An avuncular and sharp-witted persona, Walz ticks the right boxes when it comes to winning the Electoral College. He is a popular Democratic governor from the upper Midwest, a crucial battleground region, and has received ringing endorsements from the AFL-CIO, UAW and other trade union organisations. He is also a muscular surrogate who has already put Republicans on defence over J.D. Vance’s “weird” cultural views.

Perhaps most important, Walz is a white old-school liberal who speaks to the “kitchen table” concerns of working-class voters anxious over living costs and now the possibility of a recession. Though reliably progressive on issues such as abortion rights and LGBT equality, Walz seems to bask most in common-sense reforms like free school meals and paid family and medical leave that he and Minnesota’s Democratic state legislature passed into law. Well before he was a contender for the vice-presidential nomination, progressives of various stripes looked to him as an example of how Democrats should rebuild their brand outside the coasts

This record is an important asset for Harris. Throughout her term, she has struggled to lift public approval of the Biden administration’s economic agenda, reinforcing perceptions she is a lightweight on the administration’s signature industrial, trade and development policies. Many progressives, meanwhile, worry she is too enmeshed with the donor class and will wobble on Biden’s efforts to support organised labour and rein in monopolies. Walz’s presence at the very least assuages some of those concerns, even if vice presidents are hardly known for influencing an administration’s economic priorities.

At the same time, his elevation also provides some insight into how the campaign views the battleground states, particularly so-called Blue Wall states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and the Sun Belt. In 2020, Arizona and Georgia padded Biden’s final total in the Electoral College, but only by razor-thin margins in each case. Some progressive strategists nevertheless believed these victories were a sign of things to come, and that Democrats needed to expand their support in the diverse metro areas and affluent suburbs of the South and West to make up for expected shortfalls in an ageing Midwestern Rust Belt. But Biden’s standing in the Sun Belt, especially Nevada and North Carolina, took a beating from inflation. As Biden’s poll numbers lagged behind Trump this spring before his fateful debate performance, it became evident that some combination of Midwestern states and Pennsylvania offered the clearest, and perhaps only, pathway to victory. By early July, however, even those odds of reaching 270 Electoral College votes had dwindled.

Harris appears to be a determined realist on this front. By ultimately declining to pick Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, another top contender for the VP slot, she has signalled her campaign is laser-focused on the swing states most in reach. Despite the challenges she may face as a female and biracial candidate, she recognises that the industrial Midwest still exerts a powerful hold on the liberal-Left psyche. In addition to Walz, Harris is therefore still expected to be aided on the campaign trail by two of her other potential running mates: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who were feted by pragmatic progressives for repelling MAGA opponents in the 2022 midterms.

Of course, should Harris make up Biden’s lost ground in the region over the next couple of weeks, her fundraising will undoubtedly swell. That would allow her to divert some resources back to the Sun Belt and make a concerted effort to win Georgia, where Democrats still have the best chance of cobbling together an “anti-Trump” coalition in the South. That strategy, in turn, would likely bleed the Trump-Vance ticket of campaign cash in states that it still expects to win, while leaving Walz to venture deeper into Midwestern swing counties rich in working-class votes.

The selection of Walz is not foolproof, however. While he coasted to re-election in 2022 by a margin of almost 200,000 votes, his first term was rocked by the George Floyd protests, which led to extensive looting and property damage in Minneapolis. Conservatives are again claiming Walz did not deploy the Minnesota National Guard soon enough to contain the chaos, while some Left-wing activists remain angry over the limited policing reforms pursued by the state’s Democratic establishment. In an election that will be won on tight margins, Walz will have to quickly prove he can parry these sorts of attacks on the Right and the Left and keep the focus on Trump’s unfitness for office.

Another potential liability concerns the way blue cities and states handled the pandemic. Though many progressives adhered to stringent protocols, extended school closures and remote-learning policies in some cases put the Democrats’ traditional urban coalition of affluent professionals, black and Latino workers, and teachers’ unions under strain. In particular, wage-earning parents who could not work from home struggled to adapt to shifting policies, and research now shows that learning loss and absenteeism have been greater in those districts that did not resume in-school learning sooner. Although not an extreme outlier, Minnesota was also no exception to these challenges. Hence, as much as Walz was selected to bridge divides in the Democratic coalition and win over disaffected independents, the party which relies on robust turnout in all cities could suffer unexpected defections or poor mobilisation in key districts due to divergent experiences of the pandemic.

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To be sure, none of these vulnerabilities on their own are enough to drag down the Democratic ticket. Walz is the archetypal happy warrior of Midwestern liberalism, something the Democratic Party arguably needs more of. Still, it would be naive of progressives to discount the most obvious attack the GOP will deploy: that Harris is a “DEI” limousine liberal and Walz a feckless bleeding heart. Democrats are counting on Walz to deflect those volleys, but in the end the ticket will need more than Walz’s pugilistic talents to prevail in November.

In fact, Democrats should not overestimate the ways in which Walz “balances” the ticket. While Walz is expected to lend the campaign a much-needed everyman feel, the election will come down to the economic concerns that national Democrats have struggled to alleviate. Walz can help, but the top of the ticket needs to convey, with force, how it plans to tackle an across-the-board affordability crisis. As the party strives to unify a frayed coalition divided between pro-globalisation professionals, young identity-driven activists and progressive populists, it will take more than one man to show regular workers Harris has their interests at heart.

Today, England’s rendering of this fantasy, otherwise known as the Home Counties, seems warped and unstable. Travelling through Surrey, from the quiet villages nestled in the North Downs to its London border in the north, it resembles not a cliché of suburban aspiration, but a capsule of all England’s problems: the demise of its ruling party, a lost generation of millennials, polluted waterways and a cost-of-living crisis. In these leafy streets, decline and affluence have become entwined.

