote for Jeremy Corbyn in No 10”, allowing the Lib Dem press office to counter: “If we’re so cosy with Corbyn, why are we trying to decapitate him?” (The use of the word “decapitate” was of course deliberate bad taste to get the strategy more publicity. Successfully, as it turned out.)

And somehow, it worked. On a night when Kensington also turned yellow and Twitter blazed with the hashtag #RemainersRevenge, the Lib Dems leapt from barely 5% of the total to beat Corbyn by 195 votes.

At Conservative Campaign Headquarters, there was disbelief at the Corbyn result, but not outright jubilation. For one thing, the Lib Dem surge was much bigger than the campaign planners had expected, which was sending all the models haywire. CCHQ had, of course, been quietly resigned to a few Lib Dem seat gains (sorry, Zac) but the central forecast had suggested that a solid night for Swinson was actually a net positive for the Tories.

By drawing a good chunk of the Labour Remain vote away — but not enough to get near winning — the Lib Dems would help some Conservatives retain their seats in Remain-leaning southern parts. But the sort of earthquake that might topple Corbyn could change things in ways the Tory scenarios barely anticipated.

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Anyway, even as Tory officials tried to work out what the earthquake meant for them, an asteroid struck. The Prime Minister was in his car on his way to the seat for the Uxbridge and South Ruislip count when the call from the Tory agent came. It was short and bleak: “It’s going to happen.”

By the time Boris Johnson arrived at his own count, his team had told him to prepare for the worst. Despite all the CCHQ bombardment of the seat with online ads, despite all the pavement pounding by London Tories dragged in from across the capital, his majority of not much more than 5,000 had gone.

For that, Johnson could thank Donald Trump and that moment at the Nato summit when he put his arm around Johnson’s shoulders and declared: “Hey London, this is my guy, such a great guy. When he wins again, and he’s gonna win, win so big, we’re gonna do great things, maybe the best it’s ever been. He’s my guy and he’s gonna make Britain great again, just like we’ve done. Vote Boris, London, vote Boris.”

Those presidential words turbocharged the Uxbridge campaign of Labour’s Ali Milani. An army of students, youth campaigners, minor celebrities and one elegantly-dressed lady in dark glasses who said she was from “just outside Reading” all flocked to Uxbridge to urge residents to “stop Boris selling us out to Trump”.

On her regular visits, the lady from Reading proved especially good at persuading traditional Tories to switch sides, seeming to know just what made them tick. No one could quite put their finger on it, but she seemed quite familiar too, although as she wasn’t much for small talk or personal chitchat, no one ever found out her name.

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And so it was that as the sun, eventually, rose on Friday the 13th, Britain found itself in a new and — for once the word was justified — extraordinary new form of political chaos. With almost all the results in, the BBC exit poll said that the Tories would still be the biggest party, with 316 seats. (Just one less than Theresa May got in 2017, though no one could find her for comment.)

Despite that outlier in Uxbridge, Labour slumped and were projected to end up with just 230 seats, while the Lib Dems — who came close to beating Labour’s overall vote share — were forecast to have 39, behind the SNP on 44.

Though pundits, civil servants, voters and most MPs went into a turmoil of confusion and sometimes panic, the Labour team were relatively calm in those first hours — almost as if they’d been preparing for something like this. Just in time for the 7am bulletins, Labour’s John McDonnell spoke to TV reporters to set out what would happen next:

“Jeremy remains our leader. He was elected by our members and they want him to remain as our leader. He may have been cheated out of his seat by the Conservative media working hand-in-glove with the bankers in the City and MI5, but he remains the spiritual leader of the Labour movement, our moral guide. He has told me that he feels liberated from the confines of Parliament and will be spending his time among the people of Islington and this country, so that he can lead them from the places where they live and work.

“No, he won’t be speaking directly to the media today, or for the foreseeable future. What he’s doing now is much more important than that.

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“The party in parliament will be led by deputy leader, Rebecca Long-Bailey, who has asked me to serve as her chief of staff and representative in the talks that must start immediately about forming a progressive alliance government to lead a country that has decisively rejected Boris Johnson and Donald Trump’s Tories and which must now have a chance to have its say about the Tory Brexit plan too. When we form that government, Rebecca will be the Prime Minister, but she will govern in Jeremy Corbyn’s name and true to his ideals.”

On the Conservative side, there was no comparable statement or clarity. By 7.45am, no fewer than five people had suggested that they would now lead the Conservative government that would ask the Queen for a chance to demonstrate that it had the confidence of the Commons. Dominic Raab was first out of the blocks, quickly followed by Sajid Javid; neither even mentioned Johnson in their statements. Priti Patel did so, but mostly she talked about Margaret Thatcher.

