“It’s been the hardest year of my life,” said Liam, 41, whose wife is from Chile. So you might presume it would be easy to predict how this struggling retailer would be voting? But no, not in this bizarre election. For, to my amazement — not least since we were standing in the constituency of one of the best-known Brexiteers and Liam believes Boris Johnson to be “a bit of a buffoon” — he told me he would be voting Tory on Thursday.

“It’s time to get Brexit sorted. I’m a Remainer but I run a business that relies on imports from abroad and we have got to get this done and dusted. I don’t want any more delay to this process that has made me suffer for so long.”

Our chat on a chilly December evening highlights the unpredictability of this political struggle as Brexit divides the country, reshapes parties and shakes the electoral kaleidoscope. Few constituencies show this better than Esher and Walton, where a recent poll suggested the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, holds just a 5% lead over the Liberal Democrats, despite winning a 23,298 majority two years ago.

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This slice of suburban Surrey should be bedrock Britain for the Tories: the sort of place a donkey wearing a blue rosette would get elected. But as Johnson pivots his party towards disgruntled Labour voters in the Midlands and North, might they lose this seat stuffed with wealthy commuters in their southern heartland?

Monica Harding, the Liberal Democrat candidate, is convinced she is set for victory. “I really, really think I will win,” she said when we met in The Wheatsheaf pub. “People are really cross about Brexit. Most accepted the referendum result and then backed the Tories in 2017, expecting them to deliver it neatly. Now they see it has been a complete shambles.” It seemed significant, also, that Raab is keeping his head down and his team not letting journalists join them out campaigning. The Foreign Secretary, however, is optimistic of retaining his seat. “I am not sitting here biting my finger nails,” he told one friend.

It was not hard to find people who have deserted the Tories in Esher and Walton, a seat that strongly backed Remain and is home to 10,000 businesses. Yet while the curse of Brexit clings to this constituency, just as in all 649 others in this wretched election called to break the deadlock at Westminster, other big issues are bubbling beneath the surface. And not just the obvious ones of crime, hospitals, and schools causing concerns across the country. Changes taking place in the spillover suburbs that surround London present longer-term challenges. And that is why this wealthy heart of Surrey presents a warning to the Conservatives.

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This is a place I used to knew well, having lived in Oxshott for the first 17 years of my life before my family moved to Sussex on the day Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. It was a firmly middle-class village set amid the prosperous Surrey commuter belt, an oasis of suburban middle-class dreams close to the capital filled with golf courses and tennis clubs. Men in pin-striped suits and bowler hats packed the trains to London in the morning, then teenagers filled them later to escape the embrace of cosy community and a stifling sense of conformity. There was an old-fashioned grocery store in the village, parties in the village hall — and I can still recall the excitement when the first Chinese and Indian restaurants arrived in the area.

The grocery store is still there, although now rebranded. Inside, I found Nish Patel, its 29-year-old boss who took over the shop with his brother earlier this year. This affable man, born in the Indian state of Gujarat, told me how he arrived in Britain 10 years ago, speaking no English and had already run another shop nearby. As he explained his plans to improve the store, I reflected how Patel embodied the energetic and entrepreneurial spirit of immigration. Yet, unexpectedly, he turned out to be a keen Brexiteer. “I am going to spend my life in this country so I want it to be safe,” he explained. “We need to know who is coming in and out. We have a lot of burglaries here.”

The streets remain tidy, the lawns clipped, the woods by the station full of friendly dog-walkers — but this is an area that has changed fast. There has been the usual suburban churn as old people move on and young families move in, seeking more space in homes and often a sanctuary from urban life in London. Many are from migrant backgrounds, like the Patels. I recall five years ago a Surrey councillor telling me there were 30 languages spoken in neighbouring Mole Valley, with ethnic minorities making up one in seven pupils in some primary schools. There is a mosque in Dorking, just down the road from the setting for that ultimate 70s suburban sitcom, The Good Life. What would Margot have said?

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Statistics show that, unlike Patel, most ethnic minorities do not support the Tories. Yet this slice of Surrey has also become spectacularly wealthy. It is now filled with foreign billionaires, hedge fund chiefs and famous sports stars — including Chelsea players and their Russian owner, since the club’s training ground is in nearby Cobham. It is little surprise to find a study revealed Elmbridge pays the highest income tax in Britain. When I located my former home, it seemed almost the only one on the road that had survived rather than being replaced by a massive post-modern palace. At one neighbouring property, an interior design company was hanging Christmas tree lights on a tree by the front door. A worker said they charge £198 for the service — more than one-third of median weekly disposable income for British households.

Many residents live behind big gates and banks of cameras, corroding any sense of real community. “I canvass sometimes speaking on the entry phone to someone I can see at a window,” said one Lib Dem activist. Yet there are homeless people living in nearby woods, former council houses sell for seven-figure sums and far too few new houses are being built in a constituency that is almost two-thirds protected by Green Belt restrictions. These kinds of issues trouble even Tory voters and are storing up problems, whatever happens on Brexit.

I met Gareth Hughes, an 84-year-old former civil servant and oil engineer who has lived in Oxshott for half a century, by the village shops. Once we would have been almost neighbours — but he said he has seen big changes since my time. “We had one house opposite us knocked down, a family lived there, and then it was knocked down again and made bigger,” he said, adding that his own two children had been forced by high prices to live in other parts of the south-east. “This area was always prosperous but it has become much more wealthy and now none of our children can afford to live here.”

As this thoughtful man who once worked under Michael Heseltine said, what is the point of creating ‘affordable’ housing when the definition – 80% of average local market rates — puts it out of most people’s range? One study found Elmbridge, where there has been a sharp fall in numbers of younger people owning their homes and average properties cost almost £600,000, to be the hardest place outside London to get a foot on the housing ladder. Hughes has seen the legacy of such change with a weakening of communal institutions such as clubs and charity events — and while backing both Brexit and the Tories, takes a dim view of modern politicians. “They don’t seem to get anything done. They have been squabbling over Brexit and everything else seems to have been sidelined.”

This is probably the single point that unites the country — and many people in Esher hold Raab responsible as a key player behind the parliamentary paralysis. “No, I’m not voting for him ever again,” said one well-spoken man, declining to be named. “They can stuff their Brexit and the lot of them, they fucked up our country.”

Another middle-aged woman refused at first to tell me how she voted on Brexit after almost losing one of her best friends over the issue. “I’ve known her since we were 10. We are in such a sorry state of affairs, so I pledged never again to tell anyone how I voted.” Eventually she whispered that she was a Leaver on the basis I would not identify her.

A few minutes later I met Hugh Monro, a firm Remainer from Cornwall, who was attending a local school governors’ meeting but expressed the widespread despair over Westminster with unusual eloquence. “It is a pantomime,” he said. “If it wasn’t so important it would all be very funny. Instead we have a farce, written by Kafka but performed by the Marx Brothers.”

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By Tanya Gold

Metamorphosis meets Duck Soup? Certainly some prominent politicians have been transformed by the Brexit debacle — including Ian Taylor, former chairman of the Conservative Group for Europe and Raab’s predecessor in this seat for 23 years. “Sadly, I no longer recognise the Conservative Party as it is today,” he said recently.