The Conservative Party has always relied on the Home Counties — both to symbolise its vision for England and for its dependable voters. Now, as even this region is threatened, other parties are sweeping in and vying for a new future coalition of voters. “The Tory party needs to die,” says Westminster’s new Liberal Democrat candidate in Mole Valley, Chris Coughlan. He is the product of the Surrey incarnation of the suburban dream; the son of a stockbroker, he grew up in the village of Peaslake, joined the army and then the Conservative Party, and had a stint in the City. He is now one of the many Lib Dems trying to do the unthinkable: turf the Tory party out of its spiritual home.

With the local elections less than two weeks’ away, the Battle for the Blue Wall, the affluent suburbs that cling onto London, is now very much on. The first skirmish came in 2019, when Dominic Raab nearly lost his seat to an unprecedented Lib Dem surge around the Surrey town of Esher. But the past three years appear to have set up a far bigger fight that goes well beyond the revenge of the Remainers. Alongside the material decline of the Home Counties, a further dimension to the campaign has opened up. As London ages and gentrifies, and a “parasitical housing market” bites, an exodus of young families, millennials and renters unable to afford life in the capital have found themselves pushed beyond the sprawl of London and out into the Tory shires.

This is not the ordinary flight to the suburbs that comes with each generation’s economic maturity. Not all of these newcomers are young families seeking homes. Professional-millennial émigrés have made areas of Surrey such as Guildford and Tandridge some of the fastest-rising areas for youth voters in the country. And they have found themselves in a very different home county from the stereotype of Surrey comfort. The south-east has seen the biggest fall across the country in disposable income since 2019, with a gap opening up between median income and house prices that far outpaces the rest of England. More recently, some of the country’s most expensive mortgages were among those hit hardest after the Truss Budget. Nor is the county immune from the cost-of-living crisis. Throw in rising unsolved crime levels and a cripplingly expensive commute into the capital, and it’s not unreasonable to talk about a wave of de-gentrification taking place not just in Surrey, but across the Home Counties.

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The political power of Deano

By Tom McTague

The material circumstances that once made these places Conservative are starting to crumble. But the battle for the Blue Wall will not just be fought along a straightforward economic realignment. Surrey still has some of the country’s wealthiest postcodes and an established Tory party machine. And for their most proximate challengers, the Liberal Democrats, a vision for Surrey that somehow ties together Tory defectors with younger economic exiles isn’t clear.

Their targets fall into two categories: the “Surrey Shifter”, (young, newly-arrived from London) and “Waitrose woman” (middle-to-late aged and socially conservative). But while both are some of the most “Bregretful” in Britain, beyond that they have little in common. And nothing divides them more than the issue of housing. Millennials are the Yimby generation, overwhelmingly in favour of increased house-building. But here the greenbelt is sacred, and though judicial review has been forced to intervene, Surrey Nimbyism is a well-funded and experienced political force, courted by both parties on the council. Down the road in Wisley, plans to build a new town of 2,000 houses have triggered outright rebellion among disgruntled locals. As ever in this part of England, the home-owning dreams of the new generation is becoming the older generation’s nightmare. 

One way to cut through the schism is to talk about other things, mobilising instead the apathy and disaffection that is more or less universal. Knocking on the door in Surrey, “the worst it’s ever been in our lifetime” will do well as a campaign slogan. Coghlan certainly says it a lot and so do other Tory defectors. Young families are using food banks in Dorking; the River Mole that runs through the Surrey Hills is one of the most polluted in the country. When Ed Davey came to visit Mole Valley, he was taken to a swimming pond in Fetcham, which is now, as one local told me, “full of shit”. The arrival of England’s decline in these once-protected suburban idylls is now as visible as it is pungent.

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Poundbury and the English apocalypse

By Fred Skulthorp

For Geoff Eaton, a 64-year-old businessman and lifelong Tory voter, a reckoning is coming for his old party, which has “lost its moral compass”. He complains about lies, Brexit and even the lost legacy of the London Olympics. “The Conservative Party has moved away from me,” he says, “I haven’t moved away from the Conservative Party.” When I bring news of this reckoning on the Surrey doorstep to Sir Paul Beresford, the Mole Valley MP, he seems unfazed. Along with 27 colleagues, the Tory grandee has announced he is standing down at the next general election — a decision that possibly reflects the fact that his seat, which saw a record Lib Dem swing in 2019, is no longer the quiet Tory shire it once was. But when I ask if the character of Surrey has changed under him, he seems oblivious to the tensions. “In the past”, he says, “when I get talking to Surrey people, they usually come round to my way of thinking.”

But who is a “Surrey person” now? Electoral regions cannot be so easily presumed anymore. It’s much like asking who a Red Wall voter is. But while other realignments in the North and Scotland have been driven by a sense of political betrayal, in Surrey, the failure to reward conservative aspirations has elicited a different response. In the high streets of Dorking and Guildford, the Lib Dems can look for Waitrose Mum and Surrey Shifter, but their sense of decline translates not into political activism but terminal apathy. “I have absolutely no interest anymore in this country,” says Kieran, who moved to Surrey just before the pandemic with his girlfriend, and now does an evening Uber stint so he can save enough to escape to Canada. “Everything went wrong after Brexit,” says his opposite number, Jayne Bleby outside an artisan butchers. “But I can’t vote for the Lib Dems. There’s just something about them that’s not quite right.” Another gentleman in Bookham is blunter when I try to tease out his views on the county’s future: “Surrey is like the rest of England; it’s becoming a shithole.”

