Shotton is barely half an hour from where I grew up, but it is a world apart. Today it is not just a place of literary interest, but real political significance. In 2019, it was one of the last solid bricks in Labour’s Red Wall. Under Boris Johnson, the Tories managed to win over other mining towns in the area, but failed in Easington — home to Shotton. Many psephologists believed that the demographic trends which had swept the Tories into the area had not yet run their course and more parts of the Red Wall could still fall, including places such as Easington. Now though, according to the polls, Labour is on the brink of rebuilding the Red Wall all over again, throwing the Tories back not only in Easington but across the north east. I returned to Shotton to find The Most Important Man In Britain. Apparently he holds the key to the next election. His name is Deano.

Deano, I should stress, is not a real person. He is an avatar, an internet meme, a representation — the personification of a certain type who can be found almost anywhere in the country. He is an everyday man; a middle manager with a new-build home and a car on finance, a large TV and a PS4. According to one of the more popular memes online he is, more specifically, “deputy assistant head of sales targeting” who arrives home every day to a wife “already home from her work as a Team Leader in a call centre”. You can almost see the disdain dripping from the page.

To many, Deano is a figure of fun: a low-brow, low-status provincial man with bad taste and too much sway over the nation’s cultural life. But the more I read about him online, whether on Reddit, Urban Dictionary, Twitter or YouTube, the more I realise his was not a life to be mocked but cheered — and even envied. Deano owns his home, gets back from work early, and has enough disposable income for new furniture and nice food. He is doing well and is a responsible, decent citizen. He isn’t rich enough to dodge his taxes and is more likely to be found in the gym than in the pub or the bookies.

In some senses, Deano is a lifestyle choice as much as an identity, which might even be boiled down to not moving to London. For many London graduates, earning £40,000 but spending all their money on a shared rented flat, Deano is the road less travelled. Deano decided not to move somewhere else; he is happy to earn slightly less while enjoying more disposable income and more space. Ninety years after Priestley’s famous journey, I thought I would find this lifestyle in Shotton. Where there were once miners and children tobogganing down slag heaps, there would now be Deanos; not folk to feel sorry for or to romanticise — just ordinary people living ordinary lives. The problem was, after a few hours in Shotton, it was quickly evident that I was only half right.

Today, the colliery has disappeared and so too has the tip. Where Priestley’s volcano stood, there is now a monument to all the miners killed. A small industrial estate has been built next-door as well as a sky-diving centre. Call centres are now one of the main sources of employment in the area. At first glance, then, it should be a perfect home for Deano. And yet, if the old Shotton tip was a symbol of economic iniquity, a real-life metaphor used by Priestley to highlight the exploitation of ordinary workers, its disappearance seems to signify something just as bad: a loss of economic purpose which seems necessary for any community to thrive. The unfortunate truth is that Shotton is now a soul-sapping place. Pubs are boarded up, hotels turned into halfway houses, poverty high and drugs rife. Kids no longer toboggan down slag heaps but compete to torch cars. With no real industry in the area, or even an economy to speak of, old miners watch helplessly as their community withers. 

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This was not the story I’d come looking for. In fact, if you were seeking the kind of lasting Northern stereotype that Priestley helped create, then Shotton was it. Judi, who I met in the community centre, had actually met Priestley when he visited in the Seventies. “He was a strange character,” she told me. “Very dry, very droll…” But while she didn’t like what he’d said about the village — “something about urchins wasn’t it?” — she liked him. “He was very English, you know. Very English. You don’t see much of that anymore. You have to hide it under a rock.”

This is exactly the kind of place that tickles Westminster’s imagination, a place about which well-meaning seminars might be held to discuss why it no longer feels represented by Labour and its liberal, metropolitan leaders, much to the frustration of those who live there. And yet, unlike other parts of the Red Wall, the surrounding constituency of Easington stuck with Labour in 2019 and will almost certainly do so again next year. In many ways, it is simply too poor for the Tories to touch. There simply aren’t enough Deanos. For the residents of Shotton, their primary need is plain and obvious: a big and redistributive state willing to spend more money on the area. And you don’t get this from the Tories.