Such is the perplexing state of political flux. His new political party, the Lib Dems, claim to be attracting many richer voters who were nervous about inadvertently letting a tax-grabbing Marxist into Downing Street but now feel emboldened to back them after Jeremy Corbyn’s dismal campaign. Almost all Lib Dem voters told me they disliked their party’s stance on revoking Brexit. The Tories meanwhile, said they were picking up support in poorer parts, reflecting their focus on struggling citizens in the Midlands and North. “Voters are very negative about Corbyn,” said one source. “And while this constituency voted 58% Remain, that does not mean they do not respect how the rest of the country voted and that Boris managed to get a deal.”

London’s sprawling suburbia takes in chunks from four counties. Yet it is Surrey that best symbolises the great Brexit divide. The county is home to 11 Tory MPs who include some of the most prominent figures on both sides, from Leavers such as Raab and Michael Gove, through to Remainers such as former chancellor Philip Hammond and Sam Gyimah, who defected to the Liberal Democrats shortly after standing for the leadership. Seven months ago, the Tories lost their grip on four councils after a drubbing in local elections.

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By Paul Embery

Brexit is not the only reason that southern seats could tilt from the Tories. As young families move in, Lib Dems surge after partially recovering from their post-coalition backlash, and Johnson shifts his party towards socially-conservative northern voters. “There is a general feeling that public services are not working for them and the Conservative brand has been tarnished,” said James Johnson, former Number Ten strategist who ran polling for Theresa May. “In future elections, this is going to be problematic. They are going for a short-term win that could have long-term repercussions.” He added that high-profile politicians such as Raab and Iain Duncan Smith in his suburban Essex seat were most at risk from tactical voting.

Even the most devout Corbynista would accept Esher and Walton is not their natural terrain — although I did find one possible Labour voter. “I’m fed up with the whole thing really,” said Katy Nursey, 35, an interior designer parking in Oxshott with her infant daughter Ava. “I work in London and see so many homeless people on the streets. It’s just awful.” She was worried also about the health service after hearing friends and family members complain about bad experiences. Later I met a Polish dental nurse who was selling her house to return home after 10 years living in Britain — one more sign of the intensifying staff crisis in health and social care.

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Jane Drown, 60, a former management consultant who is backing the Lib Dems, said many local voters like her would happily pay a bit more in tax to boost public services but they despair over the extremism of both main parties. “Look at all these Four-Wheel Drive cars on the roads when there are people sleeping rough,” she said. “The big issue is inequality. Many people want to redress the balance but will not vote for Corbyn, who seems so old-fashioned and scares the shit out of this affluent middle-class area.”

I met her in a Costa cafe, shortly after talking to an Esher shop worker who could no longer afford to visit the local cinema — the same one that I used to cycle to on my Raleigh sports bike to see films such as Jaws and Star Wars with friends — following its makeover by the upmarket Everyman chain. “This is a constituency with two halves,” said Drown. “There are all those wealthy people in their gated developments but there are also people really struggling to make ends meet on benefits or low incomes. You need a lot of money to live here.”

Who knows if this constituency will provide the “Portillo moment” of the 2019 election, when a high-profile politician loses their job before the cruel glare of cameras at their count? Yet for someone who grew up amid the comfortable certainties of this area, it seems incredible to even suggest the Tory tradition might be under threat in this slab of rock-solid Surrey. It is one more sign of our political fluidity as tectonic plates shift beneath Westminster — and the ramifications go far deeper than current tribal battles. As I talked over coffee with Drown, she spoke with passion about the area’s growing wealth, its glaring inequalities, its gated homes — and its hidden underbelly of grafting people and grinding poverty. “Esher,” she said, “is a metaphor for the country.”

To seek to understand this polarisation is to intrude on a kind of painful family feud. So I tread carefully. But the story goes, I think, something like this.

There was a time when politics in Scotland was a fairly staid and predictable affair: Labour was dominant; most Scots hated the Conservatives; the Lib Dems (or old Liberal party) controlled a few seats in the Highlands and Islands; and the SNP, known as the ‘Tartan Tories’, was seen as something of a crank outfit and its raison d’être — independence — a fringe position.

But that was then. Now the SNP reigns supreme and Labour is in sharp decline. (It’s pretty much as you were for the Tories and Lib Dems.) This seismic shift in the popularity of both Labour and SNP is a tale of hubris, complacency, the politics of grievance, and a rediscovered national self-confidence and sense of identity.

Devolution was seen by the new Labour government as not only desirable in itself, but also a tactic designed to end the debate over independence for good. But, the law of unintended consequences being what it is, millions of Scots went and got the taste for running things themselves. And their ultimate unwillingness to settle for what they came to view as an ersatz version of the real thing ensured that the independence campaign, and thereby the SNP, was suddenly emboldened.

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Meanwhile, Labour, having taken Scotland for granted for too long, began to haemorrhage support. Its pursuit of austerity-lite policies in the years after the global financial crash, and then its alliance with the other ‘English’ parties, particularly the Tories, in the Better Together campaign for the 2014 independence referendum, accelerated its demise. Again, the SNP, which had long since reinvented itself as a progressive alternative to Labour, reaped the dividends. As far as Scottish politics was concerned, all had changed, changed utterly.

Glasgow was the last Labour bastion to fall, the party’s long hegemony over the city eventually collapsing in the Westminster, Scottish parliament and city council elections in 2015, 2016 and 2017 respectively.

But, despite all that, vestiges of support for the party in this most working-class of cities do remain. In fact, as I travelled around the constituency of Glasgow East, I found it hard to believe that it was anything but Labour. But it is. Only just, mind. The seat is a hyper-marginal, with the SNP holding it by a mere 75 votes.

The East End of this city was once a major industrial centre, home to sprawling manufacturing, engineering and textile works, including the vast steelworks of Parkhead Forge. The sounds and smells of heavy industry would permeate through the nearby slums, of which row upon row of poverty-infested tenement blocks were the main feature. The history of this part of the city is one of working-class solidarity and culture, of cranes and mills, of deprivation and squalor, of the Irish diaspora and Celtic football club, of the notoriety of the Gorbals district and 1920s razor gangs.

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Today, the old industries may be a fading memory (Parkhead Forge is now a shopping centre) and the remaining tenements sandblasted to look clean and new, but the hardship is still all too prevalent. The East End contains some of the most deprived areas in the UK. Unemployment and levels of poor health are comparatively very high; the number of benefit claimants well above the UK average.

Every one of the seven Glasgow constituencies represented at Westminster voted Remain in the EU referendum; but, of them all, Glasgow East saw the largest share voting Leave.

After the war, huge new municipal housing estates – known as the ‘schemes’ – were constructed across the city to rehouse families displaced by slum clearances. I headed out to one of these – Easterhouse – an infamous place that over the years has gained a national reputation for gang culture, violence and drugs. If Glasgow East is deprived, then Easterhouse feels like its most impoverished corner.

The place has attracted much media attention and the occasional famous visitor – Princess Diana and Jacque Chirac among them – over the years. They are brought here, no doubt, to discover what life is like for those living on the breadline in one of the most disadvantaged pockets of the nation, almost as junior doctors having a somewhat unusual and stubborn medical condition demonstrated to them.

It was after a visit here while leader of the Conservative party that Iain Duncan Smith was inspired to launch his crusade for ‘compassionate Conservatism’. The moment was, it is said, his ‘Easterhouse epiphany’.

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If you come here expecting some kind of benighted, lawless ghetto, you will be disappointed (or pleased – depending on how you look at it). True, mattresses and other discarded furniture are piled up on some streets, drab and unsightly low-rise blocks of flats abound, shop fronts are shabby and uninviting, and you’re likely to stumble upon some untended grassy wasteland every few blocks.