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How the Tories lost their way

By James Vitali

“If the Conservative Party can’t win here, where can they win?” one Tory strategist said to me despairingly. Next week, his disbelief will be put to the first of many tests, not just in Surrey, but across the Home Counties, the towns and villages that once offered a tangible encapsulation of English conservatism’s ambitions. With the structural and generational changes of the last few years, it’s unclear whether the Tories’ vision for England still commands any loyalty here. Of the sleeping 20th-century suburbs, Ballard also said they “dreamt of violence”, to escape the stifling boredom of their eternality. The search for a new suburbia forebodes a different disquiet that will last well beyond the May elections.

Ever since the shock win for the Lib Dems in Chesham and Amersham back in June, many on the centre-Left have been waiting for something equally arresting to confirm that it wasn’t a one off, and that the Tories might be in as much trouble in some of their southern heartlands as Labour are in the north.

But is YouGov’s eye-catching Blue Wall poll really that other shoe dropping? And even if it is, isn’t it more a faint echo than a darn great thud?

That the Conservatives are losing support in some of their seats which heavily backed Remain in 2016, and where over a quarter of residents hold a university degree, actually shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

After all, the flip side of the electoral analyst James Kanagasooriam’s observation that there were Labour seats where voter demographics (and values) meant they could easily turn Tory was always that the Conservatives should expect to lose a few seats, too. In fact, one could almost argue that it was always going to be a matter of when, not if.

It could even be that Covid is speeding the process up. The Government’s recent responses to both the ping- and pandemic have once again given people the impression that (a) it doesn’t really know what it’s doing, and (b) there’s one rule for it and one for the rest of us. Added to which, the search for space among relatively affluent city dwellers may be leading to the surrounding outer suburbs and small towns welcoming younger, better-educated and more socially liberal voters

Chesham and Amersham may be just the kind of constituency they are moving to. But if that formerly true-blue stronghold is in play, then so are a bunch of home-counties seats, although most of those are rather more vulnerable to the Lib Dems than to Labour.

Which is why it may be a little disappointing to those investing in YouGov’s latest polling to find that, at least in the seats it surveyed, support for the Lib Dems appears to have dropped (from 24% down to 18%) since the general election. If he does want take more Blue Wall seats off the Tories in 2023 or 2024, then Ed Davey is going to need a much bigger orange mallet than the one he wielded for the rather endearing photo-op that celebrated his party’s win in Chesham and Amersham.

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Will Boris lose the Blue Wall?

By Tanya Gold

Labour appears to be doing better, with its support rising four points from 20% to 24%. But if you’re excited about those numbers, then it probably says more about you than it does about them. A score of 20% doesn’t even merit the label “low base”. It wouldn’t even come close to what the party would need to pull off an unlikely victory in a classic three-way marginal. In 2019, there were just 11 English seats which had a vote-share gap between first and third place of less than 20 percentage points, and even among those the lowest winning vote share (Labour’s in Sheffield Hallam) was 34.6%.

To be fair, YouGov reckons that: “If the swings were uniform across all constituencies, Labour would be set to gain a total of nine Blue Wall seats, and the Liberal Democrats three.” However, if you look carefully, four of those Labour wins would be in London (Chipping Barnet, Chingford, Hendon and Kensington) and only one (Wycombe) is in what most analysts would think of as the “real” Blue Wall (the others being Milton Keynes North, Stroud, Truro and Falmouth, and one of the Bristol seats).

And anyway, as YouGov goes on in the next breath, even if Labour were to gain the seats listed, “it would not be anywhere near enough to offset the party’s losses in the so-called Red Wall in 2019”. The fact remains, as Keir Starmer’s new Director of Strategy, Deborah Mattinson (whose book does a great job of helping to explain those losses) has reportedly told Labour MPs: the party still has a long way to go if it is to win over the older, less-educated, and culturally conservative voters it desperately needs to get back in order to stand a chance next time round.

Apparently, she also pointed to polling and to focus group research, in which she specialises, that suggests support for Boris Johnson is waning. It’s also worth remembering that, at the end of last year, before the vaccine roll-out became a reality for most people, the gap between the two parties had narrowed. But even as the nation’s gratitude begins to fade, it remains the case that, nationwide, both the PM and the Conservative Party retain significant leads on the measures that matter — trust on who would best run the economy and who would make the best prime minister.

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Don't stereotype Red Wall Tories, Boris

By David Jeffreys

Sure, there are some worrying numbers for the Tories in the YouGov poll. Some 54% of its Blue Wall respondents disapprove of the Government (the same proportion who say it doesn’t listen to people in their area) – and that’s compared to only 30% who approve. Moreover, 47% think the Government is taking the country in the wrong direction compared to just 32% who reckon it’s taking us in the right direction.

Furthermore, some of the Blue Wall’s decidedly liberal views on cultural questions (for instance, 66% of voters polled by YouGov agree that a wide variety of different ethnic backgrounds and cultures is part of British culture compared to 50% of voters in general and 54% in the Red Wall) might give the Government pause for thought about upping the ante on its ongoing war on woke.

More generally, the fact that 55% think the Conservative Party is out of touch is hardly good news for Boris Johnson — until, that is, you realise that 58% say the same of the Labour Party. And Lib Dems shouldn’t read too much into the fact their score on that metric is 39%: a mere 18% say that they’re in touch.

Ultimately, though, most Conservatives — except perhaps those southern Nimby MPs desperate for ammunition in their battle to prevent their government carrying through meaningful planning reform — won’t (or at least shouldn’t) get too worked up about what the poll purports to tell us about the Blue Wall. This is mid-term: they should expect some serious discontent and dissatisfaction.

In any case, a drop from 52% support in 2019 to 44% support now can be made to sound steep but ultimately, in most of their heartland seats anyway, the worse that’s likely to happen to Tory candidates at the next general election is that they end up having to count the votes rather than simply weigh them.