Continuing my searching for Deano, I headed south to Stockton-on-Tees, another town Priestley had visited and disliked. “The real town is finished,” he wrote. “It is like a theatre that is kept open merely for the sale of drinks in the bars and chocolates in the corridors.” The problem was that even by 1933, the industry had gone and wasn’t coming back. Stockton just did not have the geography to sustain its industrial base. And so it declined. Today, the town feels as old and tired as it did then. Deano was nowhere. Cross the River Tees, though, and a different picture emerges. Stockton South went Tory at the last election, part of an unbroken Tory band of blue that runs from Redcar on the east coast to Copeland on the west. If Sunak is to have any chance of remaining Prime Minister, he’ll need to retain some of these seats. 

Stockton South might be one of his best shots. On this side of the river, traditionally speaking, you are in North Yorkshire, just a few miles from Sunak’s own constituency of Richmond. On this side of the river lie the prosperous suburbs of Middlesbrough and Stockton, as well as pretty little market towns such as Yarm, Eaglescliffe and Guisborough. But what really makes Stockton South interesting is an odd little place that didn’t exist when Priestley came touring, Ingleby Barwick. It is not a pretty market town or poor pit village. It does not fit the usual Red Wall iconography of terraced houses and working mens’ clubs. It is the biggest private housing estate in Europe, a sprawling suburb on the southern bank of the Tees, sandwiched between Middlesbrough and the north Yorkshire countryside. It is a place of red-brick homes and Audis in the drive. It is the land of Deano. 

“Probably not the main point, but why on earth do they live in a shit Deano Barratt estate newbuild?” wrote one journalist after photos emerged of Nicola Sturgeon’s Glasgow home being raided by police last week. Let’s just stop for a second to put this in context. Her home is worth around £400,000, has four bedrooms, a garage, garden, drive and conservatory. This is not a modest home, but a big one. Similar homes spread out, street after street, in Ingleby Barwick: big and detached with drives and garages. Ingleby Barwick is far from grim. It is home to thousands of people living good lives: teachers and doctors, small businessmen and middle managers. New schools have been built along with a swanky leisure centre at its heart. The latter costs £275 for the year, all-inclusive; a David Lloyd family membership in London is £300 a month.

The blog In The Sight Of The Unwise was one of the first to explain the political power of Deano to Westminster. Its anonymous author told me that Deano had been misunderstood. He is an aspirational figure, living the life most people aspired to — and governments of all stripes have long encouraged. Deano, he told me, enjoys a day at the races and weekend trips to Europe, spends money and owns his own home. There are black Deanos and Asian Deanos. There are also plenty of female Deanos. And while they might not read the Guardian, that doesn’t make them some kind of Jim Davidson parody. Their views are likely to be run of the mill, in line with the majority opinion of the country.

If Deano is in any sense working-class, it is upper working-class. But what he really is is nouveau riche — petty bourgeois. These people have always come in for more abuse than the romanticised northern worker. As Dr Dan Evans — author of A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petite Bourgeoisie — has pointed out, they are Harry Enfield’s “Loads a’money” character, Hyacinth Bucket, Boycie from Only Fools and Horses. Today, the author of the In The Sight Of The Unwise blog told me, they are Molly Mae from Love Island or the influencer Mrs Hinch.