But Easterhouse is fighting hard to reinvent itself, and vast amounts of money have been pumped into the place to help it along the way. Much of the original estate has been pulled down, to be replaced by modest but modern housing, and there is the odd shiny new building, including the Kelvin college campus (which wouldn’t look out of place in a Home Counties town) and an art and culture facility called ‘The Bridge’.

You can’t help but feel, though, that much of this is little more than cosmetic surgery – a superficial makeover on a timeworn body which, beneath the veneer, still suffers from the wear and tear of the daily grind. It’s clear, when you look at the poverty statistics, that the regeneration scheme, which dates back to 2002, has been little but a sticking plaster.

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What can the mainstream parties possibly say to convince those whose existence here has been marked by constant need and privation that their lives really will change for the better after the general election?

At St Benedict’s Roman Catholic church on Westerhouse Road, 67-year-old Mary Maguire, until now a lifelong Labour voter, is helping to prepare a special Mass. “Labour are a joke these days. Not just Corbyn; the whole party. They are a joke,” she tells me. This time she will vote SNP because it is the only party standing up for Scotland. She supports independence. “Scotland is a rich country. We’ve lots of resources, but we don’t get a say. Everyone says that England pays to keep us, but that’s rubbish.”

She voted Leave in the EU referendum. “I thought it was the right thing to do,” she says. “I voted Yes to the Common Market first time round, mind.”

“Is unemployment a big problem around here?” I ask. She bristles. “Yes, but lots of people work too. People want to work. Easterhouse isn’t just full of people claiming benefits.” It’s a common theme here. Locals are acutely aware of the reputation of the place, but are desperate to convince you that it isn’t as bad as all that.

I thank Mary for her time and offer five quid for the donation box. She gently rebuffs me. “Don’t be daft. We don’t take money off people who come to see us.”

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For all the problems caused by a lack of decent jobs, low wages, inadequate housing and social exclusion, there’s a kindness and warmth in Easterhouse. Folk are friendly and eager to chat.

Friends Donna and Fiona are walking along Aberdalgie Road. Donna, 41, tells me she is “on the fence” but veering towards Labour. “I’m a single parent and would probably be better off financially under Labour. Plus, Labour would look after the NHS. And I don’t trust the SNP.” I ask about the challenges facing Easterhouse. “Drugs. They are a big problem here. And some of the teenagers have no respect and no manners. They trash the place. Mind you, there’s nothing for them to do. And over there,” she points, “is a homeless centre filled with young men. I don’t always feel safe walking around.”

“What do you think of Boris Johnson?” Donna widens her eyes and puffs out her cheeks at my question, as if to say, “Don’t get me started!” I do get her started. “Let me just say,” she snaps back, “that I bought a Donald Trump toy for my dog. He ripped it to pieces. So now I’m looking for a Boris Johnson one.”

I ask Fiona how she will vote. “I won’t,” she retorts sharply. “It’s a waste of time. Nothing ever gets done. They are all a load of shite.” She reflects. “Although at least the gang fights have stopped now.”

Crawford Irving, 24, has lived in Easterhouse for two years. He moved here because “the rent is cheap” and earns his living as a door-to-door fundraiser for a charity. “Yeah, we’ve got our problems,” he says. “Drug issues. Poverty. You go to the shops at 10 in the morning, and people are lining up to get their cans of beer. Or outside the chemist the junkies are queuing to get their methadone. But all places have their problems, don’t they?”

He likes living in Easterhouse and is in no hurry to move on. “Underneath it all, there is a real sense of community on the schemes. It’s like we’re all struggling, but we’re struggling together.”

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He will vote Labour on 12 December. “I trust Corbyn. He’s genuine. Rides a bike and stuff. I like that.” And though a supporter of independence, he is no fan of the SNP or its leader. “Nicola Sturgeon is dishonest. She hasn’t made Scotland better. She said she would restore the NHS to its former glory, but it’s in decline.”

History tells us that the evils of unemployment and low wages are primary factors in so many other social problems that can plague communities such as Easterhouse – not just the usual mix of crime, drugs and vandalism, but the absence of self-worth, of dignity and a sense of vocation.

Give people meaningful, rewarding work and the rest will follow. It’s a truism as relevant now as when man was fashioning tools from flint. Yet it is rare these days to hear any party – not even Labour, with its radical economic programme – make the case for full employment as a prime goal of economic policy.

On the train back to the city centre, I read on my iPhone a breaking story exposing an old column written by Boris Johnson, in which he stereotyped British working-class men as “drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless”. I guess if you were fortunate enough to brought up on the playing fields of Eton rather than the streets of Easterhouse, you can deceive yourself into believing that such simplistic garbage provides any explanation at all for the trials and tribulations faced by our most blighted communities and the mindset of those who populate them.

Alighting at Queen’s Street station, I walk the few yards to George Square, home to a statue of Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns.

“Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord / Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that / Tho’ hundreds worship at his word / He’s but a coof for a’ that,” wrote Burns in “A man’s a man for a’ that”, his paean to the poor.

For some reason, I am still thinking of the Prime Minister and that old column.

I have spent a large part of the past 40 years writing about Europe and European politics. I made a brief escape to write about the United States and American politics.

In those four decades, I parachuted metaphorically into scores of towns and cities in France and in almost every state in the US — from the gang-infested northern districts of Marseille to the urban deserts of an almost abandoned, downtown Detroit.

This time I had decided to parachute into my birthplace.

Stoke-on-Trent has become a symbol of left-behind Britain. It is the alleged ‘capital of Brexit’. It is one of the key battlegrounds in next month’s general election with two ‘Labour-Leaver’ marginal seats inside the city and one on its western edge.

Why, I wondered, has my home-town become so fiercely anti-EU? Stoke voted 69% vote for Leave in 2016, more than any other large UK town or city.

How would the people of Stoke resolve in the voting booths on 12 December the contradiction between their traditional support for Labour and their passion for Brexit? Would Stoke-on-Trent go Tory — the equivalent of Sevenoaks voting Labour?

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By Paul Embery

My brother still works in the city. He lives in the beautiful Pennine hills just to the east, close to the village where we were brought up. I have often visited him since I left North Staffordshire but I have seldom explored the 21^st century version of Stoke itself.

I was profoundly depressed by what I found.

Stoke is the victim of a triple economic crisis and a triple identity crisis. Its pottery, steel and coal-mining industries were among the earliest victims of the de-industrialisation of Britain which began under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. The city’s public services have been hollowed out by the austerity drive of the past decade. Its town centres, stricken by the collapse of traditional shopping habits, range from the depressed to the derelict.

Stoke was never an elegant city. Topographically, it is not a city at all but a curving string of six connecting towns along the upper valley of the River Trent in the northern tip of Staffordshire.

If that sounds idyllic (and it might have been), you have to recall that those towns — Stoke-upon-Trent, Hanley, Burslem, Tunstall, Fenton and Longton — were among the first intensely industrialised settlements on earth. Coal was mined here from the middle ages. Josiah Wedgwood devised assembly line production of pottery here in the mid-18^th century, 140 years before Henry Ford applied the idea to cars in Detroit.

Although the six towns bound themselves together as a city almost a century ago, they remain wary or jealous of one another. Stoke people cling to plural identities. They talk of “The Potteries”, rarely of Stoke-on-Trent.