This is the land of plenty at the end of the Metropolitan Line. The charity shop has a wedding hat section. There is a bespoke gentleman’s tailor and a town museum, so you can investigate Amersham’s plenty of yore. The Britain in Bloom awards are stacked vertically on a post by the Old Market. These golden discs, and the pride in the physical perfection of Old Amersham that they convey, are an indication that Boris Johnson’s luck might sag there this year. Is the Prime Minister conservative enough for Amersham Old Town? They doubt his dedication to their bloom. These are visual lands: you see it in the costumes, the cars, the homes, and the rage against HS2, currently being hewn into the hill beyond their paradise. They hate HS2 with the fervour of children because they usually have their way in everything, and in that is the possibility of rebellion.

If Amersham Old Town is in denial about it being 2021 — it is largely medieval with fiercely repointed Georgian frontage — so are most of its voters. I wonder if the residents consider the Chiltern Hills to be an extension of their gardens; they are enraged about HS2 because it will benefit the Midlands and the North and leave them and their excellent transport connections with a glut they did not seek.  Benjamin Disraeli similarly courted the working classes from nearby Hughenden Manor, but perhaps the descendants of his voters have forgotten this happy coalition of manor and slum. HS2 is the only teardrop spilling onto their plate, and this, not pandemic, is the story here. Pandemic was unfortunate, but they are vaccinated now, and the shops are open.

There is jeopardy for the Prime Minister, then: when Dame Cheryl Gillan, Conservative MP for Chesham and Amersham, died in April, a by-election was called, scheduled for Thursday. Gillan’s majority was immense, a blue hill in a land of hills: 16,223 in 2019, or 55.4% of the vote. If you listen to constituents the result was barely conscious. As a pub landlord says from behind his tidy bar: “I vote Conservative. If you ask me why I vote Conservative I couldn’t give you an answer.” He makes it sound like an existential question singular to Tory Buckinghamshire: “Why do I vote Conservative? I think the majority of people don’t really look into that much – of why they vote.” He tells me he was born to a working-class family in Wales — his Welsh-based family have “nothing” — lives in a £1 million house in Chesham Bois, drives a new Range Rover and educated his children at private schools. Then two elderly ladies come in for lunch, and we must stop talking, because he is busy spoiling them with a professionalism that looks like rapture. He has been working since 5am — he works hard — and he is almost the most analytical voter I meet, but this election is about flowers and potholes.

The Tory majority is vast, but the Liberal Democrats sense an opportunity to beat the new Conservative candidate, one Peter Fleet, formerly of the Ford motor company. His centre of operations is a flat above an award-winning iron mongery in Amersham; from here he rides out to promise mitigation of the impact of HS2, a national park in the Chiltern Hills and a crack-down on anti-social behaviour (he is against it).

To combat him, there are 500 Liberal Democrat activists in Chesham and Amersham, placing banks of posters near notorious potholes. It is uncanny, and I wonder if they are consulting psychologists. Hit a pothole and you see a Liberal Democrat poster or, more likely, four Liberal Democrat posts. “The roads,” I am told by an upper-middle-class woman, “are shit”. I fantasise their slogan changed to: “Potholes winning here.”

Opposition parties do well in by-elections, and there is rage with the liberalisation of the planning laws, which I think is the equivalent of Total War in Nimby-land.

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How the Left lost Hartlepool

By Tanya Gold

There is a theory that for each brick he removes from the Red Wall, Boris Johnson loses a third of a brick, or maybe more, from the Blue Wall, as businessmen voters fantasise about which lie they would fire him for, and liberal-leaning voters flee London for the Home Counties, taking their Remain politics and rustic fantasies with them. These fantasies are helpful to Liberal Democrats, if irritating: what is the point of living in a village where everyone looks like Philip Green? Where be the cows?

I hear that after a bad poll the previous week, Johnson made a surprise visit to the constituency. The Liberal Democrats were second in 91 seats in 2019 and took Amersham Town Council in May. They wonder if this by-election is the beginning of a recovery; of a Conservative rebellion against itself. Amersham Old Town is quite the place to stick it to the man, his optics — last week he was gambolling in the Cornish surf  and toasting Peter Fleet with a pint — and his national polling average of 44%.

I meet the Liberal Democrat candidate Sarah Green in a coffee shop in Amersham. Amersham is not Amersham Old Town. It does not have a bespoke gentleman’s tailor, or a personal museum. I watch an attempted burglary of a post office, just opposite the Conservative campaign office. The postmaster chases the villain with a baseball bat. No one is injured.

Green is young, open, emphatic. “People feel ignored,” she says, “people feel taken for granted.” I heard that in Hartlepool, from Labour voters; here, I struggle not to laugh, which is slightly unfair because pain is pain. “It’s been true blue for decades – council, local, national. It’s like, ‘it’s always going to be blue so why should they listen to us?’ The idea that if you live in Tory area you get investment is manifestly not true. All the issues feed into that underlying theme of being taken for granted”. No one is exempt from self-pity nowadays; and so, a Liberal Democrat activist tells me, excited former Tories are stopping her to say, “I’m voting for Sarah!” Another says she heard a group of “dyed-in-the-wool Tories” were surprised, on meeting in the pub, to discover they are all Liberal Democrats now, from a combination of, “planning changes, the way you just have to ring Bojo, bung him some money and you’ve won the business”. I wonder if Chesham and Amersham will surprise itself with its audacity tomorrow. It’s a by-election. The stakes are low. Even if they do elect a Liberal Democrat MP, their taxes will not rise. It will be a murder without blood.

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Estate agents are too busy to talk — though one shouts over his shoulder that the Prime Minister wore the same tie to Amersham as he wore at the G7, and he has dandruff too, which matters in a village in bloom — but the man in the art gallery says: “There are an awful lot of people moving out [to here]. Every one of the flats here,” he points upwards “has gone on the market, with the exception of one. Every weekend I see people coming into the shop saying, ‘it’s fantastic round here, we want to move, we want a garden, we’ve been living in the city’”.