“Look at Thatcher and Tebbit and how they almost take pride in the rigid populism of their political thought,” wrote Tony Blair in an admiring letter to the then Labour leader Michael Foot back in 1982. “The Tory party is now increasingly given over to the worst of petty bourgeois sentiments,” he concluded. Those petty bourgeois sentiments, of course, would win the Tories landslides in 1983 and 1987 and keep them in power until 1997, when Blair would take over, accused by his own party of pandering to the same apparently “petty” sentiments. Then and now, this same group is the key to winning elections. For what is Deano if not the “Essex Man” of today, or “Mondeo Man”, or perhaps even the “Worcester woman”? They are all ciphers, characters who most closely resemble the everyday man or woman of England who decides elections, not because they are concentrated in one swing town, but all the swing towns of the country: in Middlesbrough and Swindon and Batley and Droitwich Spa.

Deano is everywhere. And for the past year he has been screwed. 

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Deano is not rich and he is not poor. He relies on cheap credit, low taxes, good public services and stable prices. All of this has disappeared. In the wake of the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, both public borrowing and inflation rocketed and so, in time, did interest rates. Then came the madness of Liz Truss who sought to light a fire under the British economy in order to burn away its problems, only instead to burn it all down — hitting Deano in the pocket all over again. 

In the chaos that followed the Truss budget of September 2022, as many as 1,700 mortgage products were removed in the space of a week. When they came back on the market, they were at rates 1-2 percentage points higher. For Deano in Ingleby Barwick, who might have a £200,000 mortgage left to repay, the monthly repayment costs would have risen over £500 a month — or around £6,000 a year. The interest rate rises have also increased the cost of leasing a car and anything else bought on credit. And this is before the food and energy price rises are taken into account. For the first time in Deano’s life, his standard of living has dropped. He was born into a world of low interest rates — and that has suddenly disappeared.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan asked voters whether they felt better off than four years earlier. The problem for the Tories is that their core constituency of voters clearly does not and are almost certainly not going to by next year. Perhaps that’s why those now advising the Conservative leadership on its election strategy are urging a greater focus on the Deano class that handed the party its victory in 2019: stop focusing on the poor in places like Shotton who do not vote Conservative, and start focusing on the petty bourgeois in Ingleby Barwick who do. These are the voters the Tories need in 2024: Deano and Deano’s parents. They are also the “hero voters” Labour is targeting as well. What that means for Shotton and places like it is a depressing thought, for they remain nobody’s priority.

It is fashionable to think of today’s post-Brexit Conservative Party as being some kind of seismic shift away from its traditions, not only from the moderate One Nation Tory leaders such as Macmillan and David Cameron, but also from Thatcher. The truth, though, is that the Tory coalition of 2019 marked something of a return to the traditional Disraelian coalition of the wealthy elite and the provincial petty bourgeoisie. This is the coalition the Tories have always needed to win. David Cameron never quite managed to assemble it in the way that Macmillan, Thatcher and Johnson did. When Margaret Thatcher stood against Ted Heath for the Conservative leadership in 1974, she gave an interview to the Daily Telegraph setting out her vision of conservatism. Headlined “My Kind Of Tory Party”, she argued that the party had failed the people by failing to control inflation and losing focus on the day-to-day reality for ordinary people. There was nothing wrong with defending “middle-class values”, Thatcher argued. “International interest rates must be thought of in terms of the young couple’s mortgage as well as of the balance of payments.” The same is true today.

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One southern Tory MP told me their 2019 coalition was the closest the party had got to Macmillan’s landslide-winning bloc of 1959. And Macmillan, of course, rose to prominence as the MP for Stockton. For the Tories, Deano has always mattered. Today, Deano’s mortgage is rising and so are his taxes. Meanwhile, the few state benefits he does have access to are means-tested and the public services he uses are deteriorating. In short, he is not on the breadline, struggling to put food on the table, but he is paying more for less and can feel it. Another Tory MP, this one from a Red Wall seat, told me he worried Sunak’s vision of the North was as a great extension of Richmond: all dry-stone walls and market towns basking in gentle, rural prosperity. It’s a vision as out of touch as that which sees the North as one giant Shotton. In fact, the bits of the Red Wall that the Tories won in 2019 are not so very different from anywhere else in the country. 