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The city has another permanent identity crisis. It is officially in the West Midlands, but it is culturally and economically more like industrial Lancashire or Yorkshire. North Staffs people have the warmth and openness of Lancastrians, the grit of Yorkshire people and the wit of Scousers.

Stoke falls outside the Government’s Northern Powerhouse project. It will be narrowly bypassed by the planned £88bn HS2 high-speed railway. An investigation into the booming cost of  HS2 may axe the planned junction with the 19^th-century route into Stoke-on-Trent.

Potteries people feel on the edge and in between — in the geographical heartland but, in some ways, isolated from the rest of Britain. Even the Stoke accent is unlike any other. I was pleased to discover that friends and strangers are still referred to as “duck”. “Ah yer aw-right duck?” — never “love” or “dear” or “pet” or “darling”.

Now a third identity crisis overlays the others. What is Stoke-on-Trent for in 2019?

Other northern and Midlands cities — Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool — have recreated themselves as hubs for financial and other services. Stoke, without the character of a “real” city, has been unable to compete. As one local businessman said to me: “Never mind financial services. We’ve hardly got any banks left.”

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The Stoke-on-Trent that I knew in the 1960s and early 1970s was a hell-scape of slag heaps, steel furnaces, factory chimneys, bottle-shaped pottery kilns, jumbled terraces of red-brick houses, scraps of railways and bright green canals. And yet the city — on the days that you could see it — had a grandeur, a strength and a perverse beauty. Above all, it had a purpose and an identity.

The six towns were relatively busy and prosperous. The pottery industry was declining but still produced everything from fine Wedgwood and Doulton dinner services to cheap tea-cups and municipal urinals.

The re-born Stoke-on-Trent is cleaner and leafier. Old pits and slag heaps have been turned into beautiful parks or shiny shopping centres. New dual carriage-way roads (partly EU-funded) carve and weave between the towns. Whole sections of the city I remember have vanished — rebuilt or just abandoned.

More than ever, there is no “there” there in Stoke-on-Trent. The new Potteriescape has islands of beauty or energy. Overall, it is a dispiriting, characterless jumble.  Imagine the ugliest part of any city — the most rumpled, outer-suburban edges of London or Paris or New York. In the “new” Stoke, that ragged fringe goes on for 36 square miles.

Average pay is 16% below the national average. House prices are half the national average. One of the town’s biggest employers is the international on-line betting giant Bet365, started in a Portakabin in Stoke by a local family in 2000. Betting shops, tattoo parlours and charity outlets fill many of the town centre slots.

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I spoke to Wendy, aged 19, in a deserted Hanley town centre on a weekday morning. She was wearing a bright red hoodie and had a pink candy-floss hairdo. She is unemployed.

I said the town didn’t seem to be buzzing today.

“Buzzing? I don’t know what to say to you, duck. Hanley is never buzzing. If you’re young you’re just stuck, aren’t you?  Only jobs are low-paying. You can’t afford to go out at night. You can’t even afford to bugger off and live somewhere else…”

Another man I met, Dave, 55, a former potter, now a part-time mechanic, said: “Stoke on Trent is a shit-hole. Once everyone knew someone in the pits or the pots. Now all we’ve got is students and care-workers.”

It’s not all grim. The new Staffordshire University, created from a polytechnic with EU regional development money, has gained a high reputation for information technology and film studies. A “ceramic valley” enterprise park (more EU money) is discovering, inter alia, new uses of specialised pottery in hi-tech industries.

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The pottery industry — you are now supposed to say “ceramics” — is recovering but it has  6,000 jobs compared with 70,000 in the 1950s. Royal Doulton has shifted most of its production to Indonesia. Wedgwood ditto but some is returning. Spode has closed, though its name is still used.

The niche, innovative new pottery makers such as Emma Bridgewater and Portmeirion (incorporating Spode) are thriving. Ugly old Stoke still produces transcendentally beautiful things. The resurgent ceramics industry is, however, 50% dependent on exports to Europe.

Why, then, is Stoke, so apparently dependent on Europe, so anti-European?

***

I turned first to Phil Corrigan, the political correspondent for the excellent local daily newspaper, The Sentinel (one aspect of Stoke much improved since my day).

Corrigan said there was a sense of having being abandoned; a contempt for all the mainstream parties; a belief that, somehow, a Britain which “took control” of its own rules and laws would make a difference to Stoke-on-Trent. All government seems far away and indifferent. Brussels seems furthest away of all.

“There is an association in many people’s minds between the EU and UK membership since 1973, because of everything that has changed in Stoke since then — the decline of the pits and pots,” he said.

“European immigration is also a big, big issue. There is a resentment at new foreign faces and voices in a traditionally parochial place that’s long had a bit of migration but never very much.” Stoke is 95% white and English born.

The election will be a knife-edge in Stoke, he says. “Labour voters are disaffected and very pro-Brexit but they have an ancestral hatred of Tories. It will depend how many switch to the Brexit Party…”

“A large part of the population here is now completely walled off from politics. Turnout is amongst the lowest in the country.”

When the Tories captured Stoke South in 2017, it was the first Stoke seat to go anything but Labour for 80 years. Labour should hold Stoke Central this time, Corrigan believes, but they might lose Stoke North and Newcastle-under-Lyme, just to the west.  If that trend was projected nationally it would easily be enough for a Johnson majority.

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I attended a meeting of the Staffs4Europe group at a pub in a village just outside Stoke. Why was my home-town so anti-EU?

Liz Baker said: “The explanations have changed. In 2016 people would say ‘we’ve been neglected’, ‘cheated by them in London’ or ‘on the local council’. Or ‘we don’t like all the immigrants’. Or ‘we don’t like what the council has done with the buses’.”

“Now they say: ‘It’s about sovereignty and taking control of laws and trading freely with the world… They repeat what they’ve heard the politicians say on the telly.”

Her husband, Tony Rogers, said: “Voting Brexit was the first time they ‘won’ in their lives… They may not know what it means but they know they were on the winning side.”

***

Hanley, set on a hill above the other towns, emerged long ago as Stoke-on-Trent’s main shopping and entertainment centre. It has now been rebranded as the “City Centre” and “Cultural Quarter”.

It was in Hanley in 1964, aged 14, that I went to the Regent Theatre/Cinema to see an up-and-coming London rhythm and blues group. That band, The Rolling Stones, seem to have survived the past 55 years better than Hanley — although the Regent Theatre has been expanded and now attracts touring rep companies.

I stood outside the Regent and buttonholed the locals. How will Stoke vote? What about Brexit?

Many of my would-be victims, though very friendly in the Potteries way, told me they had not a scrap of interest in politics. “It bores me, duck. Can’t stand any of it.”

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Almost all, I have solemnly to report, had no knowledge of the learned arguments about Brexit or Boris in the Twitter and media bubbles where I now live. There was hostility to all politicians; disdain (to put it kindly) for the Tories; but also a passionate distrust of the EU and dislike of “foreigners”.

Derek, 64, retired pottery worker: “I was for Brexit, still am. Not changed my mind a bit… I’ll tell you why. Too many foreigners. Sometimes you can can scarcely hear English spoken in Hanley these days… And now they say they’re bussing more up from London. They don’t want them down there. So they think we can have them.”

