https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-populist-tory-party-has-a-lie-at-its-heart-lpxtds5h7
Red wall voters have warmed to Johnson but the mood will sour when they realise he can’t make their towns prosper
On this page seven years ago I reported from a by-election in a fairly desperate seaside town. Not Hartlepool but another struggling place, Clacton-on-Sea in Essex. After a depressing day there I got the tone wrong — it was too scornful — but what I said was right.
I wrote that Clacton was a slowly failing resort, an example of those parts of Britain that were going nowhere, characterised by people and businesses with nowhere to go, and many who had given up the fight. Twenty-first century Conservatism (I said) should not cast its net on the side of failure, however easy the immediate catch. Politicians, like priests, will always make their easiest converts among “the weak, the unlucky, the resentful, the fearful and the poor”. We should care for these people, of course we should, but not always for their views. I still think that.
In Clacton they were going to vote Ukip, I concluded, and indeed a few weeks later they did: a boost for those in the Conservative Party who believed that, to appeal to places like Clacton, they should move in a populist direction. They’ve done that now. The populist wing of the party is in charge.
This morning, as we survey the Tories’ breathtaking gains across the struggling parts of England, winning a by-election in another floundering seaside town, Hartlepool, we must concede that the results are not just a victory for the Conservative Party but for its populist wing. We former Tory moderates have to acknowledge this. The strategy is working for them.
Of course it’s easy to protest (and true) that Tory success in Hartlepool is partly owed to the dire state of the Labour Party. Decent and capable Sir Keir Starmer may even be tempted to give up. But in favour of what or whom? It is the Labour Party, Starmer’s boss, that’s the problem. This 20th-century relic of a party, in hock to folk memories and hulks of trade unionism, is bed-blocking that space in Britain where something new should grow; and until this sour and obsolete political beast dies, the new cannot be born. So don’t tell Labour how to adapt. It can’t. Tell it to go away.
But the new support for Boris Johnson’s gang sweeping across much of Britain really is a thing. Voters there like what the Tory party is turning into. Clacton is now one of the safest Conservative seats in Britain. In Hartlepool, a great wodge of the Tories’ new majority comes not from former Labour voters but from those who last time supported the Brexit Party. It is futile for those of us who want to be liberal Tories, and for those of us who are now former Tories, to deny that there are millions of votes to be won in the depressed parts of our country, and Johnson is winning them.
It’s futile, too — and I’m coming to terms with this — for us Boris-sceptics to dream of a silver bullet that will finish off the electorate’s attachment to this man. Nemesis must surely await? We dream of a “Gotcha!” moment. Maybe Dominic Cummings has the tape recordings? “All will be revealed!” we mutter.
Friends, we’re kidding ourselves. There’s no spray-on defeat for this man. Why do we think the voters haven’t yet cottoned on? They have. And they aren’t bothered. When you keep telling people something and they don’t seem to take any notice, it’s either because they don’t want to know or they know already and don’t care. There’s no point in holding Johnson to some moral standard to which he has never pretended. Better and perhaps more constructive to hold him to what he has pretended: that Tory government can rescue those parts of Britain that have sunk, while others have risen. It can’t, or won’t, be done.
If you add up all the Hartlepools across Britain — all the depressed towns, especially in the Midlands and the north of England and in Wales; and all the desolate high streets in all the hard-bitten urban landscapes that litter regional England; and all the struggling seaside resorts around our coasts, from Blackpool to Llandudno and from Hastings to Skegness — and then imagine yourself a Tory chancellor and ask yourself “How do we ‘level up’ these places, as we’ve promised?” answer comes there none.
You can create a few free ports — a beggar-my-neighbour way of displacing rather than creating economic activity. Yet without the sort of massive Marshall Plan the Americans could afford after the Second World War, that is only tinkering. This (or, I believe, any) Conservative government is not going to “level up” red-wall England.
That is the lie at the heart of the new, populist Tory appeal and this cabinet knows it. As your Clactons and Hartlepools, your Rotherhams, Redcars, Doncasters, Walsalls and Penzances fail to respond to what tinkering we can afford, and the levelling-up sloganising begins to sour, there will be only one recourse for a Johnson administration if it is to carry on milking support from depressed places: turn up the volume of angry populism. Sabre-rattling with the EU, punitive rhetoric on law and order, longer jail sentences, noisy anti-wokery ... and slowly the Conservative Party I joined half a century ago will become almost unrecognisable.
As disillusion in red-wall Britain grows, the Tories will turn back towards the class interest with which the party has been historically associated: back towards the achieving, entrepreneurial places and people; back towards business, towards graduates, the employed, the savers, and the more comfortably off. And when they do, they will find we have wandered away.
It will probably not be Johnson who cops it. He has a real talent for holding his audience, the electorate, by sheer force of personality and as long as he does he will distract attention from the vacuum of policy and political philosophy he has created. He has, too, a knack for getting out from under trouble, and he will, before or after the next general election. His successor will be left surveying a wasteland of a party.
In politics there is a market in optimism and a market in anxiety. The market in anxiety is the easiest to capture and this week the Conservatives consolidated their hold on the disappointed, the nostalgic and the fearful. A party has a personality and it’s derived in part from the people it pitches to. A party that pitches to the angry or the resentful soon begins to look like them. Positive or negative? The Tories can’t wear both masks. They won Hartlepool and lost London; charmed Clacton and dismayed Cambridge. Johnson may get away with it. His successors won’t.
. I’m devastated. Lol.