I meet such women in Chesham, which is a sadder Amersham Old Town; there is a foodbank with a request for sponge pudding and tinned chicken taped in the window. They are an NCT group; they sit by their babies’ prams, drinking large cocktails. They are from London, and vote Liberal Democrat here, though one voted Labour formerly — “I don’t think Labour know who they are [now]”. They are not angry about the Government’s response to pandemic: “I’m not sure how anyone would have handled it,” says one. But they are worried about child poverty, the future of the NHS, and the lack of affordable housing.

There is almost no Labour presence in this constituency, and the voters know it. Labour say they are campaigning, but the evidence is flimsy. (They are speaking to the press via email). Labour took 12.9% of the vote in 2019. I meet a Labour voter smoking on a bench. “They don’t bother round here,” she says, “it’s a shame. It’s [the political dialogue] all about Boris Johnson, and what he’s doing. It makes you laugh. It’s always about Boris”.

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The prostitution of Cornwall

By Tanya Gold

I don’t find the candidate Natasa Pantelic, a councillor in Slough, but I am sent a statement which includes the words: “This is an opportunity for change — a fresh start — for Chesham and Amersham. They [the Liberal Democrats] don’t care about progressive politics; they just care about power.” There is a Chilterns4ProgressiveAlliance group standing in the centre of Chesham “campaigning for opposition party cooperation in Chesham & Amersham, Batley & Spen and the next general election”. They are genial but they do not have the support of the opposition parties themselves, which is a maddening for them and pleasing to Boris Johnson.

Under these gentle currents is the possibility of future anguish. There is a Cassandra here: Brendan Donnelly, a former Conservative MEP who is standing for Rejoin EU. He sits outside a coffee shop in Chesham and tells me that Brexit will hit us like a thunderstorm soon enough; then the tarmac drives of the mighty Chalfonts will tremble. I watch a pro-Rejoin band perform with a toy cat (a “catidate” and member of Cats Against Brexit Mayhem) that stood in an election “and won more than 200 votes”. The vocalist sings: “Boris Johnson he said he swore he’d never leave me /and Boris Johnson said he swore he’d always love me.” Did he?

Donnelly and the ladies with cocktails aside, I meet few people who are prepared to voice anger about anything other than HS2 or potholes, and I am slightly stunned. So: the worst thing that might happen to Boris Johnson this summer is that he loses a by-election over potholes, and to the Liberal Democrats, with their 11 parliamentary seats and national polling average of 7%. Or that he nearly does. That does not sound like a crumbling blue wall. The political map is not that simple or beautiful.

As I prepare to leave Amersham Old Town, I go into a shop and look at a rack of clothes decorated with embroidered flowers. There is a live bee lurking at the hem of the dresses, disorientated by the flowers that are not real, and, I imagine, increasingly bereft and frightened. I wonder if the voters of Amersham Old Town will ever have a similar awakening.

The Tories think they will take this seat from Labour in the by-election on Thursday called after the Labour MP Mike Hill quit, beset by allegations of sexual misconduct. They may well: another brick from the wall. (Hartlepool has been Labour since the seat was created in 1974.)

The first potential voters I meet wait for theocracy, which is a fair measure of alienation. Still, they are chirpy because they have given up on politics, and the weather is fine.

They are three elderly women, sunning themselves by the war memorial. “We don’t vote for any political party,” says one, “because we are a non-political organisation and the only one is Jehovah God. His kingdom is the kingdom that will rule the earth. We know by the things that are happening now. No government in the world can solve these problems. Only God. We need theocracy.” I try to imagine the logo on a leaflet and fail.

“There was a lot here once upon a time,” says the second, “It’s declining. It’s all Christmas cracker factories. Not real jobs. For men. All the mines have gone, everything substantial has gone.” “I don’t like Hartlepool at all,” says the third. “There is nothing in Hartlepool that interests me”. “Well, you’re here,” says the second. “Just the shopping,” says the third.

“I think the general air is one of despair really,” says the first. “Not despair, despair is a strong word. Helplessness.”

My notebook is full of such quotations; one man of 86 tells me, in all seriousness, that he is too old to vote. Hartlepool once made ships; it had 43 ship-owning companies in 1913. Now it makes ennui. It has some of the highest rates of male unemployment (9.7%) and child poverty (32% of children in workless households) in Britain. The A&E has gone, the police lock-up and magistrates court have gone, and maternity services have gone. No one is born in Hartlepool anymore, except in error.

A vacuum is also an opportunity: the Tories sent Johnson to Hartlepool United, to kick a ball in support of the candidate, “a farmer and businesswoman” from Yorkshire called Jill Mortimer, who is dogged by rumours that, prior to her candidacy, she never visited Hartlepool, or had a proper job. (That, here, is quite relatable.) She says not. She has raised cattle and run a B&B, cites a Hartlepool-born relative, and says she has visited the battery museum, which is apt.

If Hartlepool falls, it will not be a victory for Conservatism, unless you are cynical. “For 47 years, Hartlepool has had Labour MPs,” says Mortimer’s campaign literature, “it is why the town has been taken for granted and struggled. I’ve brought Boris to Hartlepool twice already during this campaign,” she adds, as if presenting a wrapped gift, a piece of human infrastructure. Its fall will, rather, be a fable about political failure: a story of disconnection, hubris and, of course, class.

There are two Hartlepools: the Headland (“The Heugh”), an ancient fishing village, and the newer West Hartlepool (Hartlepool means “stag pool”). I go to the Headland. There is a fabulous Norman church, St Hilda’s, built on the site of a 7^th century abbey, named for the patron saint of poetry. Its bells cannot be rung, due to weakness of the tower. What a metaphor! There are fine Georgian and Victorian houses on the sea, but they are crumbling, and in the gaps when others have fallen, modern housing: a history of English architecture, in mistakes. “It could have been another Whitby,” says a man fixing a burglar alarm. But the Labour council was careless of this treasure, and it wasn’t.