Priestley came away from the North East exasperated by the failures of economic governance that had left people and places to rot. “The planning did not take into account the only item that really matters — the people,” he wrote. “The final question must always be, not how are England’s imports and exports, not how many ships we are building, how many tons of coal we are getting out of the ground, but how are the English People.” He is still right. But the English people do not fare well if nothing is being imported and exported, built and sold, for without it an area is robbed of its purpose. Where there is economic life, there are Deanos. And for the Tories, where there are Deanos there is life.

Gateshead may still be overshadowed, but its greatest monument has become legendary. Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North celebrates its 25th birthday this month: a worthy occasion to remind ourselves that the town in which it stands is a microcosm of North East England, and its guardian angel represents both the past and the future of a region that continues to evolve.

If industrial Gateshead appeared to visitors like Priestley as a squalid anthill, then this was the consequence of the modernity that that had come to Tyneside as early as the seventeenth century. Nearby Whickham has a good claim to be Britain’s first truly industrial society; by 1700, over 75% of the residents worked in mines and factories. The pride of neighbouring Winlaton was Sir Ambrose Crowley’s ironworks, reputedly the greatest manufactory of ironware anywhere in Europe, which churned out pots and pans, shackles for the slave trade, and the nails that held together the wooden walls of the Royal Navy. To house the expanding workforce, a sort of model village sprang up, which prefigured the terraced streets that went on to so characterise the North of England.

Places like Whickham were built on the mountain of coal that lay beneath the rolling landscape of northern County Durham. By 1911, fully one third of the county’s working age population were mining it, sending their output up to the Tyne for export, via the mighty Dunston Staiths in Gateshead. The ACDC frontman Brian Johnson grew up in Dunston and recalls that the pits and steelworks would “declare a truce on Mondays” so washing could be hung out without getting filthy. The quote from Virgil’s Aeneid that appeared on Gateshead’s civic arms — Caput Inter Nubila Condit (“Its head is in the clouds”) — was a nod to the smoke that usually wreathed the town.

Gateshead, then, was a firmly working-class place, a sort of proletarian backstage to the grandeur of Georgian Newcastle, and a place where some of the richest, most mellifluous Geordie is spoken by the natives. Brian Johnson himself has an accent as thick as a submarine window, and the folk culture of Northumbria is replete with references to the children of Gateshead. It is the home of the fictional Cushie Butterfield, the star of a well-known Geordie drinking song. (“She’s a big lass, and a bonnie lass, and she likes her beor.”) It is also the site of that riotous bacchanal of 1862, the famous Blaydon Races — which is the subject of Tyneside’s national anthem — as well as the once-mighty Federation Brewery, a huge structure by the Tyne that looked like a Soviet power plant, and whose output was served in the Palace of Westminster. The town’s traditions run as deep as the coal seams under County Durham.

But Gateshead was also a site of modernism. Thomas Wright, the first astronomer to speculate that faint nebulae were distant galaxies, was educated there. In the nineteenth century, the lightbulb inventor Sir Joseph Swan lived in Low Fell, the town’s grandest suburb, where his house, Underhill, was the first in the world to be illuminated by electricity. And in 1984, a housebound Gateshead pensioner called Jane Snowball became the world’s first online shopper when she took part in an innovative council scheme to place an order from her local Tesco using her TV’s remote control. She bought cornflakes, eggs, and margarine.

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And beneath where the Angel of the North now spreads its wings lies a site of huge significance for Britain’s modern industrial history. It was in the Team Valley in 1934 — amid a depression that had cratered demand for coal and ships, and therefore crippled the North East’s economy — that the national government decided to build Europe’s first ever industrial estate. Its aim was to create “facilities required by industrialists engaged in starting fresh enterprises” — of the type that were then booming in the South. The locale had been rural until a colliery opened there in 1842 — one of many operated by our new King’s stupendously wealthy ancestors, the Bowes family. But by the Thirties, 57% of Gateshead’s population was out of work — so, in the words of the commissioner appointed to help Britain’s “special areas” by the surprisingly forward-thinking Chancellor Neville Chamberlain, “novel and unorthodox” measures were required.

