These days, the bloody-mindedness remains but has long since given up on the rebellious politics of 2016. Little has changed after Brexit. Westminster and anything associated with it — London, politicians, tourists, journalists — are despised. Alternatives such as Mebyon Kernow, the Cornish independence party, are seen as a joke. In fact, everything is a joke: spurning my predictable questions about life in the area, one gentleman does a 10-minute skit about how he’s been smuggling migrants from Calais on an old fishing boat and leaving them on the telegenic beaches for second-home owners to deal with.

Tourism has helped to create a sort of neo-feudalism in this era, warping the rental market for existing residents, and trapping locals in a seasonal economy of unreliable incomes and unresolved resentment. The prosperous parts of Cornwall have become “a giant theme park”, as one punter describes it, leaving Redruth as one of its many servile outhouses, lying beyond the gates of Poldark-cum-Surfing Land.

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Will Britain ever build beautiful?

By Fred Skulthorp

In another age, Redruth was one of the wealthiest towns in the world, its copper playing a part in everything from the Industrial Revolution to Britain’s naval hegemony. That economy fell into decline in the late-19th century, long before the rest of Britain’s manufacturing base. The result is an eerie hodge-podge of industrial marvels, social deprivation and abandoned mining infrastructure. On the high street, next to some of the finest 18th-century architecture in the country, stands an abandoned Wilko.

But, in the last few years, an opportunity for recovery has presented itself. Now, it’s the area’s lithium, discovered in “globally significant” quantities in 2020, that could yet realise some of those visions of abundance and revival: the rare-earth element is essential to the production of batteries for electric vehicles and renewable energy storage. Come 2026, Cornish Lithium will soon start extracting the gold of the green industrial revolution. The company estimates that 7,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) can be produced a year, alongside the 20,000 from 2028 provided by rival companies Imerys and British Lithium operating down the road in St Austell. This would, however, still leave Britain dependent on some of the world’s biggest producers in Australia, China and Chile, with such schemes only partially covering the 80,000 tonnes a year the UK is predicted to require by 2030.

Despite these deposits, both companies have had to jump through hoops merely to survive. But having previously relied on angel investors and crowdfunds, a package of £67 million announced in August from the UK’s Infrastructure Bank placed the project in the national interest. When Emmanuel Macron declared that “made in Europe” should be our continental motto, lamenting that a Europe without a serious industrial policy risked being left behind by the changing tides of globalisation, he was talking about the viability of quixotic projects such as lithium mining in Cornwall.

“I’m acutely aware of the sad state of the economy in the area and the potential to make a difference,” says Jeremy Wrathall, the founder of Cornish Lithium, when I speak to him the next day. Wrathall trained at Camborne School of Mining, now underwhelmingly known to the area as the “Pool Innovation Centre”. The name change is symbolic of some of the local cynicism about the project, a relic of the area’s previous attempted makeover from industry and mining to services and tourism.

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But Wrathall is well-rehearsed to shrug off such doubts about the return of mining to Cornwall. He laments the “inbuilt scepticism” towards the rejuvenation of the UK’s mining industries. Cornwall, unlike other sites in Europe being touted as potential sources of lithium, has a history of mining. One comparable site in Portugal is currently battling locals who fear the opencast mine will destroy the village. Wrathall’s method is slightly more benign. This is less mining, more extraction, pulling lithium-rich brine from the springs beneath the 280-million-year-old granite sheet Cornwall sits on. Beyond the usual suspects of rent-a-gob environmentalists and ardent Nimbies, it’s difficult to find anyone overtly opposed to the project.

But there are also factors beyond his control. For all the rhetoric about deglobalisation, the allure of cheaper lithium abroad will endure, particularly without a proper homegrown industry to sell to. While rhetoric about restoring Britain’s industrial capacity is in vogue politically, it is estimated that £100 billion would be needed to set up a sustainable electric-vehicle industry. BritishVolt, the most recent attempt to construct a domestic lithium battery factory went into administration in January. When I raise this with Wrathall, he falls back on the sort of quiet idealism that remains in pockets of the old mining country. “Our project transcends politics,” he confesses. “We don’t want to let people down.”

Here lies an almost mystical appeal to the project. Britain has a strange relationship with its mines. Dirty, exploitative, abundant — the petri dish for both our industrialisation and our first revolts against capitalist excess. From Conrad’s Nostromo to the post-Thatcher nostalgia for the demise of the coal industry, mines are a catalyst for the history-making seams that run through the nation: pride, self-sufficiency, rebellion. Romantic tosh, perhaps, but it’s a mood you can unearth quite easily when visiting an area where tourism, welfare and the faint promises of 2016 have been left to fester.

Nowhere can the faint glaze of revival be better felt than “Heartlands”, built on an old centre of Cornish mining at Robinsons Shaft. It’s a surreal non-place of conference meeting rooms, environmental hubs educating visitors on the woes of climate change, tourist tit-tat shops flogging Cornish language books, and a mining-themed tearoom. Were lithium extraction to start up just a stone’s throw away from the site, it could cast a welcome shadow over this failed offering for Cornwall’s future.

