The parliamentary seat of Southend West had only three MPs in 86 years, which itself reflects the sense of cultural and community continuity in the area. Channon was succeeded at Westminster by his son Paul, who after almost 40 years himself was succeeded by David Amess, who was murdered doing his job as an MP last Friday. Sir David’s atrocious killing appeared random: we may never know why his murderer settled upon him, and upon committing an act that astonished and horrified quiet, ordinary Southend, which had until then remained in its own distinct corner of Essex, harmlessly going its own way – exactly like its late Member of Parliament. The murder of Jo Cox in 2016 was a comparable atrocity: but insofar as these acts of wickedness can ever have a rationale, her murder was committed by a constituent with a neo-Nazi obsession, who is now serving a whole life sentence, rather than by an outsider who seems to have settled on the MP for Southend West for reasons yet to be determined.

Leigh-on-Sea, the part of the Southend conurbation where Sir David was holding the surgery where he was murdered, still has evocations of this part of the Essex coast from the age before it became suburbanised. Leigh is a place with one of the best qualities of life in the country. The housing stock is mainly of high specification, though not extortionately expensive, and the marine views come with easy proximity to London. Crime is not considered a problem: all of this underlines why the shock of Sir David’s murder has hit the community so hard. It is not merely because of his well-attested popularity, but because this relatively sedate and unpretentious part of Essex is not remotely used to experiencing shocking events of this nature. In a different age, Channon made frequent visits to his constituency — more so than most MPs of the era — and found his constituents diverting. From his occasional descriptions of them — mayors who would like a knighthood and the odd internal wrangling in the Conservative Association — not a lot has changed in that respect either.

Historically, on the main shipping route from the northern continent into London, Leigh was once a prosperous port. These days, quite a few of the local residents have little boats of various descriptions that they play about in on the water. One can see them grounded on the vast mud flats offshore when the tide is out. The North Sea is but a few miles away to the east, and quite a few locals take their craft off past Shoeburyness and Foulness Island, and fish for a hobby. Leigh started off as a fishing village, and what remains of that enterprise notably harvests the cockles that still give visitors the definitive Southend experience.

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But, then, in the 18^th century, the channels that led to Leigh silted up and the marine trade dried up; while at the same time, tiny Southend, to its east, was becoming a popular resort. Much of old Leigh — vestiges of which still exist in a few wood-framed buildings and in the medieval church — was demolished in the 19^th century when one of Southend’s two railways was constructed. It starts at Fenchurch Street and leads through the mainly charmless flatlands of south Essex, calling for the last few decades at the new town of Basildon, which Sir David represented from 1983 until moving on to Southend in 1997. A second railway, from Liverpool Street, takes a more northerly route, through a Brentwood now made famous by the delights of The Only Way Is Essex, and comes into Southend from the north. Their arrival, 140 or so years ago, marked the transformation of the area into part of the commuter belt, and initiated the wave of late Victorian building that has marked out much of outer Southend ever since. It also represented a social change that brought a large, respectable middle class into the area, further waves of which have arrived ever since, their aspirations sustained by the town’s excellent grammar schools. It has also helped secure a Conservative majority in what since 1950 have been Southend’s two parliamentary seats, and which had been held by the party since the constituency was carved out of the former South-East Essex seat in 1918. In political as well as in most other respects, the area is one that over decades has undergone no radical change.

Leigh is also an artists’ colony, with an estimated 70 painters, ceramicists and other creative people working in the town, selling their work through several galleries. Not least because of this, it has become the smart end of Southend; as elsewhere in Essex, the decline of the high street has led to premises being filled with bars and restaurants, and the service economy taking over while many of Southend West’s inhabitants take themselves off to London every day. It’s not exactly the Côte d’Azur, but it serves a remarkably similar purpose for the those who live in and around it. And it is emphatically the sort of place where people don’t get murdered in cold blood, least of all a hugely popular Member of Parliament.

Many of Sir David’s constituents would fit the profile for Essex Man, or his wife. The various waves of new, ambitious residents who have moved in to Southend since the war had their roots in the East End of London: they may even have first seen the place on one of those days trips to paddle in the sea and eat cockles, ice cream and sticks of rock, or to play in the one of the amusement parks, the most famous of which was the Kursaal. It was one of the first such entertainments in the country when it opened in 1901; it closed in the Seventies and the building it was situated in stands empty near the town’s so-called “golden mile”. The local government ward around it records one of the highest levels of social deprivation in the country; Southend is a town that has extremes of wealth and poverty. Much of its centre was redeveloped in the Sixties as the tourist trade collapsed with the advent of cheap foreign holidays, a succession of ugly concrete blocks being built to try to transform the place into a business centre. To an extent, it worked: the town is now home to the central VAT administration, another tribute to its sedateness.