David Davis surprised many people by convening a press conference where he talked about the SAS and being good in a crisis, concluding: “I am ready to serve again.” His moment was rather spoiled when TV gallery directors cut away from him, however, because at that exact moment Nigel Farage spoke to the cameras outside the Red Lion and revealed that he’d thought long and hard about it and was in fact willing to accept a peerage and the premiership for long enough to see Britain out of the EU without a deal at the end of January.

Financial markets were having none of it, however, and after initial panicked falls, the pound was rising sharply again as traders decided the turmoil meant no Brexit in January and quite possibly ever. They were encouraged in this by tweets from Guy Verhofstadt in Brussels suggesting that the EU27 should unilaterally suspend the Article 50 process.

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Of Johnson himself, there was no sign. He was still, technically at least, Prime Minister, and so remained shut up in Downing Street. The No 10 press office issued a brief statement saying that the PM was consulting officials and no further comment would be made. Off the record, Tory officials briefed journalists that the only conversation going on in No 10 was about how a minority Conservative government would reconvene Parliament and bring about an immediate dissolution with a new general election in January; Johnson would be a candidate, though they declined to say where. There was no question of changing the Brexit timetable, they insisted.

Yet equally, off-record, “sources” at Buckingham Palace insisted that the Queen was constitutionally bound to consider all the possibilities; officials were seeking an urgent conversation with Sir Graham Brady of the 1922 Committee to ask just who, if anyone, was actually Conservative Party leader at that moment.

In the Palace view, the possibilities to consider included Long-Bailey, Swinson and Nicola Sturgeon somehow assembling a government that could govern at least long enough to reset the Brexit process, most likely by way of a referendum but possibly by simply asking the EU to stop the clock. The only sad certainty was that the Monarch would not be making her annual New Year trip to Sandringham.

That was the state of play just after 8am when another snap dropped on the Press Association election wire, bringing one of the results that had been delayed due to ballot boxes being delayed when a van crashed on a slushy Scottish road. A split second later the news flashed up on phone screens across Westminster: “East Dunbartonshire: SNP GAIN…”

It was here, in 1645, that representatives of King Charles I and his enemies among parliamentarians sought to hammer out a settlement to the English Civil War. The prospective Treaty of Uxbridge contained proposals that would see the king remain in power – though with his authority over the church, military and Ireland fettered. The wranglings lasted for just over three weeks. But, buoyed by recent military victories, the king saw no reason to give ground, so the talks floundered and the draft treaty went unsigned.

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Taking a dollop of satirical licence, and if you just substitute the current prime minister (who also happens to be the MP for these parts) for the monarch, it’s not much of a leap to see parallels with the political situation in Britain today.

Will Boris Johnson, emboldened by his own recent election success, show the same bravado as the old king in facing down recalcitrant MPs determined to prevent him from delivering Brexit? Will he go so far as to prorogue parliament if they obstruct him – just as Charles himself did in 1628 in a squabble over customs duties? Will he threaten to cling to power even if MPs express no confidence in his administration, thereby potentially forcing the real monarch to intervene? Johnson’s “Do or die” rhetoric of past weeks suggests he may do any of these things.

The constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, created in 2010 out of the old Uxbridge seat, was once deemed safe, if not rock-solid, Conservative territory. Between its two incarnations, it has returned a Tory at every general election since 1970. But things are suddenly less comfortable for the Tories here. In 2017, the seat saw a 13.6% swing to Labour and Johnson’s majority halved to just over 5,000 – the smallest for any prime minister since 1924. Labour needs only a 5.4% swing to win next time out, and is going all out to achieve it.

To add to the Tories’ woes, a recent report by the centre-right think tank Onward described the seat as ‘vulnerable’ because of its ratio of younger voters to older voters (the place is home to Brunel and Buckinghamshire New universities). Increases in the local ethnic minority population are likely to squeeze their vote further.

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Wandering around Uxbridge and South Ruislip, however, it is difficult to see it as anything other than middle-class suburbia: semi-detached and terraced 1930s houses with bay windows set along pleasant tree-lined avenues with well-tended grass verges – the type of place the London media is prone to forget even forms part of the metropolis. The denizens of these neighbourhoods are what some people might describe as ‘gammon’: mainly white, often of more mature years and well-to-do, and imbued with those small ‘c’ conservative attitudes that seem to provoke such ire in your modern-day liberal. There are pockets of a more gritty and working-class persuasion – the odd one-time council estate muscling its way in at the margins of the constituency.

It’s sort of Terry and June, but with Wolfie Smith lodging in a back room.