It’s a feeling suggested by many of the locals: “We’ve become a nation of numpties unable to make anything ourselves,” says a local businessman preparing for a drinks reception in one of Redruth’s reconverted buildings (ahead of a local arts festival which he describes as a “load of wank”). For all the regeneration that has taken place here, there are some wounds that Britain’s “creative” and “services” industries cannot heal.

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Levelling up died in Teesside

By Fred Skulthorp

The return of mining, however, must rest on more than just symbolism. On the outskirts of Redruth, Stephen Barnes, the town’s mayor, reveals the stifling hold these old mining shafts still have, not just on the town, but on its visitors too. In the summer months, they lure in the tourists with plumes of dark smoke blown through the old chimneys. For a brief afternoon, the landscape is once again dotted by working satanic mills. Yet the new lithium mines offer not just an escape from England’s nostalgic doom loop, but a different socio-economic settlement. The jobs initially created would number only in their hundreds, but Barnes believes it would be a way of “restoring pride”, and make a start in lifting stagnating wages away from the exploitative grips of the tourism industry.

Back in Redruth high street, the potential tragedy of all this expectation materialises. At present, the hope of the UK setting up an electric-car industry to compete with the subsidised might of China and the US is a struggle, if not a fantasy. And so too is the idea that lithium mining alone might set the area on a path to abundance and innovation. That’s not to say the quiet longing is not there.

Next to the town’s landmark statue of a miner, a Metro station has appeared, like one of those AI-generated engineering marvels shared by dejected Anglo-futurists on the social-media doomscroll. A map shows a high-speed underground train traversing the old network of mining tunnels underneath us. It’s an art installation, erected for the festival that starts tomorrow. But for a moment, it’s also a flicker of belief under grey skies on a late Friday afternoon, as the pubs open their doors and the high street once again starts to empty.

The Tories were here, last week, for Conference, at the height of their uncannily revived powers.

Priti and Michael, Rishi and Nadine, were spreading their wide wings in Manchester Central, the singed remnant of some 19th century NASDAQ, now a corporate events space. The place was choking with Conservative slogans and branding, and boosterisms; but were they anything more than fresh enamel licked on the same old Westminster banger?

I was here because I wanted to watch the political body get pressed by conspiring lobbyists and cringing public affairs officers. I wanted to understand the people who will rule over us for the next decade. Had they really become the “people’s party”? Were they really more Northern, more working class, more in touch with basic realities? Did “levelling up” Britain mean anything at all? And did they really know what to do with that sweet majority, with all that delicious power?

If they were the people’s party, then it was ostensibly for people like Greg. I found him palely loitering around the exhibits one morning in a three-piece tweed suit. Both he and the suit appeared new. “Personally,” Greg said, “I’m nineteen.” He was from Harlow, Essex. (The 20th most deprived area in England.) His mother was a teaching assistant. His father was a drug dealer. He had never been to one of these before.

Conservatism gave him an identity. A way of defining himself contrarily. He said he’d hated school. Hated his Left-wing teachers. Hated, he admitted, his Left-wing home. He was utterly sincere. The new Conservatism had offered him enough to make the journey to Manchester. There were probably more Gregs in the party than there had been for a generation.

Did the Gregs have a champion? It was supposed to be Michael Gove. But the Minister for Levelling Up had pitched his tent so large that he was lost in it. Gove’s levelling up agenda was too wide, too vague. What did it mean to say that he wanted to “ensure people live their best life”? Promising everything would be another way of doing nothing.

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But at least Gove sounded cheerful. All of them did. “Now”, Rishi Sunak posted on Instagram, “is the time to show them that our plan will deliver.” In their speeches and their digital branding the ministers rolled together many different optimisms. To be a ranking member of this government was to be present with vigour and joyfulness.

Let the other side talk about fuel shortages. Let Dom talk about trolleys. Let the Telegraph spit about taxes. After Covid, after Brexit, it was time for peace. It was the moment to say, as Nadine Dorries did — against all sense, all reason, and all justice — that No Time to Die was the “best Bond ever”. None of it needed to be true.

The only statesman-in-embryo for miles around Manchester was the Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen. A plausibly blue-collar, municipal Tory, reminiscent of Joe Chamberlain in the specificity of his vision, and in the way he embodied a sense of place.

He talked poetically and pointedly in a flat, steady Geordie voice at a fringe event one evening. Now was the time, he said; the Conservatives could rebuild and restore the North. He described a radiant future, where green tech brought the industrial revolution full circle, back to Teesside, back to Newcastle, Darlington, Stockton. Houchen’s revolution went backwards to reclaim the future. The superabundance, the rewarded greed, the hard materialism, and the worldly ambition of mid-19th century England would be born again. History could be forced. You had to push against it. Ben Houchen was doing this in Tees Valley. He had cajoled and eked away until industrial jobs were returned to Hartlepool and Redcar. But this time the revolution would not be iron squealing on iron, it would not turn country boys into broken factory hands, or pollute the rivers, or poison the sky black. These industries would be green, pure.