Further reading

The Blue Wall won't save Labour

By Matthew Goodwin

Many things have harmed Labour here: corruption, individualism and the desire to punish the villain they can touch. “Here Labour is the establishment,” says Rachel Featherstone, the Green Party candidate. But the most important is a failure of representation which Brexit exposed so gaudily it could not be ignored. Labour is two parties now, co-existing uneasily, which is why Keir Starmer is pale with fretting: pro-Remain London and the other affluent cities, and places like this. The two despise each other, but only one side will admit to it.

It is pitiful that no native pro-Brexit Labour candidate from a town with 100,000 residents could be found. Perhaps they were not sought. Labour’s man, Paul Williams, was born in Canterbury, educated in Cambridgeshire, worked in Stockton-on-Tees where he was an MP 2017-19, and was a Remainer, while 69.6% of this constituency voted to leave.

A former magistrate describes the main candidates: “One [Mortimer] is north Yorkshire and the other one [Williams] was the MP for Stockton. He didn’t represent the people of Stockton when they wanted to vote for Brexit [by 61.7%] so how can you trust him? He ignored the electorate so I wouldn’t vote for him if he was the only person standing. I’d tear my vote up. I really would”.

A workman on Scarborough Street, formerly Labour, now Tory, says: “A hell of a lot of red wall people voted Brexit and they [Labour] knew that. They went against them all, that’s why they lost the last election by a massive landslide: ‘we’re ignoring what you said, we’re going to stop in Europe no matter what’”. He says he misses Tony Blair, and I don’t blame him. Child poverty fell by 13% in the North East between 1999 and 2013. Between 2013 and 2019 it rose by 9%, three times faster than the national average, and it is still rising. Unfortunately, the most vocal local Socialists — the Northern Independence Party — want a referendum on secession from the United Kingdom, will call their state Northumbria, and are not granting interviews to me.

I eat roast beef in the Cosmopolitan pub — the name is a gag — on the Headland, and I meet the landlord, the independent councillor Tim Fleming. Fleming says: “We’ve had enough of people just getting dumped on us, ‘oh that’s a safe seat, put him there’. It’s the London Labour Party where it [the rot] started.”

For Fleming, some voters have passed beyond despair to cynicism. “If you have a Tory up as mayor in Teesside [Ben Houchen] and a Tory in Hartlepool — all the Tories in all the towns they’ve took over — they might do [something] because they might be looking to build a new power base that’s longer lasting than the one they’ve had. They’ve never had anything in the North so who knows? If he [Houchen] gets re-elected, there’ll be nothing if we have a Labour MP and a Labour council in Hartlepool. No money will come here, never has done”. The Green Party candidate Rachel Featherstone calls this “a protection racket”.

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Labour councillors, Fleming says, have voted against a council tax freeze, but didn’t vote against a 30.8% rise in their allowances. It was another tipping point; Hartlepool has the highest rate of council tax in the country proportionate to the value of property. Fleming, though, has a sense of humour. “If only Richard III had won the Wars of the Roses,” he says, “he was more northern-based”.

In the car park opposite David Bettney, a former Regimental Sergeant Major in the Light Dragoons, and the Social Democrat candidate, is talking to a smudge of supporters, after which he will be driven round the Headland in a tank. Bettney says Labour’s decline mirrored the decline of local industry: “Before you had a captive audience. Trade unions used to get them at election time, [they] were like, ‘here’s your MP’. They don’t have that hold anymore. Everyone is splintered now. They are working out of their white van.  They can come to their own opinions, not a herd opinion. I don’t know a single labourer that votes Labour.”

Bettney thinks an elite stole the Labour Party. “When is the last time you’ve got someone with a regional accent from Labour?” he asks. “They are all replaced by people who’ve gone to university and are from Wiltshire — or whatever. It wouldn’t matter if it was just now and again, but it’s happened everywhere. They are not representative of anybody in these areas.”

To redeem Labour, Bettney says, “All MPs would have to sack themselves.” They preach inclusivity, he says, but they will not allow their own former voters to be themselves; is that really emancipation? Bettney imagines a voter saying, ‘I’m proud to be from Hartlepool’ or ‘I’m proud to be from Yorkshire’. “You can’t say that [in Labour]: ‘it’s bigoted; it’s racist’. You are robbing them of any self-worth.” His conclusion is this: “Labour now is rich people telling poor people that other rich people are their problem.”

When I first meet the Labour candidate Paul Williams, he accuses me of door-stepping him at his campaign office in West Hartlepool. I say I didn’t even recognise him, as he is wearing a (very clean) mask, and he calms down. He is obviously decent, but he can’t be what they need him to be: a man who sounds like them and voted for Brexit. He offers the weary contradiction of a proud apology. He speaks like a heavily edited leaflet. Of Hartlepool’s Labour councillors who damaged the party’s reputation, he says: “there were some people [who] weren’t in it for the right reasons. They are no longer in the Labour Party. People are very disappointed that Labour didn’t deliver. Labour didn’t live up to what people hoped they would do locally in the council.” He is more honest than the Tory Party, whose campaign literature obliquely blames de-industrialisation and austerity on the Labour Party.

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“People are willing to at least listen to us again [since Corbyn],” he says. “There were people who were just angry at Labour. Now people are no longer angry. It’s almost as though they want to be able to vote Labour but they’re just not quite sure”. He says the 2019 voters will stay with Labour, and there are new Labour voters too: “But what we don’t know is if it’s enough.”