Over £2million of government funding was awarded to transform the boggy, 700-acre site. The designs were produced by 29-year-old William Holford — a key figure in twentieth-century urban planning, who worked on the masterplans for Durban and Canberra. The industrial estate enabled Gateshead to diversify. After it was opened by King George VI in 1939, the first tenants were very different to the usual heavy industries, with haulage contractors, coachbuilders, and clothing factories proliferating. This was Tyneside’s answer to the Golden Mile in West London — with its grand, art deco Hoover and Firestone factories — and by the Sixties, more than 16,000 people worked at the Team Valley Trading Estate. And it’s still thriving, with more than 20,000 employed there in firms as diverse as Express Engineering and Primula Cheese.

Driven by a similar sense of reinvention, by the Nineties Gateshead Council started to conceive of a new landmark that would welcome travellers to Tyneside, acting as a “millennial image that would be a marker and guardian for our town”. When Anthony Gormley was first approached by the council, he was unconvinced, dismissive as he was of “roundabout art”. But then he saw a photo of the mound where the old pithead baths had been; it reminded him of the tumuli at Wayland’s Smithy, the evocative bronze age barrow grave in Oxfordshire. What Gormley then created — a 20-metre-tall steel colossus, based on a cast of his own body — has a similar ineffability: the North’s response to the great priapic giant of the South at Cerne Abbas in Dorset.

The Angel’s site, at the southern approaches to Gateshead Fell, presents a 360 degree sweep of Northumbrian history. To the North lie the heights of Sheriff Hill, an eleventh-century battlefield and the spot where the burghers of Newcastle would turn out to meet the justices before they crossed the Tyne. Slightly to the West are the ancient Anglo-Saxon settlements of Ravensworth and Kibblesworth, and the valley of the Derwent River, one of the great crucibles of the industrial revolution. In the South is Birtley, once the site of the sprawling munitions plant of “Elisabethville”, which was home to 6,000 refugees from war-torn Flanders during the First World War, when it was run as a Belgian colony by the government in Brussels. To the South-East lies the Sixties new town of Washington, and its vast Nissan factory, which churns out more cars in a year than the whole of Italy. Finally, lying deep beneath the site is a former colliery, where miners toiled (and frequently died) for 200 years. Few locations can evoke the richness of Tyneside’s history, and to stand here on a bright and windy day, while the diggers and cranes puff and pant nearby to widen the A1, reminds you that this place is always on the move.

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“People are always asking, why an angel?” Gormley once said. It isn’t a specifically Tyneside symbol. The so-called “Dirty Angel” on a column in Newcastle’s Haymarket is actually a rather Wagnerian depiction of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, brandishing a sword and laurel wreath and raised in memory of the Northumbrians who fell in the Boer War. Gateshead itself — home of the formidable “Gateshead Gurkhas”, spearpoint of the British Army in the Second World War — has on its cenotaph a stern depiction of “manhood in the attitude of defence” above the Latin proverb MORS JANUA VITAE: “Death is the Gate to Life”. Despite its 208-tonne weathered Corten steel bulk, and 177ft wingspan, the Angel of the North is more benign and irenic — its wings subtly angled forward by 3.5 degrees to create a sense of embrace.

Made of the same quarter inch-thick plate that was the staple of Tyneside shipyards, the sculpture was inspired by a conversation between Gormley and a local councillor, Pat Conaty, who had migrated from County Cavan to Gateshead in the Fifties — just as so many belonging to the Irish Diaspora before him had come to the coalfields and steelworks of North-East England. “What we need Mr Gormley,” said Cllr Conaty as they walked up the site, “is one of your angels.” From the late Eighties, Gormley had played with angelic imagery in a sculptural series called The Case for an Angel, and this suggestion captured his imagination — and may also have appealed to his own Irish Catholic background (his parents chose his initials to spell out the old Jesuit motto AMDG).