I was taken along by him, briefly. But he was only a mayor.

I met other Gregs. Four late teenage, working-class Tories from — rub your eyes — Liverpool. Owen Jones buzzed around them with a microphone, his mouth slack, bewildered, bitter. (The four did not make it into Jones’ “behind the scenes” conference video report.) Oh we hate him, we hate him, we hate him, the four boys said as they approached Jones. “But still,” one whispered, “we must get a selfie with him.” I asked them who their favourite Prime Minister was.

“Thatcher,” one said, “Thatcher forever.”

It stunned: Thatcher still burned above Conservative politics, charging her imitators with warmth and light. What else could explain Liz Truss? The new Foreign Secretary dressed like Thatcher, snubbed and blunted enemies like Thatcher, and started, whenever I watched her speak, to look like Thatcher too. Truss’s events were the most queued for. The members were pilgrims shuffling towards a splinter of the true Eighties cross. Truss offered them sacraments of fiscal rigour, delivered with leathery personal firmness. For in the pits of their hearts, the members didn’t want a big, caring, doing state — where levelling up was purportedly taking them. They didn’t want to go there. They certainly didn’t want to pay for it either. What they wanted was a dominatrix to lovingly roast the Government’s flab off with a blowtorch.

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These were the Tories who went, like Truss, longest into the night, after the daytime, orderly, brisk conference had been washed aside by the 6pm tide of expensed alcohol and gossip.

This conference happened in padded back rooms, invite-only suite parties, and long carpeted ballrooms in the bowels of the hotel. It was stranger, and darker, than the day was. Every night there was a sense of homecoming: after the election, which was never properly celebrated by the party; after the lockdowns, which made so many of them unhappy and uneasy.

The bar fizzed. Boys younger than tadpoles dragged their seats near to enthroned junior ministers; howlingly drunk princes screamed for the right kind of bread; dazed spads slid off chairs; rumours were exchanged: sexual escapades, job promotions, if Carrie was even allowed in her husband’s suite, more sexual escapades, and whether the Prime Minister will use his big speech to raise the minimum wage. (He will not.) And at every table, a suit lapel stuck with ironic lake blue badges that said “Tory Scum”.

A few knew how weird it was to be the “people’s party.” “I’d rather be the party of the working man than the party of the rich,” one of the princes had roared. “But I still want to be very well off.”

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Would all those pristine first-time Conservative voters like what they saw at this conference, if they’d been here? They would have liked Houchen, maybe even voted for him. They would have put some chicken nuggets in the oven for Greg. Perhaps they would have spotted Liz Truss’s talons. Would they have noticed where real power in the party lay? Trollope writes somewhere that people who take an interest in politics should “not be desirous of peeping behind the scenes”. They wouldn’t like what they discovered.

At the top of the party was what a bad columnist would call the liberal metropolitan elite. The enduring sentimental stereotype of Toryism in England is utterly misleading. It’s still the rah-rah, port-sinking, organ music playing, red melton fabric, Oxbridge, Brideshead, “young fogey”. They are extinct. Kaputt. That Boris plays this character sometimes leads to confusion. The Left think they are fighting Simon Heffer, when they’re actually fighting Henry Newman.

The leading factions in the party are as distant from people in Redcar as the Blairites became. For now they are simply better at patting voters on the head than the Left is. Conservative power is wielded by spads who look like they were laying over in Manchester before a flight to LAX. An explosion in a Hugo Boss factory clothed them all in the same tieless blue suit. And the women strode by in dresses high in the neck and long to the floor. Headbands were mandatory. They are photocopies of Carrie.

Together the blue suits and the headbands formed a court, which squatted in government. They were the fluffers and pot-holders, the heralds and jugglers, the princes and flunkeys. Observing them did not make me feel confident about the power they had bedded so luxuriantly down in. The court only knew messaging and campaigning. Nobody knew how to govern. Not in the Labour Party either. “We’re not run by anybody,” Rory Stewart said in 2014. “The secret of modern Britain is there is no power anywhere.”

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Boris Johnson's speech was a joke

By Will Lloyd

But the Prime Minister still had power, of a sort. The other ministers gave their speeches in a squashed auditorium. He had a pharaonic hall to give the culminating barnstormer in. A big venue for the big boy.

It didn’t matter what he said. Nothing could move this government until the Labour Party woke up. Their power was a given. He could stand there and announce bread rationing next week and go up in the polls. They’d build a statue of him in Parliament Square. Everyone knew he had ten years by default. All that was required of him was a presence, to keep plates spinning in the air, to offer up punchlines.

Maybe though, after effete Boris, after this era of frothy giggling and wily manoeuvring, the party and the country would grow weary of clowns and sharpers. However ingenious they were at game-playing. Then Houchen — or a figure like him — might have a chance.

This is what the country needed. It is not what the party craves.

Ultimately the theme of conference was not whether the the Tories were changing. It was the glitter of this easy, empty power. The good ideas the Conservatives had, and all the good they could do, were at risk of being washed away by it.