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Essex veered to Conservatism from the moment most agricultural workers were enfranchised in the 1880s. At the 1886 general election, which put Salisbury’s Unionists in for six years, most of the county returned a Unionist MP. The great agricultural depression that hit rural England after 1873 hit the newly-enfranchised men hard, and Liberal free trade policies were held to blame for it. Even at the Liberal landslide of 1906, when all of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk and all but one seat in Suffolk went Liberal, about two-fifth of Essex remained Tory. After the Great War the party’s grip on the Essex electorate stiffened, helped by the enfranchisement of women who followed Mrs Pankhurst’s example and voted Tory. A story told by the distinguished journalist Colin Welch, when campaigning for Rab Butler in Saffron Walden at the 1945 election — when Labour won a landslide — sums up the independent and, indeed, aspirational mind of the locals even then. A local titled lady, who felt she was doing her civic duty in getting a Labour government elected, approached a yeoman farmer leaning on his five-bar gate to tell him why Mr Attlee deserved his vote. The farmer raised his tweed hat, listened politely and at the end of the lecture simply said: “Ma’am, oi’ve made moi poile, and yo’ can go ter buggery.”

The new towns and the influx from the East End post-war, especially in Sir David’s part of Essex, brought in Labour voters in large numbers for the first time: but the combination of essentially 18th century temperament of the indigenous population — who, like the farmer, just wished to be left alone to make their pile — and the barrow-boy inheritance of the East End proved a lethal cocktail to socialism. Mrs Thatcher’s promise in 1979 to create a new class of property-owners by allowing the sale of council houses to their tenants, and her subsequent deregulation of the City that broke the stranglehold on it of the old boy network and allowed the barrow boys to become filthy rich lit the blue touch paper under an Essex economic boom. New private estates popped up, wine bars opened, and Essex Man was invented: it was a short step from there to TOWIE. Essex became a county of small businesses: the Tory betrayal of such people after Black Wednesday led to half of Essex’s seats going Labour in the Blair triumph of 1997. Today every single seat in Essex is Conservative, reflecting the local, still Thatcherite ideology of hard work, aspiration and reward. More than ever they are making their piles, and socialism and any other doctrine can go to buggery.

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Southend is, but in other ways is not, the Essex of what has become the popular imagination. It has a very high population density, yet its conurbation is bordered by marshlands where it is not bordered by the sea. It has a relatively unchanging culture, a tribute perhaps to the high proportion of its residents who are over 55. Yet it also has a strong youth culture, as its nightlife testifies, but many of the young people’s grandparents were putting themselves about on the Front back in the early Sixties, when mods and rockers would gather there in the hope of a pitched battle. As with all Essex towns, there have been new housing developments in recent years, though mainly on the periphery: and Southend, with what in recent years has been renamed London Southend Airport, looks outward in a way that perhaps much of Essex does not.

It is deep Essex not in the way that one often thinks of the term – the picture postcard villages such as Finchingfield or the Bardfields, 30 miles to the north, or the ancient market towns such as Thaxted and Saffron Walden – but in the sense of its distinct culture, bred for three or four generations out of the East End, and which made its new home on the mudflats of the Thames Estuary. It is in that that its Conservatism lies, why it and Sir David Amess took to each other so naturally and so well, and why despite its pockets of poverty the Left has never made any impact there. And in this generally happy world of its own making, it is no wonder the shock of what happened to an entirely innocent member of the Essex family on Friday is so visceral, and so hard to absorb.

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 2): 1938-43, edited by Simon Heffer, is published by Hutchinson.

It is self-seeking and short-sighted: a mistake. There is a vacuum to be filled because Tory and Labour are a functional absence. I come upon them only through campaigning literature on lamp posts and under foot: it floats around the constituency like tumbleweed. Party leaders come for photo opportunities so there is evidence for posterity that they exist. Press officers rarely respond, even to requests for information. So, others come to fill the void. Their complaints are superficially rational — opposition is easy — but they are here not to soothe but to ignite. George Galloway, a charismatic, wants to exploit the racism British Muslims face because major parties will not grapple with it. Laurence Fox is here too, offering support to the teacher at Batley Grammar whose use of an image of the prophet Mohammed led to protests at the school, and the teacher choosing exile from the town. It is astonishing to see Fox and Galloway on the same platform but, as self-defined mavericks, perhaps it is not so strange.

