As Liz Truss stumbled through last week’s disastrous round of interviews with local radio stations, Basingstoke’s United Reformed church was giving away bread. Loaves donated by local supermarkets were arranged on a set of metal shelves covered by a tarpaulin. Every so often, someone would gingerly walk up and help themselves, before turning their attention to the hot food that was also available: soup, risotto and stew, cooked by a group of spirited volunteers. They told me that the town’s levels of need were suddenly increasing fast, and they were now feeding whole families.
A few yards away, I met Peter. Now retired, he had worked for the telecoms giant Motorola, a once-sizeable local employer that closed its Basingstoke operation in 2017. Rocketing bills, he told me, meant he was now limiting himself to two hours of TV a night, rationing lighting, keeping his heating off, and wearing sweaters and fleeces whenever he was indoors. Among the items in his shopping bag was a baguette he had got from the church.
In 2016, he had supported leaving the EU – hoping, he said, that the billions the Brexiteers said we gave to the EU would now be spent at home. Three years later, he enthusiastically voted Conservative, thanks to Boris Johnson.: “He seemed young to me – like he had ideas, and he was going to do something.” Now, the few words he uttered about politics were full of a weary cynicism. When I mentioned Truss and the chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, his face crumpled into a grimace. At the next election, he told me, he wouldn’t vote.
Basingstoke, in the built-up corner of Hampshire that sits next to the M3, looks like a solid chunk of Conservative England. The sitting Tory MP, Maria Miller, has a majority of 14,000. The borough the town dominates voted for Brexit by the same narrow majority as the country as a whole. Outwardly, it seems comfortably off, but the town centre is full of vacant shops and charity outlets, and there are a striking number of huge office buildings that now lie empty. All told, Basingstoke embodies a malaise I have seen before in other southern towns and suburbs: a sense that the dynamism and aspiration that arrived in the 1980s peaked well before the crash of 2008, and have been slowly fading ever since.
Beyond the spectacular fumblings of Truss and Kwarteng, these are the long-term roots of the Tories’ sudden political crisis. For a long time, millions of people in supposed Conservative heartlands have been managing to just about maintain their material comforts while their surroundings have felt increasingly shabby and fragile. First came austerity, then the pandemic, and the effects of the latter soon blurred into the economic fallout from Brexit and the war in Ukraine. Now, amid hugely increased living costs and the prospect of big jumps in mortgage payments, it feels as if the disruption and decay that has so drastically affected people’s immediate environment is threatening to consume the most basic foundations of their lives.
For a very long time, Tory electoral success has been based on a time-honoured trick: persuading the social middle that it has nothing in common with the bottom, and indeed kicking poor people around just to reinforce the point, something that the Truss government’s approach to “welfare” looks set to resume. But the crisis we are in is blurring those distinctions. Over the past few months, I have met plenty of people – in Basingstoke, Birmingham, suburban Merseyside and Milton Keynes – who are becoming acquainted with a new reality of cancelled holidays, self-rationed petrol and basics food brands. There is a palpable fear among many of them about where they might be heading: beyond the discount supermarket, might the next stop be the food bank?
In that context, a mini-budget that focused its tax cuts on a tiny minority of top earners and lifted the cap on City bonuses was an act of complete political stupidity. As long as Conservatism could successfully present itself as the voice of homeowners, car drivers, commuters and small businesspeople, the suggestion that it was primarily about the interests of the very wealthy could easily be neutralised. Now, many people who habitually voted Tory seem to sense that they are being left behind: suddenly, only the rich are credited with the powers to restart growth, and the party millions once voted for as a matter of habit seems to be treating them with a high-handed indifference.
There is another element of this political neglect. Over the past six years, Conservatives should have been focusing on the threadbare state of even outwardly affluent towns and cities, the increasingly precarious lives of their party’s voters, and such basic issues as housing and public transport. Instead, they were either getting lost in Brexit’s endless complexities or extolling a utopian “global Britain” that quickly collided with reality. Now, what ministers call “Brexit opportunities” seem to only be open to a tiny number of very privileged people, like the hedge fund managers Kwarteng reportedly shared champagne with only hours after his big announcements. Would you believe it: a revolution sold to the public as the very essence of anti-elitism turns out to be the most elitist project modern British politics has ever seen.
The latest Tory prime minister, as we know, fancies herself as the heir to Margaret Thatcher. But as Truss’s latest encounter with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg once again proved, the comparison is completely laughable. Thatcher was always confident, fluent and on top of her brief; Truss is hesitant, stilted and prone to blurting out borderline nonsense (“I’m, I believe in outcomes rather than inputs,” she said, which is not exactly a line to settle people’s nerves). And another difference says even more about the contrast between Conservatism then and now.
Thatcher hugely helped the rich, but thanks partly to her beginnings in that Lincolnshire grocer’s shop, her deepest affinity was with a swathe of the electorate that included both a chunk of middle England and newly confident elements of the working class. But Truss, a child of left-liberal parents and a relatively late convert to Conservatism, seems to have no core constituency at all. The haughty arrogance of her Etonian chancellor hardly helps; neither does a cold, theoretical set of ideas that is shredding Tory ideas rather than promoting them. There is one particularly glaring example: as the banks withdraw mortgage products and interest rates jump up, what will be the fate of the age-old belief in a property-owning democracy?
And so to one last rather overlooked point. As our economic troubles pile up, there is talk of renewed austerity: in her interview with Kuenssberg, Truss pointedly declined to rule out public spending cuts. She and her colleagues ought to bear in mind the words of the writer and academic Ross McKibbin, written in 1999 but every bit as relevant to 2022: “The middle classes make more use of the NHS, public transport, public libraries, local swimming pools, public parks and their right to state welfare than anyone else.” Therein we see one key aspect of the Tories’ snowballing crisis, and further proof of this surreal period’s defining political fact: that if Conservatives only seem able to bring to their own heartlands worry and despair, the game is surely up.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist. To listen to his podcast Politics Weekly UK, search “Politics Weekly UK” on Apple, Spotify, Acast or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday
