To understand the meltdown the Conservative party faces, you do not have to go too far from Westminster. A short hop on a commuter train will do it – out into the suburbs and towns of the home counties, mostly still understood as true-blue heartlands but now full of a mixture of uncertainty, unease and anger that seems to have drastically shaken those age-old loyalties.
Last week, I was in Godalming in Surrey, represented for almost 20 years by Jeremy Hunt, the Tory politician who has held four cabinet posts since 2010 and is now somewhat desperately trying to remind his colleagues of the importance of the centre ground of politics. Life there looked largely easy: a seemingly bustling high street, enviably large houses and the sense of a corner of the country little used to political ruptures. To mark the 80th anniversary of D-day, the local shops were draped with an array of European flags; the scene in front of me seemed to crystallise the very English affluence that fosters calm and endless continuity.
But things here are on the move. Ten years ago, Hunt won a majority of nearly 30,000; now, as the Lib Dems talk up their chances, even he says the new seat of Godalming and Ash is on a “knife-edge”. Hunt has reportedly donated more than £100,000 of his own money to local Conservative campaign funds. Energetic local activists involved with the left-leaning pressure group Compass – drawn from a range of non-Tory parties and now in positions of local power – have long extolled the wonders of both tactical voting and the kind of cross-party cooperation that now ties together the coalition that runs the borough council and spans the Lib Dems, Greens, Labour and local independents. A decade ago, 53 of its seats were taken by Tories; now that number has crashed to 10.
One fact above all others explains what may happen here on 4 July. Back in 2016, Godalming was part of an area where nearly 60% of voters backed remain. It is not the kind of place where people enthuse about Nigel Farage and wring their hands about immigration and “small boats”. Its dominant middle class is educated, outward looking and fuller than ever of the values that define the capital city where so many local people make their living – conservative with a small “c”, perhaps, but also discernibly modern. What really runs deep, moreover, are shared ideals about business and success, which surely stand in sharp contrast to a ruling party now defined by incompetence, dogma and the dire economic results of our exit from the EU.
Outside the local branch of Caffè Nero, everything became clear in the course of a 15-minute conversation. Next to their mud-encrusted mountain bikes, four sixtysomething men were nursing their espressos and flat whites, and when I asked them about the election, they could barely contain themselves. They spoke in the confident tones of people used to chairing meetings and networking with clients, but everything they said was shot through with a deep sense of loss.
“Jeremy Hunt is a very, very good MP for this district,” said one of them. “But I have a major issue with him in that nobody seems to be talking about the major issue, which is Brexit. Every politician is denying that, and that’s why I can’t vote for him.”
I wondered if he had voted Conservative in the past. “Always,” he said, and he then told me a simple story. “I have a local business. Market research. Ten years ago, 40% of our clients were European. We now have no European clients. It’s just seen as not appropriate for European companies to use a British supplier.”
He said he was going to vote Lib Dem, “just to give Jeremy Hunt a bit of a shock”. One of his friends – another lifelong Tory – exasperatedly ran through a few of our recent prime ministers, starting with David Cameron: “Once we had the referendum, he just buggered off. Theresa May was doing the very best she could. But Johnson was just a charlatan. A liar.” Another said he would vote Labour, because he wanted “a new generation of politicians – it’s time for the dead wood to go”.
These are very familiar opinions. Over the last 10 years or so, I have heard them from people in such old Tory redoubts as Guildford, Maidenhead and High Wycombe, and in the comfortable suburbs of Cheshire and Greater Manchester. They have been reflected in seemingly endless byelection results and in one council contest after another. Now, as this strange and surreal election campaign takes shape, the same views are defining a growing subplot about what some people call the blue wall: seats across the south of England – and beyond – now suddenly being eyed by both the Lib Dems and Labour.
But this story is not just about the Conservative party. A lot of it centres on a modern middle class still often thought of as reactionary and illiberal but that is actually worldly, worried about the climate crisis and infuriated by Brexit. It is also about a chunk of the English establishment that has completely lost touch with the people and places it still thinks it speaks for. If the next week sees Reform UK overtake the Conservative party in the polls, the siren voices gathered around the Mail, Telegraph and GB News will presumably insist that the answer lies in more populism and shrillness, and some deranged political realignment whereby Faragism will come to define the Tory soul, much as Donald Trump has taken over the Republican party. But that way lies extinction, definitely as a force that aspires to power. England is not America. Surrey certainly isn’t.
Still, the Tory pantomime that has estranged such a huge part of the party’s old base looks set to carry on. The arrant stupidity of Rishi Sunak’s early departure from Normandy last week lay in how it was guaranteed to enrage both parts of his party’s crumbling electoral coalition; they spat feathers in Stoke-on-Trent, but they were also livid in the south-eastern commuter belt. Meanwhile, voters who once saw the Tories as the party of business, stability and basic economic sense now behold something utterly different – a motley crew of reckless ideologues who will respond to defeat by moving even further to the right. Such is one of modern history’s most mind-boggling turnabouts: the self-styled heroes and buccaneers of 2019 suddenly revealed as hopeless lemmings, glorying in their own encroaching irrelevance.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
