In one of Britain’s safest Tory seats, the women of Benfleet Methodist Church were opening their first “warm bank” a day after the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, warned that “decisions of eye-watering difficulty” lay ahead.
“This town isn’t poor but there are people who are struggling and we know there will be mothers coming this week to get supplies,” said Marie Howard, 77, gesturing towards pasta, tins and other foodstuffs stacked up in a back room.
Hot meals are also prepared, although – fresh from the kitchen – Doreen Bartlett, 87, added that they had been shocked to find last Sunday that beef had trebled in price.
Yet while economic turmoil is unlikely to trouble the 26,634 majority of Tory whip Rebecca Harris in Castle Point, an Essex seat on the Thames estuary, divisions over leadership and ideology are coursing through the local party. The splits mirror those playing out more widely, as a snap YouGov poll of 530 members on Monday and Tuesday found more than half believed Liz Truss should resign, including 39% of those who voted for her in the leadership race. Boris Johnson, three months after he was forced to resign after a series of scandals, was favourite to succeed her on 32%, with former chancellor Rishi Sunak second on 23%.
In Castle Point, the new chancellor’s shredding of Truss’s economic plans was not been enough to stop Robert Burdett, a Sunak supporter, from cancelling his party membership on Monday.
“I emailed and said ‘you don’t represent my views any more’ and that I might only re-evaluate once this car crash is over,” said Burdett, the owner of an IT support company. He attributed his firm’s survival through lockdown to the emergency measures introduced by the Treasury under Sunak. Now things are different. “I’m now politically homeless, basically,” he said.
A glance at the Castle Point Conservatives Facebook page revealed a full-blooded debate, ranging from calls for an immediate general election through to others either urging Johnson’s return or describing him as a “buffoon”.
“As usual it takes an imbecilic Conservative administration to make the insanities of leftwing political thought seem realistic in the eyes of the electorate,” said one poster.
Among other local members in Castle Point who spoke to the Guardian, former councillor Bill Sharp railed against the lack of support for Truss among MPs. He said: “The members made a choice and sadly, it appears that certain elements of the leadership have decided that we’re not fit enough to make the correct decision and want to change it. That, I’m afraid, will do the party a great deal of harm.
“I was quite impressed with Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget. I thought ‘At last we have a Thatcherite back in charge.’ And then days later the poor man gets [ousted].”
Sharp, a former Tory parliamentary candidate who said that he knew both Nigel Farage and Richard Tice, leader of the populist rightwing Reform party, added that the “blue stronghold” of Castle Point would not go Labour. But he said the Conservatives had to deal with what he insisted was untapped concern about illegal migration.
“What would be a big problem would be Reform, whose ideals are perfectly Thatcherite, coming forward after doing deals with other smaller parties and putting up a decent candidate,” added Sharp.
Pam Challis, a former leader of Castle Point council, watched from her living room as Hunt ripped the mini-budget to shreds. “I’ll be absolutely honest, I really, really don’t know what they’re doing at the moment. It’s a mystery to me what they’re trying to achieve.”
Watching the FTSE creep up following Hunt’s announcement, her partner, Brian Nery, said that the new chancellor had to be given a chance, but added: “You can put this in big bold type, but the solution is ‘bring back Boris’.”
There was also a reminder at Benfleet Methodist Church of the former prime minister’s enduring appeal, where he was referred to, as usual, by his first name by Howard. “Liz Truss should never have been there in the first place because it was Boris who was voted in.”