Last week, the Labour candidate Kim Leadbeater, a well-being coach and personal trainer, was harassed in the street by a Muslim anti LGTBQ activist, demanding that she condemn LGBTQ education in schools. (Leadbeater is gay.) “The colour of blood is what you are,” he said. Now she has police protection. Labour sources say Galloway supporters are repeatedly driving past the campaign office; once they crowded in to harass them. Labour activists, including Muslims, were pelted with eggs and one was beaten. In white areas, fake Labour leaflets are circulated, saying, “Labour supports taking the knee”, and “The Labour Party believes that it is high time that white people acknowledged their privilege”. Labour itself published a leaflet showing Boris Johnson shaking hands with India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi with the caption: “the risk of voting for anyone but Labour is clear”. Labour Friends of India asked for its withdrawal.

It is a co-incidence, or perhaps, worse, an omen, that this is the constituency whose Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in 2016 by a white supremacist outside, of all places, a public library. Leadbeater is Cox’s sister. I wonder if it is another mistake from a Labour Party that embraced centralisation, a wound that took too long to show itself: the wrong candidate in the wrong place. Many Labour supporters feel unseen by the party they once embraced as family. Is it seemly to emphasise family ties, through a woman who only joined the party this year? What happened to Jo Cox is a tragedy, but her sister’s candidacy is still morbid nepotism, and it is unpopular with some voters. It takes politics further away from them, and into someone’s else’s personal narrative. “I can’t vote for someone who jumped on a bandwagon,” says one former Labour voter, “the sister of someone quite good.”

Batley is superficially sleepy. The once bustling market has declined; the police station has gone. Most commercial activity is sucked into a vast supermarket, with the now mandatory support for a foodbank in the window. (More than a third of children live in poverty in Yorkshire, and most of them are in working families.)

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Alienation is obvious as you wander Batley and Spen. The young SDP candidate Ollie Purser tells me: “The biggest demographic I meet is people who aren’t going to vote and before I can even give them a leaflet the door is shut.” I follow him as he campaigns in Birstall, an estate of red-brick houses dominated by a sign that says NO BALL GAMES, and in an area where people, according to Purser, either say, “There’s nought for kids to do”, or they else they say: “There’s too much anti-social behaviour”. The main issues here are public services — the Liberal Democrat candidate Tom Gordon says constituents are using Dentaid, a charity that usually operates in developing countries — and whether to build a new Amazon distribution centre for more air pollution and ill-paid, exhausting jobs.

“You all talk shite,” says a man when he opens the door to Purser, though genially. “I have no interest in voting whatsoever.” “Anything to do with working-class culture gets chopped up,” mourns the next, though he takes a leaflet. “I never go out,” says the next, “I’m a Mum”. As we leave two children wave from the window. “I’ve never voted in my life,” says the next potential voter, who must be 70, and Purser patiently explains the principles of a polling station to her. Even when voters do enter a polling station, Purser says, “they are always holding their nose. That’s the problem. [People] biting their lip and putting their cross next to the name because they hate the other team more”. These people are, Purser says, “dislocated. Atomised. Individualised.” As if to illustrate this point, there are two local Facebook groups dedicated to the town: Batley Matters and Batley Really Matters. Even the advocacy groups have split.

In the middle, preening calmly amid the chaos, is George Galloway, the former Labour MP fighting an Oedipal battle with the party he once loved. Though he remains the same, he changes parties more often than he changes his hat: from Labour to Respect to the “economically radical and socially conservative” Workers’ Party.

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Galloway hopes to take Labour votes from the Asian community that make up 20% of the electorate here. He believes they are vexed by what they perceive as Labour’s lack of support for Palestine and lack of action on Islamophobia. One woman says her five-year nephew saw a tabloid headline, and said: “Auntie, look, we are terrorists. It says there”. This has reached a tipping point for Galloway supporters, with Palestine as the flashpoint. Shops in Batley are papered with pro-Palestine messages, and it is not, for these voters, something remote. It is, at least partially, a proxy conflict. In Palestine’s suffering they see themselves: it is a paradigm of their perceived powerlessness. One woman explains the change in dynamic: “We’re not your servants anymore.” Another woman says, “Obviously Israel own everything. It is an untouchable country.” She, though, will vote Conservative. I doubt this view is as widespread as Galloway would like.