Sam, 60, café-owner: “They tell me that I’m in the cultural quarter of The Potteries. The bloody cultural quarter. Where do they think we are, bloody France? If I want to put tables outside and be continental, I have to pay bloody council £500 a year or summat. £500 a year? Might be worth it if we had summer all year but in Hanley it lasts only three weeks at most…”

Ron, 78, book-stall owner: “I voted for Brexit. There are too many foreigners here. It’s time we spent money on our own. They can come here and get benefits. That’s not right.” Will he vote Tory/Boris? “Like a friend of mine says, ‘I wouldn’t vote Tory so long as there’s hole in me bottom’.”

Janet, 84, retired office worker: “ I really don’t know what to tell you, duck. I’m sick of hearing about it. I wish it was over, one way or another. I voted to Remain. I just thought country had done OK since we joined. But now it’s all been such a mither, I don’t know. I’ve always been Labour. Do I want another referendum? Do I heck.”

I travelled two miles down Waterloo Road to Burslem, the so-called “mother town” of the Potteries – Josiah Wedgwood’s birthplace and the setting for Arnold Bennett’s Five Towns novels. Waterloo Road, incidentally, was immortalised by 1968 pop song of the same name written by two Stoke natives, Mike Deighan and Mike Wilsh.

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Its refrain was: “You’ll find what you’re looking for on Waterloo Road…” You won’t any more, unless you want to place a bet or buy a second-hand exhaust for your car.

Of all the places I visited in Stoke-on-Trent, Burslem was the most distressing. I remembered a lively little town with grand 18^th-century and 19^th-century buildings. The buildings survive but are mostly empty. Burslem has become a ghost town since the Royal Doulton works closed in 2005. Most production has emigrated to Indonesia.

Tracy, 50, used to be a dipper in the Doulton works. She now runs the Upper Crust cafe.

“Almost the only other place still open now are a bridal shop and Walkers’ pies,” she said. “It’s so sad what’s happened to Burslem. People would come straight out of Doultons and into town centre. Now they go online if they can afford to shop at all…”

Tracy voted Brexit in 2016. Will she vote in the election? “Yes, probably Labour. Always been Labour here (Stoke North). Don’t like Boris. I can’t abide the way his hair is… Many folks here will go for Farage, not because they like him but just because of Brexit and because he’s not Labour or Tory…”

***

When we were about to leave Washington in 1992, my son, then two years old, gazed at his empty home and said: “Put it all back. I want it all back.”

That’s what I felt about Stoke-on-Trent. Put it all back. Put back the bottle kilns. Put back the slag heaps. Put back Shelton Bar steelworks. Put back the missing districts of terraced houses.

One of the many tragedies of Stoke is that it has been rebuilt for the 20^th century, not the 21^st. There is a tangle of new dual carriageways; the roads are still choked; but the town centres, even the new shopping centres, are empty. Public transport is poor. Why no light rail or tram system?

I’m a fairly convinced pro-European but I understand (I think) why Potteries people have a sense of loss and betrayal which pushed them to vote Brexit.

I’ve spent the past year covering the French gilets jaunes protests. In provincial France you hear the same mixture of sound arguments and exaggerated conspiracy theories. “All the life and energy and pride has been sucked from our provincial towns… All the good jobs and the investment goes to the big metropolitan areas…We are being cheated. We are being laughed at…”

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Stoke’s vote for Brexit appears out of line if compared with other English cities (Manchester voted 39.6% to Leave, Liverpool 41.8%). It is explained by the fact that Stoke is not really a city. The Brexit vote in once proud, prosperous and independent towns on the edge of Midlands and northern conurbations — Wolverhampton, Bolton, Oldham, Rotherham — was in line with that in Stoke-on-Trent.

People in those towns also feel — rightly or wrongly — that they have lost out to or been robbed by London or bigger cities nearby which have successfully reinvented themselves for the 21^st century. A vote against Europe was, whether consciously or not, a vote against a modern world which passed them by. Part of that modern world was membership of the EU.

I can understand Stoke’s Brexit vote. It’s harder to understand why people might vote Conservative. Arguably, the Tories — whether Margaret Thatcher or David Cameron — have brought more calamity to Stoke than the EU ever did.

On the other hand, you have also to remember the many decades in which Stoke council was run by Labour. (It is now a coalition of Tories and independents.) In those years, the city did some things right. It also lost its way amid allegations of cronyism and corruption.

The Stoke results will turn on a few hundred votes either way; Brexit will weigh heavily in Johnson’s favour. Leaving the EU may give Stoke’s Brexiteers their fleeting sense of “victory”. It is difficult to see why it should do anything to revive the fortunes of The Potteries.

Beyond the observable, there is, of course, another shared characteristic: a history of sectarian bloodshed and violence which disfigured each of these most notorious of streets until the truce of the Belfast — or Good Friday — Agreement a little over 20 years ago.

It is possible to travel, as I did, from one to the other simply by navigating through a few residential streets — though be sure to go by day, for any nocturnal expedition is likely to be thwarted by the closure of steel gates at various crossing points between the nationalist Falls area and the unionist Shankill.

A so-called ‘peace wall’ — in reality an imposing separation barrier — also bisects these neighbourhoods. Curiously, the number of these structures has increased across Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement was ratified, and skirmishes are still a reality of life at some of the interface areas around the walls. Their presence serves as a jolting reminder that the old enmities haven’t gone away.

Yet, for all that, today’s Belfast is one in which an entire generation has grown up without the experience of bombs and bullets. In many respects, it bears all the hallmarks of a modest-sized contemporary European city at ease with itself — sections of it positively glisten with modernity.

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But take a stroll for a couple of hours and its past will inevitably make itself known to you. Not just that of the Troubles, but also Belfast’s place in history as a global industrial centre.

A museum dedicated to the Titanic was opened seven years ago on the site of the former shipyard where she was built, and the towering yellow gantry cranes, Samson and Goliath, of the still-operating Harland and Wolff shipyard dominate the horizon to the north. Reminders of Belfast’s heritage as a hub of the international linen trade — the city was once known as ‘Linenopolis’ — are also plentiful.

The city’s emergence in the 19th-century as a major port and industrial powerhouse brought with it the trappings that inevitably came with such status, the type of splendour that can still be seen today in the buildings that drip with Victorian majesty: Ulster Hall, Queen’s University, Central Library and the Grand Opera House, to name a few of the more elegant.

Today’s Belfast, though — as with other of our industrial cities and towns which during the days of Empire became the workshops of the world and reaped the benefits long afterwards — finds itself trying to forge a new future in the cut-and-thrust of a global marketplace devoid of the old certainties.

Northern Ireland itself is an altogether more global, more diverse place these days. In the decade between 2001 and 2011, the percentage of the population born outside either the UK or Republic of Ireland tripled, with many migrants arriving from countries granted EU accession in 2004. It is estimated that 30,000 Poles alone have settled here.

But for all the progress of the past 20 years, a new anxiety exists across this province — one arising from recent developments over Brexit, and in particular the deal struck between Boris Johnson and the EU.

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There is unease across much of the unionist community, which reckons the British government has sold them out. In most cases, these are Leave voters (the vote went 56%-44% in favour of Remain here, with the vote dividing conspicuously along orange and green lines). The plan to draw a customs border in the Irish sea will, as they see it, have the inevitable effect of weakening ties between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, and thereby calls into question the entire future of the union.

Three nights before my arrival, a hastily-arranged meeting, advertised as a “rallying call to all unionists” and attended by the alleged leaders of loyalist paramilitary groups, had taken place at the Constitutional Club in East Belfast. Reports suggest the place was packed to the rafters, with many expressing their fury at the “betrayal”.