He emphasises Tory cuts: tells me that after the A&E closed in 2011 there was for six years no overnight doctor in Hartlepool. He organised a consortium to open an urgent care facility: “I worked the first shifts there myself and I was leader of that organisation.” He sounds stung. “That’s the contrast between somebody who has a positive history of doing great things for people in Hartlepool versus a farmer from Thirsk [Jill Mortimer] who has almost no connection to this town.”

Ralph Ward-Jackson has an obvious connection: his great-great-great-uncle — another Ralph Ward-Jackson — was the founder of West Hartlepool. His statue is by the station, looking lonely and aggrieved. Ward-Jackson meets me in the park named for this ancestor, and we drive to the marina to look for the 30-foot inflatable Boris Johnson raised by The Wombles of Hartlepool, a sort of mood-lifting collective (it has been removed) and eat chips. Most candidates do this for authenticity, though only the Northern Independence Party has a graphic of a whippet: “Taking inspiration from our shared history of communal solidarity we, like the whippet, shall run to freedom”. (They are not yet registered with the Electoral Commission, so their candidate, Thelma Walker, is running as an independent, and she is polling at 6%. Splitters.)

Ward-Jackson wanted to represent Hartlepool at the General Election in 2019 for the Conservatives, and the local party, he says, agreed. They sent him to Conservative Central Office where, “I end up in front of this ice-queen in who clearly didn’t know where Hartlepool was. And then she said in a po-faced way: ‘Why would anyone want to go there?’”

He wasn’t selected and he wouldn’t have stood as an independent, he says, if they had selected a decent candidate. Instead, “they produced this I’m sure very nice lady from north Yorkshire. This is how Central Office think. They’ll think, ‘oh let’s get a map, who have we approved within this area? Oh yes, there’s her, that’s great’”. I think Ward-Jackson is too kind. I think an algorithm chose her; even so, he was enraged at the insult to Hartlepool.

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“It’s 35 miles away,” he says, “Hartlepool and Thirsk. One is a tough industrial slash post-industrial town and the other is a sleepy agricultural town with no real challenges or issues of a different sort anyway. They’ve got nothing in common” — unless you work in Central Office.

Ward-Jackson says it is a “non-doorstep issue” (I’m not sure I agree) but it obsesses him: “I hate the political class and I want to give them a bloody nose if only by frightening them a bit: [for choosing] another slick, packaged professional politician. They want biddable people.” Ward-Jackson, a former Tory, and Bettney, a Social Democrat, are of the same mind on this, and this is comforting: at least the anti-Tory contingent agree on something. Hilton Dawson, formerly a Labour MP, now standing for the pro-devolution North East Party, thinks so too.

“The only way of making progress in the local state and the regional state is to join the party,” he says, “and the party serves itself.” I believe him: he was a Labour member for 35 years and an MP for eight. “And the people within the party serve themselves and without opposition they lose completely all perspective on what they’re supposed to be doing. They don’t respond to criticism and complaint, they don’t respond to good ideas. They simply try to close down any debate”.

In this race to centralisation and control, people take what choice they have left: “I don’t see a vote for Brexit as being some great anti-European thing or something about UK independence particularly. I see it much more as people just saying, ‘We want to change, we want something different, we want to be in control of this agenda’”. That is an argument for devolution; he says it is the only route to accountability.

I sense in Hartlepool, under the ennui and the exhaustion, a dynamism trying to break free: 16 candidates, many of whom are competent, and have good ideas, is proof enough. Labour has, like Citizen Kane, talked about the people as if it owned them for too long.

Some voters look to the Conservatives as “fresh eyes” with “fresh air” and praise the vaccine roll-out. (Here, as ever, women take pleasure in Boris Johnson’s idiocies. Men do not.) They may be poor, but their lives were saved; and perhaps their cynicism is so acute Hartlepool will turn blue; perhaps the Tories will meet it with tribute. But they should not cackle too recklessly if Labour stumbles here: their own reckoning with the North will surely come.

Hartlepool, Labour since 1964, is one of the most significant by-elections for years. If Labour loses, the pressure on an already wobbly Sir Keir Starmer will be immense. It will give his Left-wing critics ammunition and his Right-wing critics yet more evidence that the broader realignment of British politics is only just getting started.

So, it’s no wonder that a new idea about Labour’s future has been embraced so keenly. Labour, it is argued, should turn to the ‘Blue Wall’; it is not a wall per se, more a sprinkling of liberalising, suburban hotspots across the country which the Conservatives have held for a while, and which are trending towards Labour.

In his insightful blog, political analyst Steve Akehurst identifies 41 seats which have been held by the Conservatives since at least 2010, where Labour or the Liberal Democrats have overperformed their national swing in 2017 and 2019 and where the Conservative majority is below 10,000. Seats causing particular excitement include those of big-name Tories like Steve Baker in Wycombe, Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford and Wood Green, and Graham Brady in Altrincham – and even Uxbridge, Boris Johnson’s seat.

“They largely lean Remain”, writes Akehurst, “and so have larger numbers of the demographics that have turned against the Tories since 2016: under 40s, university educated, more socially liberal. More likely to prioritise issues like climate or housing.”

On a good day, assuming a swing of between 3.75 and 5.75 points, and with Labour over-performing in these “Blue Wall” areas, Akehurst estimates that Labour could win anywhere between 15 and 26 of these seats. Assuming the Conservatives lost some other marginal seats, the collapse of the Blue Wall could demolish Boris Johnson’s majority, put Labour back in power and give journalists one hell of a revenge story.

It is an appealing thesis, not least for political analysts who desperately want it to happen. It is no secret that many of the people who write about politics also tend to be graduates who lean to the Left and want the pendulum to swing back in their direction. Many spent 2019 urging Labour to swing behind a second referendum, while downplaying the disastrous impact this would have in its heartlands and ignoring the fact that Johnson could easily offset losses to liberals by invading the Red Wall, where workers had been drifting away from Labour for 20 years.