The result was a masterpiece of monumental sculpture: a work of public art utterly different from the reactionary and totalitarian monumentalism that Gormley had wanted so much to avoid. And it soon inspired genuine local affection — so much so that before Newcastle United’s appearance in the 1998 FA Cup Final, the Angel was vested in a huge black and white shirt bearing the name of local hero Alan Shearer. “I was very moved,” said Gormley later. “That was a baptism.”

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What does the Angel represent, 25 years after its birth? It has certainly become a cynosure for Gateshead itself, even replacing the goat’s head on the local football club’s crest, and whenever I drive past it on the A1, I’m always struck by its enduring power and dignity. The word angel comes from the Greek angelos, itself a translation of a Hebrew word meaning “messenger”, and has been used in that sense, both secularly and spiritually, since its first manifestation in Old English. Can this Angel bring a hopeful message to a region of England that has not enjoyed a happy transition from the industrial to the information age?

In numerous interviews, Gormley has mused on what this great structure had meant to him and the people who built it, how rooted it is — literally, with 20-metre-deep foundations to stop the North winds blowing it over — and how it transcended individual lives. But when asked the simplest question, why he chose an angel, Gormley replied simply: “The only response I can give is that no-one has ever seen one and we need to keep imagining them.” Given everything that has gone before the Angel, and the enduring hardship of its hometown, we need to keep reimagining what places like Gateshead — and the wider North East — could be like, too.

Writing in the 1920s, DH Lawrence had foreseen it all. The son of a miner, he hated industrialism, which he believed had “frustrated that sense of community that would make us all unite in pride and dignity”. Politics had no solutions; it dealt in meaningless abstraction, rather than ordinary feeling. Talking with political activists, Lawrence observed, “is like trying to have a human conversation with the letter x in algebra”.

Exiled from Britain after the First World War, he set off an a “savage pilgrimage” before tuberculosis finally caught up with him. By 1930, he was dead. It was up to a new generation of writers, each in their own way inspired by Lawrence, to respond to his challenge to politics. They are the subject of Marc Stears’s new book Out of the Ordinary, which shows how the likes of George Orwell, JB Priestley, and Dylan Thomas rejected the abstract ideologies of their day. In using a language that was concrete and specific, Stears argues, they created a new vision for politics.

A political academic and former speechwriter for Ed Miliband, Stears believes that revisiting the output of these writers in the 1940s can provide a solution to our polarised present moment. The technocratic politics of the Blair and Cameron years have left Britain divided. Populism, both on the Left and Right, has failed to offer a convincing solution to years of economic inequality and political gridlock. For Stears, the answer is a politics of what he calls “the ordinary” and “everyday life”.

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In Stears’s account, Orwell, Priestley and Thomas rejected Lawrence’s “abstract idealisms”, refusing to fall, as Thomas puts it, “for the latest isms like pups for rubber bones”. For Orwell, vague and abstract language was the source of his era’s “political chaos”. It allowed politicians to manipulate the truth, and in its worst instances, to justify murder.

They eschewed the pessimism of the Right, too, and what they saw as grandiose ideas of Britishness. Priestley attacked what he called “Big Englanders”, Orwell hated “Rule Britannia” and flag-waving officer types, while Thomas loathed Elgar.

Instead, they aspired to a language that was tangible and rooted in people’s everyday lives and experiences. For Thomas, “the everyday” lay in memories of his childhood in Swansea: “the pubs and clubs, billiards rooms, promenades, and the suburban nights”. For Priestley, in “filling stations and factories”, “arterial and by-pass roads”, and “bungalows with tiny garages”, while Orwell associated ordinariness with “solid breakfasts, gloomy Sundays, smoky towns, winding roads, and green fields”.