The number of benefits claimants is significantly lower than the average across the UK, and the high street seems, unlike many across Britain today, to bustle with activity and trade. Resistance to HS2 and a third runway at Heathrow – both of which will impact on the constituency fundamentally – is widespread, with many residents mildly irritated that their MP’s own opposition has been less than unequivocal. In fact, chatting to people here, it is obvious that the new prime minister cuts as divisive a figure locally as he does across the country.

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Thomas Moulstone is sitting outside Debenhams. “I quite like Boris’s ideas, but he’s a bit of a slob,” he says. He is a youthful 91 years old and has lived in Uxbridge all his life. “When you’re the prime minister, you should be smart.” As a former RAF serviceman, Thomas is probably inclined to take a dim view of anyone who dresses with anything less than crisp perfection. Perhaps surprisingly, he used to veer towards Labour, but has lost faith in the party over recent years. He sees Johnson as a careerist, though. “I’ve never seen him around here. It’s like he’s using this place as a stepping stone to bigger things.”

Thomas voted Leave and is frustrated at the failure to deliver Brexit. “The whole thing needs sorting out. Quickly.” I ask if the prospect of no-deal concerns him. “Not much point in worrying about anything at my time of life,” he retorts. A clear majority in the constituency voted for Brexit, though a YouGov poll last year indicated that voters here had switched to Remain.

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“I think there should be a second referendum,” a local job centre worker, Ben Mabadeje, 30, tells me. He voted Remain. “I don’t see how we’ll survive outside the EU.”

His family, originally from Nigeria, have always supported Labour, but Ben says he might be prepared to give Johnson a chance. “I like his idea of an amnesty for migrants. We need the resources of these workers, even if they came here illegally in the first place. So I think Boris is right on that one.” He pauses. “Although he’s a shit local MP. Doesn’t do enough around here.”

The Tories are determined to ensure that Johnson does not become their first party leader since Arthur Balfour in 1906 to lose his seat. They will no doubt throw everything into protecting their star player. For its part, Labour has been co-ordinating a series of “Unseat Boris Johnson” days, and the grassroots organisation Momentum has promised to flood the place with activists.

The party’s twentysomething candidate, Ali Milani, has been making waves. His backstory – a local lad who arrived in the UK as an immigrant from Iran aged five and was brought up by a single mother on a council estate – will undoubtedly appeal to all those hostile to the Eton and Oxford elitism embodied by Johnson. But the odds must still be against a Labour gain here.

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That said, given the age of unpredictability through which we are living, there is no longer such a thing as a political certainty. And if Johnson chooses or is forced to call a general election before having delivered Brexit, anything becomes possible. At the European elections earlier this year, the Brexit Party took an estimated 30% of the vote across the constituency, so it’s not hard to see how Johnson’s vote might end up being squeezed between pro- and anti-Brexit forces.

I sense, however, that, for the moment at least, Uxbridge and South Ruislip is prepared to stick by Johnson and give him the chance to prove himself as prime minister. “Politics is a total mess. Someone needs to sort it out,” says Tracey Spencer, 47, who is shopping with her daughter. “Boris can’t do any worse than the others. I don’t mind him. He seems to be pretty normal. I mean, he’s sometimes a twat, but he doesn’t mind looking a twat, if you know what I mean.”

I find it difficult upon hearing these affirmations of support for Johnson to set aside my own personal antipathy for the man. I was at war with him five years ago when, while mayor of the capital, he imposed the most savage cuts on the London Fire Brigade in its history – and can’t quite bring myself to understand what others might see in him. I have always seen his bumbling, blundering persona as a cynical act – a diversionary tactic designed to deflect attention from his neoliberal, Thatcherite politics – the type that wouldn’t be welcome across large parts of London.

Past colleagues of Johnson’s have testified to this contrivance – most notably Simon Heffer who, in an excoriating piece written a decade ago, said the act was ‘finely-wrought’. Rejecting any notion that Johnson was a ‘buffoon’, Heffer wrote: “The act is calculated, and it has required serious application and timing of the sort of which only a clever man is capable.”

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Until now, the act has worked. But whether Johnson can carry it off in the ultimate role, where statesmanship and gravitas are demanded, remains to be seen. I suspect that many of the more old-fashioned Tory voters in Uxbridge and South Ruislip quietly disapprove of Johnson’s clownishness, his air of arrogance and messy private life – but are prepared to overlook these as the price for having what they consider to be the right man in place to sort out a national crisis.

In truth, it is hard to see Johnson being decapitated here. His apparently infrequent trips to the constituency suggest that he is confident he has the voters of Uxbridge and South Ruislip on his side. And his bullishness on the national stage suggests he is equally convinced he has a majority of the nation on board as the Brexit saga reaches its apparent denouement.

But, then, Charles I was probably infused with the same air of self-assurance when ordering his commissioners to abandon negotiations with parliamentary leaders at the Crown and Treaty pub. And look what happened to him.