Outside Galloway’s campaign office I find a mass of photographs of Galloway on sticks, so they look like a bus station with only one destination: a Galloway victory. I meet him in Starbucks. He is all twinkling vanity; he reminds me of Boris Johnson. Like Johnson, he likes campaigning more than governing; like Johnson, victory over the enemy is not a moral but a psychological imperative. The chase is all. If policy alone was his aim, he would add his voice to the SDP perhaps — “we respect them”, he says — or the Yorkshire Party — campaigning for devolution through its candidate Corey Robinson — or even Labour itself, prostrate but still breathing.

He speaks in perfect paragraphs, emitting campaign literature laced with memoir. Galloway does not converse, not really. He orates, mirrors, boasts. Labour is now a party of “trans-maniacs” who deplore the British voters and the British flag. Labour has, he says, no leadership. They are, rather, “a series of people sitting in circles. I remember vividly Tony Blair’s wife shouting at me to stop shouting, when in fact all I was doing was speaking clearly in the way that one does when one is making a speech. I remember it vividly even though it was more than forty years ago”. I wonder if this, at least partially, is why he is here. He has a long memory.

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He also remembers a woman outing herself as a lesbian at Conference decades ago. “Everyone clapped. I remember saying to the fellow next to me, ‘Why is everyone clapping? Should I announce what I like sexually? Would they clap?’ The personal,” he mourns, “became substituted for what united all of us — whoever we slept with”. And yet here he is, effectively trying to deliver a Conservative MP to Westminster, because of who he is, and I can’t think of anything more personal.

Is he concerned about this? “I draw no distinction between Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson,” he says, “in fact Boris Johnson is better at it than Kier Starmer would be”. He compares Johnson’s campaigning in the Fox’s biscuit factory to how Starmer would do it, if he had done it: “He would have would have walked around like a robot, a desiccated calculating machine, while Boris was practically breakdancing on the factory floor”. For Galloway, Starmer’s failures are ever expanding, like space. Where they do not exist — the biscuit factory, for instance, where he did not appear and so could not fail — he imagines them.

I offer the decline of child poverty under Blair as an example of an important difference between Labour and Tory policy. “I didn’t say there was no difference,” he says, “I said I make no distinction. The difference is this,” he explains, “the Tory wears on his sleeve what he is. Labour are wolves in sheep’s clothing and it’s our job to tear away that sheep’s clothing and reveal the wolf within”. He changes his mind: “it’s not really a wolf, it’s more a jackal. The jackal within has to be exposed”. The jackal feeds on the dead. I think he is projecting.

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Eventually, after multiple emails and telephone calls and knocks on campaign office doors, I do meet a Labour activist, though by accident: a white man walking his Labrador in the park. He too speaks in perfect sentences, as if the relative silence on the street is creating rhetoric straining to be heard.

“The Tories,” he says, “are hoping to win by default, and they are hoping that Mr Galloway will help deliver that for them. He’s incapable of winning the election and if he wants to play a small part in electing a Tory candidate,” – his anger is obvious, though he speaks calmly — “for a party whose leader insults Muslim women, refuses to deal with Islamophobia in the Conservative Party and will do nothing to defend the causes including that of Palestine which Mr Galloway professes to hold dear then that’s up to him”.

That night there is a hustings in a community centre with only one candidate: George Galloway. His wife videos him for posterity. Kim Leadbeater pulled out, and Galloway seems both delighted and appalled. The Yorkshire Party candidate Corey Robinson says he accepted the invitation but was not given the address, and so wandered around Batley looking for it until he gave up and went to visit his family. That is not mentioned.

The interviewer thanks Galloway, whose rhetoric rises to this tiny crisis. “It is I who should thank you,” he says, “and commiserate with you for the great insult that the Labour Party has just delivered half an hour ago”.

He says Labour’s loss will cause an earthquake to destroy its leader. “Why do I care about that?” he asks himself. It’s a good question. The answer is, he says, that the country needs an opposition and, “Britain currently doesn’t have an opposition because the Opposition Leader is no leader at all. He’s so wooden that birds are trying to nest in him. He’s so robotic he might as well be speaking through a speak-your-weight machine. His words go nowhere, move nobody, persuade nobody.”

He continues in this vein for an hour while around him, in a vacuum made of cowardice, the major parties flail, and, in Labour’s case, sink to his tactics. This is a filthy by-election, and only one man is made happy by it. It will not be enough.