One or two prominent figures have warned of a return to violence — though it is doubtful on this point that such voices are representative of the wider unionist and loyalist community. That said, the indignation is not confected and cannot be dismissed as mere posturing; it is plainly real.

I head to meet John McVicar, chairman of the Greater Shankill Community Council, at the organisation’s offices in the heart of the Shankill Road. This is staunch loyalist territory. McVicar tells me that he wasn’t in the least surprised when learning of the details of the revised Brexit deal. “After seeing Johnson and Varadkar cosying up, we always had the feeling that the government would ditch us,” he says.

McVicar believes that many in the unionist community are resentful at what they see as a “chipping away” by Sinn Féin at their sense of Britishness. “There is this incessant push by Sinn Féin for reunification. It makes people feel unsettled,” he says. The Prime Minister’s Brexit deal, he argues, has played right into the hands of the republican movement.

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But is this resentment likely to see a return to violence, I ask, citing the words of the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Simon Byrne, who recently sounded the alarm over the threat from dissident loyalists.

“I think Byrne’s talking out of his arse,” McVicar snaps back. “You’re sitting a few hundred yards from the site of the Shankill bombing [in 1993 the IRA blew up a fish shop, killing ten]. I can tell you that nobody wants to see a return to that.”

McVicar knows what he’s talking about. He survived a shooting attempt as a young man back in the early 1970s and still has flashbacks. He lost friends in the Troubles. His father, born in Scotland, served in the RAF in the Second World War before becoming a trade union shop steward. “I have little in common with people in Dublin,” he says. “I don’t say that to be antagonistic, but I have more in common with people in Glasgow, Birmingham and London. We’re part of the UK, and we don’t want special treatment in any Brexit deal. If that means we have to take a hit economically, so be it.”

He says his father taught him the value of compromise, though McVicar himself is no fan of the Good Friday Agreement and thinks politicians cherry-pick it to suit their own ends. “The front cover of the document had a photo of a family looking out from the Giant’s Causeway at a lovely sunset. Well, they were facing north, and everyone knows the sun sets over Donegal towards the west. So the Agreement was built on a lie from the beginning.” He pauses. “We were never all just going to kiss and make up.”

The popular John Hewitt pub on Donegall Street is owned by the Belfast Unemployed Resource Centre. It has a distinctly political, though non-partisan, theme: a portrait of the late loyalist-paramilitary-turned-peacemaker Gusty Spence sits rather incongruously alongside one of Gerry Adams on a wall adjacent to the bar.

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I join a group in a side room. Voluntary worker Anne, 60, is a Roman Catholic, not practising, just ‘cultural’. She was raised in the nationalist area of the city and voted Remain in the referendum. Although she thinks Brexit has probably brought the prospect of a united Ireland closer, she questions whether reunification will ever happen. “I think people here are political orphans,” she says. “Neither the British state nor the Irish state want us. Not really. I think lots of young people actually see themselves as Northern Irish above anything else. That’s probably a good thing.”

She thinks the DUP has overplayed its hand. “They should have voted for Theresa May’s deal. But Boris Johnson went to their AGM and won them over by criticising May’s deal. And now he’s sold them out.”

There is no disputing the DUP’s anger: it has certainly been scathing in its criticism of Johnson and the government. But where does it go now? It’s difficult to see the party, having supported Brexit for so long, suddenly start championing a return to the EU.

Joanne (not her real name), 37, grew up on a housing estate in a loyalist part of North Belfast, is on the Left politically and voted Leave because of the ‘undemocratic’ nature of the EU. She has little time for the old tribalism and is impressed with some of Sinn Féin’s ‘progressive’ policies, though critical of its ‘opportunistic’ position on Brexit. “They were traditionally in favour of leaving the EU, but now they suddenly support staying. It’s ridiculous. How can they argue for an independent Ireland while wanting to give power back to the EU?”

I ask whether she thinks violence will return as a result of Brexit. “No,” she replies emphatically. “It’s done. People just don’t want that stuff anymore.”

It is a message I hear time and again in this city. It seems that all but a few diehard recalcitrants desire a lasting peace and a future in which the ancient enemies don’t merely tolerate each other, but co-exist in a spirit of friendship and reconciliation. As ever, though, in Northern Ireland, the journey between word and deed is long, arduous and fraught with pitfalls. Here, even a dry and mechanistic matter like the particular nature of a customs border with the European Union can hold symbolic meaning and encourage people to retreat to their historical redoubts.

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The violence may have subsided. But it is obvious that the hard task of building a common good between two communities that still live largely parallel lives and have spent much of the past viewing the other as some kind of existential threat confronts this province as surely today as it ever did. The apparent inability to resolve the deadlock at Stormont is a sign of how the politics of entrenchment can still dominate here.

Out towards the east of the city is a mural dedicated to CS Lewis, a native of these parts. It is said that Lewis’s sadness over the sectarian conflict drove him to adopt an ecumenical brand of Christianity and in turn choose the title Mere Christianity – borrowed from GK Chesterton – for his signature classic on religion. Chesterton himself used the phrase to emphasise the need for Christians to elevate their common core beliefs over narrow doctrinal differences. There may be a lesson there somewhere.

Nobody to whom I spoke wanted nor foresaw a return to the ‘bad old days’. But neither is a lasting peace a nailed-on certainty. The people of this beautiful, scarred, enchanting, troubled land have for two decades been walking nervously across a room while holding a precious vase. And though the floor beneath them just became a bit more slippery, they remain determined to make it to the other side.

We met as the 48-year-old was clearing up for the day on his fish stall in Doncaster Market. “I hope Boris Johnson will sort it all out,” he told me.

Mitchell, like many in this town at the heart of South Yorkshire’s mining community, is a lifelong Labour voter. Yet he admits to liking Johnson, who visited the market earlier this month, where he bought some English plums and a cob loaf. “People here were very impressed with him,” he said. “The other MPs all want to line their pockets but Boris seems in it for the good of the country.”

Mitchell, who hopes fish prices will fall post-Brexit after seeing his margins badly squeezed in recent months, views Johnson as closer to ordinary folk than most Conservatives, despite his Eton education and fondness for classical quips. “Boris does not seem a Tory to me. In the past Tories have been all la-di-da and posh but he seems more down to earth, not really posh at all.”

Since the affable fishmonger was dismissive of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour, I asked if he would put his cross next to the Conservative candidate at the next general election?

“No, I don’t think I would vote Tory,” he replied. “I like the Brexit Party. They are very similar in views to the Tories and Boris, while Boris and Nigel Farage also have similar views. I’d like to give them a chance.” I told him I was puzzled by this, given his desire for Brexit and admiration for the Prime Minister. “I don’t really know why I couldn’t vote Tory,” he said. “Maybe the Tories just seem southern, while Labour is the Northern party.”

And here lies the pivotal issue for British politics as the prospect of an election looms over the divided country. For the Tories, bound so firmly to Brexit, need to win scores of seats in the Midlands and North to make up for heavy losses that are anticipated in the Remain strongholds of Scotland, London and the south-east.

But can they really make significant incursions in traditional Labour heartlands?

So I went to Doncaster — which voted 69% Leave; has comparatively low rates of immigration; and three Labour MPs — to explore whether the party of Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron has a chance of winning over Labour supporters infuriated by Westminster’s failure to resolve Brexit.

Tiffany Allen, 52, a mother of four who works in social care, votes Labour because “it has always been for working class people” and backed Brexit out of frustration with the decline of public services and bad government.