When the Second World War broke out, Stears argues, these writers were forced to reconcile their sense of unease with conventional ideas of Britishness. In doing so, they turned their commitment to specificity into something of popular substance. Priestley’s Postscripts challenged Churchill for radio listeners; Orwell commissioned programmes for the BBC in India; Thomas wrote radio plays and film scripts.

After the War, however, the country failed to unite around this vision: Attlee built the welfare state from the top down, while successive governments — both Labour and Conservative — enfeebled local government. Politics become increasingly technocratic and distant from everyday concerns. All the things that once connected politics to everyday life, from trade union branches to local newspapers, began to disappear.

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This is a compelling account, but how applicable are the insights of these long-dead writers to contemporary politics? Today’s politics has arguably become more, not less, abstract. Indeed, we live in an increasingly abstract world, where things that were once solid — from telephone booths to paper money — have melted into an intangible digital world.

In his book, Stears recalls a conversation with a Labour pollster who, in the 2015 election campaign, told him that people valued spending time with loved ones more than any other issue. Nothing else came close. When Stears asked him why the party didn’t make this more of a focus, he was told this — the issue that matters most to people — isn’t what politics is about.

But if politics feels distant from people’s everyday preoccupations, it is because its language so often fails to connect. Both Left and Right talk of “equality”, “responsibility” and “aspiration”: vague, abstract words with no relevance to people’s lived experience. Even when politicians try to resolve these problems, their language fails to bring ordinary people onside. “Social mobility” and “levelling up” are phrases almost unheard outside the corridors of Westminster.

This linguistic emptiness means that politics is, as the philosopher Simone Weil wrote, increasingly “peopled exclusively by myths and monsters”. The slipperiness of abstract words means they can “represent for us an absolute reality”, while, at the same time, “mean anything whatsoever”. We reach for abstractions to explain systems of belief and ideologies: “fascism”, “sovereignty”, “patriotism”. But too often these words are manipulated to smear political opponents or shut down debate. When this happens, the common ground erodes and polarisation becomes inevitable.

The Conservative Party’s risible “war on woke” is a case in point. “Woke” is a meaningless expression often used by proponents as a commitment to vaguely progressive ideals. For its detractors, however, “woke” is nothing short of the 21^st century’s answer to Bolshevism. If we cannot even agree the meaning of a word, substantive argument becomes impossible. A “war on woke” is like trying to catch a phantom. And when only 4% of the public know what a culture war actually is, the chase is futile, too.

And if conventional political language loses its purchase on ordinary life, voters will look for unconventional politicians to fill the vacuum. When Donald Trump, for instance, pledged to “build a big, beautiful wall”, his language couldn’t have been more concrete. This was ordinary language at its most ordinary. Trump was electable because he refused to obey the conventions of politics and speak its jargon.

That isn’t to say that Trump-style populists are the solution to this crisis. Instead, if we are to develop a politics that can connect with voters’ lived experience, specificity is a place to start. Rather than gesturing vaguely to “community”, for example, we should talk about the institutions that facilitate one: affordable housing, for instance; access to fields or parks; pubs, shops, places of worship and schools.

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Politics will never be entirely free of abstractions, of course. For politicians, abstract language will always remain a useful tool to paper over the divisions that run through parties. Concrete language leads to firm promises, which are hard to keep. And disregarding all vague words would, as Orwell acknowledges, lead to a kind of “political quietism” where big ideas could not be debated at all. What’s more, phrases like “the ordinary” and “the everyday” are themselves abstractions, with different associations for different people.

But a concern for the everyday would, in Stears’s view, bring politics closer to people’s lived experiences. He believes it might help convince them that policy is not something irrelevant and aloof from their daily lives, but something that can be created by them, and in their own image.

In the meantime, what’s certain is that too often, politics feels like a poor substitute for the things that actually concern us: decent work, relationships, health, and a good place to live. If we could move politics closer to these concerns, we would go some way to solving many of the great challenges of our age.