Which is exactly what happened. Of the 57 seats the Conservatives gained in 2019, all but three came directly from Labour — and of those 54 seats, 50 voted Leave. While the Conservative vote increased by 1.2 points nationally, it surged by 10.2 points in the Red Wall. The Tories not only massively overperformed in these seats, they reshaped their party around a Leave vote that is more geographically efficient than the liberal vote: spread out enough to have more electoral impact.

And this is why I do not find the Blue Wall thesis convincing. The numbers. It is simply not big enough to bring down Boris Johnson’s majority. Even if Labour were to overperform here, it still needs to find significant gains elsewhere. This is what happens when you double down on liberals in a first-past-the-post system. While your analysts might tell you that you are putting a bet on the future, liberals are often too strongly concentrated in the big cities and university towns to deliver the broad support that you need for a stomping majority in an electoral system like Britain’s. Liberals are increasingly flocking to the big cities and university towns, where Labour is already dominant. This is why Sadiq Khan does not need to worry about his re-election next month.

The Blue Wall strategy also relies on Labour doing a far better job of unifying the liberal factions, which it failed to do in 2019, when only half of Remainers voted Labour and one in eight voted Green or Liberal Democrat. Even today, the latter still hold 12% of the vote while disillusionment with Keir Starmer’s leadership appears to be strengthening rather than weakening, especially among the young graduates who loved Jeremy Corbyn and whose strong turnout is a prerequisite to making any Blue Wall strategy effective. With the Brexit Party resting in peace, the risk of internecine rivalry is greater on the Left than the Right.

More fundamentally, the Blue Wall thesis ignores the fact that the Red Wall has only been partially dismantled. There are still many, many more seats that could easily fall to the Conservatives, so long as Boris Johnson stays committed to the deeper transformation of British politics that is underway — a transformation that is seeing his party rally a cross-class coalition of blue-collar and affluent cultural conservatives.

Here is just one statistic to keep in mind. Of the 44 most marginal Labour seats today, 39 are outside of London and the South. I call this the “Red Wall 2.0”. These are seats that have small majorities of 4,000 votes or less, are filled with pro-Brexit, cultural conservative workers who lean Left on the economy and Right on culture, and which have been trending Conservative.

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More than a dozen are scattered across the North West and North East while another 13 are in the once reliable People’s Republic of South Yorkshire. These are places that are filled with hard-working, patriotic Brits who want the Government to reform an economy rigged against them while preserving a culture they see as being under threat from increasingly illiberal “woke” activists.

One of those seats, Wentworth and Dearne, is currently represented by Labour MP John Healey, who grasps the fact that across a large swathe of the Midlands, Yorkshire and North the collapse of Labour’s Red Wall was only just starting in 2019. As recently as 2017, Healey’s majority was 15,000 votes. Today, it is 2,165.

It is just a small swing from joining neighbouring Don Valley, which was held by Labour from 1922 until 2019, in the Conservative camp. This is perhaps why Healey has just released a collection of essays by Labour MPs who, like him, have seen their once solid majorities crumble from over 10,000 votes to less than 4,000.

They represent the “new Labour marginals” — the seats that New Labour types once said had nowhere else to go but which ever since then have been trending Conservative. Healey points to people “who feel Labour left them before they left Labour”.

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“Those who feel let down by Labour describe at best an unwillingness to listen, with no respect for their experience, and at worst a rejection of their views as ignorant or backward”, he goes on.

These areas exhibit all of the features that now define the new Conservative Party electorate; blue-collar, pro-Brexit, culturally conservative and hacked off. They are the people who Toby Perkins, Labour MP for Chesterfield, describes as being denied thousands of new factory jobs by Sports Direct which instead gave them to migrants from Eastern Europe, “while voters felt progressive opinion refused even to consider the problem, much less propose solutions”.

Labour MPs who represent newly marginal seats include Yvette Cooper, whose majority crashed from over 15,000 votes in 2015 to just 1,276 today, Dan Jarvis, whose majority has fallen from over 15,000 votes to just 3,571 and Jonathan Reynolds whose majority has been cut in half, falling to just 2,946 votes. Labour strongholds have become redoubts.

At the core of this is who Healey calls the “real middle”, which is “not the middle-class that became New Labour’s fixation”. The real middle, he argues, are the “ten million aspirational workers who live on ordinary incomes around the average of £24,908. They often live in one of the 14 English towns that cover 16 constituencies like Stevenage, Crawley and Harlow. In 1997, New Labour won all but one of them. By 2015, they represented none of them.”

If we take an even looser definition of “marginal” and look, like Akehurst, at seats with (Labour) majorities of less than 10,000 votes then there are 105 seats where the Brexit Party or Conservative Party are second, 82 of which lie outside of London and southeastern England. They include Doncaster Central, Doncaster North, Halifax, Kingston-upon Hull West and Hessle, Rotherham, Barnsley East, Batley and Spen and Barnsley Central. And they include Hartlepool, which is why the forthcoming by-election on May 6 is so important.

If the Conservatives take Hartlepool or come close to doing so, then the implication is not just that Johnson will defend his existing Red Wall at the next election but could easily add another 40 or so seats to it. That would tilt British politics into a much deeper realignment that sees the Tories sink even longer roots into northern, working-class heartlands and Labour increasingly retreat to liberal enclaves.

This is ultimately why the reshaping of British politics is so traumatic for Labour, especially in England. In Healey’s essays you can detect a real fear among some in Labour that the party could soon be breathing its last breath across a large swathe of its oldest and most cherished territory. We could well be on the cusp of an even greater shock. And this is why I for one shall not be holding my breath when it comes to tales about the imminent revenge of the Blue Wall.