“We were just fed up with the country,” she explained, detailing to me how the care system had declined “disgracefully” over her 25 years working in the sector. “No-one can get anywhere. Work, pensions, the NHS – it all seems a bit rubbish these days.”

She shares the widespread disgust over Westminster that I heard again and again from all shades of opinion — but admires Johnson, despite saying he was a clown. “I’m cross with everyone else, but not him,” she said. “There’s just something I really like about him – it may be that he seems laid back, he speaks our language.”

Allen should be a prime target for Labour. She works in the public sector. She saw her wages drop when moving to Doncaster from Stockport three years ago. She is worried about the NHS, which is treating her mother with dementia and son with terminal cancer.

She even admitted to liking Corbyn at first — until the Labour leader refused to meet US president Donald Trump, which she thought demeaned his position. Now she has no time for him and does not believe he could fund all his spendthrift promises.

So the big question: could she bring herself to put her cross next to a Tory in the voting booth? “It is all bizarre – but I think I could cope with voting Conservative,” she smiled.

Such voters show how fast the tectonic plates are moving in our politics. They are the reason Johnson was willing to visit Doncaster — where former Labour leader Ed Miliband sits on a 14,024 majority —  at the risk of facing public anger over austerity. This shift was recognised by Johnson when warned by a rebel MP the Tories could lose Guildford, among the truest of blue seats with a majority of 17,040 in 2017, if they backed hard Brexit. “Guildford will have to go then,” the Prime Minister replied.

The election, assuming it arrives soon, will be coloured by Brexit and speed up the electoral changes seen in recent elections as the Tories twist towards older, poorer and less well-educated citizens and Labour woos middle-class, affluent voters.

My snapshot, an escape from London’s bubble to drill down into views of northern voters, was fascinating. It was not a scientific study — I merely talked to people around town — although a polling firm source said my findings echoed focus groups they held in the same area last week.

“All they care about is that the 2016 referendum result is respected,” said my contact, who was testing views of Leavers. “They see it as a north-south issue, with northern working class people wanting to leave and southern people trying to thwart them.”

In fact, Danny Dorling, a professor of geography at Oxford University, has actually found that while some northern towns voted heavily for Brexit the bulk of support came from southern English voters. But perception is everything in politics.

What I did find in Doncaster was widespread disgust with Westminster, immense distrust of politicians and intense dismay on all sides Brexit has not been resolved. “They should all be sacked – they can’t do their job properly,” said Paul Singleton, a forklift truck driver.

Not one person had anything good to say about Corbyn — and several lifelong party supporters were scathing, sometimes over minor issues such as refusing to bow to the Queen. Both Remainers and Leavers saw the party sitting on the fence over Brexit and spraying around spending promises that cannot be fulfilled.

This is astonishing for an area such as South Yorkshire, with its history of mining and municipal socialism. But my findings only underline polls showing Corbyn with the lowest approval ratings on record for an opposition leader, while Labour is level-pegging with the Liberal Democrats nine points behind the bitterly-divided Tories.

“It’s in my blood but I don’t know if I’ll vote Labour or not vote at all,” said Gaz Skoof, 38, a Remain-voting structural engineer from a mining family background. “It’s all just a mess, an embarrassment on the global stage. I’m fed up with it all.”

Skoof was contemptuous of Nigel Farage, who held a rally in Doncaster this month. Yet he did say that his father, who stood on picket lines during the 1980s miners strike, was likely to back the Brexit Party. “A lot of people will be swayed by them.” Indeed, a poll back in April had the Brexit Party down to win most votes.

When I asked Skoof about Johnson, he smiled before saying he admired his efforts on Brexit — highlighting the bizarre confidence many voters place in a politician with a record for duplicity, whose brief stint as Prime Minister has failed at every turn.

Yet not everyone is convinced. “I like Boris because he is quirky but I would not vote for him because he’s told  too many lies and fibs,” said Heather Stewart, a Labour Leaver who works in a pharmacy. “I don’t think he will deliver. I don’t trust him.”

Some responses I heard on Johnson echoed those I heard in the United States when talking to Trump supporters in states such as West Virginia: that he is different to other politicians, that he is selfless, that he talks their language. Others dismiss him as a buffoon, a clown, a joker. Clearly many people see every player in the Brexit drama and every twist in the debate through the prism of their own views, which only fuels the divisions and hardens attitudes.

And the stakes are high. David Smith, a Tory-voting health and safety official, said he would switch to the Brexit Party if Johnson failed to deliver on his oft-repeated promise to leave by October 31st. “I want a leader that keeps his word,” he said. Smith sees the stalemate as ‘parliament versus the people’ — and said many locals might vote Tory for the first time in their lives if Brexit goes through. “This is Labour heartland so it’s a big thing for them,” he said. “But if he fails, they will go to Farage.”

One local Labour source said voters might grumble about Brexit but most would stick with the party. “I notice on doorstep conversations that when you get them on to other issues, people say it is true, we are electing a government for five years.” Like many other northern towns, Doncaster was hit hard by austerity with council spending falling almost one-third since the Tories took office in 2010 despite rising social care pressures and above-average number of workless households.

Yet as Smith said, dumping Labour for the Tories is a big step for voters in an area such as this. For some, it is too big a leap — especially when the Brexit Party offers an alternative vehicle for angry Leavers to display their dismay over the deadlock.

Perhaps this struggle was best shown to me by Rob and Jenny, a couple in their fifties who I met as they left a supermarket. They are both lifelong Labour voters who backed Brexit, despise Corbyn and intend defecting to other parties. Jenny, a cook, said she would probably back the Tories since “Boris is trying to do his best”. But her partner was sceptical about his agenda, worried by Tory bickering, infuriated about immigration and saw Farage as “the only one who can get us out”.

Before we parted Rob repeated a now familiar refrain: voting for the Conservatives would be a betrayal of his background, having been brought up in a mining family in the colliery village of Denaby Main. “I can’t vote Tory – it is in my blood.”

Such complexities of heritage and outlook defy crude certainties of analysts, politicians and strategists. It makes predictions so uncertain as we struggle with the Brexit referendum fallout that is corroding constitutional and political norms.

Few would argue with Stephen Carling, 64, a palliative care nurse I met standing by Frenchgate shopping centre opposite the shuttered Thomas Cook shop as heavy rain fell on a grey urban landscape. “It’s a crazy time for this country,” he said. He told me he voted to leave. “I thought we were a strong country, we might have a couple of tough years but we’d get through. But I’d have voted to stay if I knew what I know now because people like farmers and small businesses are going to suffer.

“I think it will come to a second referendum — but I don’t really agree with this. They should just do what people the country voted for – and if they go against this, people will just ask why they should bother voting?”

It is foolish to draw firm conclusions from such a flying visit, especially given the volatility of politics and unpredictability of public opinion. Yet it is clear discontent is growing, democracy creaking and Johnson’s divisive strategy may be paying some dividends in unlikely places.

Will it be enough? I am sceptical. And his populist approach — pitting ‘the people’ against ‘parliament’ and ‘the elites’ — is extraordinarily high-risk as another Brexit deadline looms: for himself, for his party and for his fearful country already so lacking faith in its tarnished political class.

“None of them have a clue,” said former soldier John Hanson, 71, a Tory-voting Remainer from nearby Bawtry, who did five tours of duty during The Troubles in Northern Ireland. On this point, at least, I found agreement in Doncaster.

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It was here, in 1645, that representatives of King Charles I and his enemies among parliamentarians sought to hammer out a settlement to the English Civil War. The prospective Treaty of Uxbridge contained proposals that would see the king remain in power – though with his authority over the church, military and Ireland fettered. The wranglings lasted for just over three weeks. But, buoyed by recent military victories, the king saw no reason to give ground, so the talks floundered and the draft treaty went unsigned.

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Taking a dollop of satirical licence, and if you just substitute the current prime minister (who also happens to be the MP for these parts) for the monarch, it’s not much of a leap to see parallels with the political situation in Britain today.

Will Boris Johnson, emboldened by his own recent election success, show the same bravado as the old king in facing down recalcitrant MPs determined to prevent him from delivering Brexit? Will he go so far as to prorogue parliament if they obstruct him – just as Charles himself did in 1628 in a squabble over customs duties? Will he threaten to cling to power even if MPs express no confidence in his administration, thereby potentially forcing the real monarch to intervene? Johnson’s “Do or die” rhetoric of past weeks suggests he may do any of these things.

The constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, created in 2010 out of the old Uxbridge seat, was once deemed safe, if not rock-solid, Conservative territory. Between its two incarnations, it has returned a Tory at every general election since 1970. But things are suddenly less comfortable for the Tories here. In 2017, the seat saw a 13.6% swing to Labour and Johnson’s majority halved to just over 5,000 – the smallest for any prime minister since 1924. Labour needs only a 5.4% swing to win next time out, and is going all out to achieve it.

To add to the Tories’ woes, a recent report by the centre-right think tank Onward described the seat as ‘vulnerable’ because of its ratio of younger voters to older voters (the place is home to Brunel and Buckinghamshire New universities). Increases in the local ethnic minority population are likely to squeeze their vote further.

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Wandering around Uxbridge and South Ruislip, however, it is difficult to see it as anything other than middle-class suburbia: semi-detached and terraced 1930s houses with bay windows set along pleasant tree-lined avenues with well-tended grass verges – the type of place the London media is prone to forget even forms part of the metropolis. The denizens of these neighbourhoods are what some people might describe as ‘gammon’: mainly white, often of more mature years and well-to-do, and imbued with those small ‘c’ conservative attitudes that seem to provoke such ire in your modern-day liberal. There are pockets of a more gritty and working-class persuasion – the odd one-time council estate muscling its way in at the margins of the constituency.

It’s sort of Terry and June, but with Wolfie Smith lodging in a back room.

The number of benefits claimants is significantly lower than the average across the UK, and the high street seems, unlike many across Britain today, to bustle with activity and trade. Resistance to HS2 and a third runway at Heathrow – both of which will impact on the constituency fundamentally – is widespread, with many residents mildly irritated that their MP’s own opposition has been less than unequivocal. In fact, chatting to people here, it is obvious that the new prime minister cuts as divisive a figure locally as he does across the country.

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Thomas Moulstone is sitting outside Debenhams. “I quite like Boris’s ideas, but he’s a bit of a slob,” he says. He is a youthful 91 years old and has lived in Uxbridge all his life. “When you’re the prime minister, you should be smart.” As a former RAF serviceman, Thomas is probably inclined to take a dim view of anyone who dresses with anything less than crisp perfection. Perhaps surprisingly, he used to veer towards Labour, but has lost faith in the party over recent years. He sees Johnson as a careerist, though. “I’ve never seen him around here. It’s like he’s using this place as a stepping stone to bigger things.”

Thomas voted Leave and is frustrated at the failure to deliver Brexit. “The whole thing needs sorting out. Quickly.” I ask if the prospect of no-deal concerns him. “Not much point in worrying about anything at my time of life,” he retorts. A clear majority in the constituency voted for Brexit, though a YouGov poll last year indicated that voters here had switched to Remain.

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Don't scorn Boris's ambition

By Mary Dejevsky

“I think there should be a second referendum,” a local job centre worker, Ben Mabadeje, 30, tells me. He voted Remain. “I don’t see how we’ll survive outside the EU.”

His family, originally from Nigeria, have always supported Labour, but Ben says he might be prepared to give Johnson a chance. “I like his idea of an amnesty for migrants. We need the resources of these workers, even if they came here illegally in the first place. So I think Boris is right on that one.” He pauses. “Although he’s a shit local MP. Doesn’t do enough around here.”

The Tories are determined to ensure that Johnson does not become their first party leader since Arthur Balfour in 1906 to lose his seat. They will no doubt throw everything into protecting their star player. For its part, Labour has been co-ordinating a series of “Unseat Boris Johnson” days, and the grassroots organisation Momentum has promised to flood the place with activists.

The party’s twentysomething candidate, Ali Milani, has been making waves. His backstory – a local lad who arrived in the UK as an immigrant from Iran aged five and was brought up by a single mother on a council estate – will undoubtedly appeal to all those hostile to the Eton and Oxford elitism embodied by Johnson. But the odds must still be against a Labour gain here.

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That said, given the age of unpredictability through which we are living, there is no longer such a thing as a political certainty. And if Johnson chooses or is forced to call a general election before having delivered Brexit, anything becomes possible. At the European elections earlier this year, the Brexit Party took an estimated 30% of the vote across the constituency, so it’s not hard to see how Johnson’s vote might end up being squeezed between pro- and anti-Brexit forces.

I sense, however, that, for the moment at least, Uxbridge and South Ruislip is prepared to stick by Johnson and give him the chance to prove himself as prime minister. “Politics is a total mess. Someone needs to sort it out,” says Tracey Spencer, 47, who is shopping with her daughter. “Boris can’t do any worse than the others. I don’t mind him. He seems to be pretty normal. I mean, he’s sometimes a twat, but he doesn’t mind looking a twat, if you know what I mean.”

I find it difficult upon hearing these affirmations of support for Johnson to set aside my own personal antipathy for the man. I was at war with him five years ago when, while mayor of the capital, he imposed the most savage cuts on the London Fire Brigade in its history – and can’t quite bring myself to understand what others might see in him. I have always seen his bumbling, blundering persona as a cynical act – a diversionary tactic designed to deflect attention from his neoliberal, Thatcherite politics – the type that wouldn’t be welcome across large parts of London.

Past colleagues of Johnson’s have testified to this contrivance – most notably Simon Heffer who, in an excoriating piece written a decade ago, said the act was ‘finely-wrought’. Rejecting any notion that Johnson was a ‘buffoon’, Heffer wrote: “The act is calculated, and it has required serious application and timing of the sort of which only a clever man is capable.”

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Until now, the act has worked. But whether Johnson can carry it off in the ultimate role, where statesmanship and gravitas are demanded, remains to be seen. I suspect that many of the more old-fashioned Tory voters in Uxbridge and South Ruislip quietly disapprove of Johnson’s clownishness, his air of arrogance and messy private life – but are prepared to overlook these as the price for having what they consider to be the right man in place to sort out a national crisis.

In truth, it is hard to see Johnson being decapitated here. His apparently infrequent trips to the constituency suggest that he is confident he has the voters of Uxbridge and South Ruislip on his side. And his bullishness on the national stage suggests he is equally convinced he has a majority of the nation on board as the Brexit saga reaches its apparent denouement.

But, then, Charles I was probably infused with the same air of self-assurance when ordering his commissioners to abandon negotiations with parliamentary leaders at the Crown and Treaty pub. And look what happened to him.