The by-election in Selby and Ainsty, 50 miles south of Sunak’s estate, is part of the reason why. Mention it to the attendees and they grimace. On Thursday, Labour will have a chance to overturn a 20,000 majority and lay the first meaningful stone in the path to a Tory electoral apocalypse. Two weeks ago, the race was compared to a coin toss. But since then, a great pilgrimage of shadow ministers and Labour activists has flooded the Yorkshire town, hoping to pull off the second-largest swing to Labour in electoral history. This would be the sort of decisive victory not seen in Selby since the days of the English Civil War, when a Royalist rout spelled the end of King Charles I’s rule in the North. The bookies now have them as favourites to win.

Selby, however, as both Labour and Conservative canvassers confess, is a “weird constituency”. It takes in pockets of poverty and comfortable Country Life villages. It is an area of contrasts and contradictions: a beautiful Norman Abbey within a stone’s throw of a high street garlanded with vape shops; a commuter belt to Leeds and York in the former industrial heartland once home to the most productive coal mine in Europe. A place where three-quarters of homes are owner-occupied, but the housing shortage and mortgage-rate crisis now make home ownership both untenable and undesirable. A place where you can find all of England’s problems and convince no one of their solutions.

For both parties, this is not just a by-election, but a chance to war game electoral machines for 2024. Labour see it as a zone of reckoning for a country fed up with Tory rule, and a chance to lay the ghost of Jeremy Corbyn to rest after their vote dropped here by 9.6% in 2019. The local Tory wisdom — and ready defence — is that if they lose the seat, it will be because their vote stays at home. But outside of the two major parties, Selby is also a place where we can observe, in the form of political rebels and strays, the two unresolved forces of British electoral politics: the disbelief in the power of politics to change things, and a hatred of Westminster.

Nothing sums up the latter like the circumstances which led to the by-election. The stroppy resignation of Nigel Adams — a Johnson lackey who departed after failing to get a peerage — “has pissed everyone off”, as one Tory put it. The constituents aren’t impressed either. “Good riddance, you shocking grifter,” read one of the kinder comments on a farewell post. The legacy of Adams, further tainted by his temporal association with the other more sleaze-orientated by-elections, has only contributed to a broad cynicism towards Westminster. Adams himself is now regarded as a political morality tale in the pubs of Selby: the local lad who went to London and got lost in its web in his pursuit of patronage.

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The Conservative candidate, lawyer and councillor Claire Holmes, seems eager to bridge that gap by talking up her “local connections”. But she already appears to have misread the mood of the constituency on housing.  There’s only so much she can say about the mortgage woes other than repeating the promise to cut inflation, but her pledge to protect “green spaces from inappropriate housing” was regarded as tone deaf in a constituency that can no longer rely on Nimbyism to form a winning coalition of voters. It was this comment that spurred a number of younger local Tories to abandon her campaign — “the sort of lazy politics that will stop anyone under 50 from voting for us”, as one senior councillor put it.

By contrast, Labour has seized upon housing in their campaign. Speaking in the Commons last week, Keir Starmer pointedly raised the case of a police officer from Selby forced to sell his home due to rising mortgage costs. And mortgage deals are coming to an end across the area as repayments rise by up to £400 a month. At the age of 25, the Labour candidate Keir Mather might seem perfectly positioned to court young voters stuck in the area and unable to get on the housing ladder. But — Oxford to public-affairs consultant via the office of Wes Streeting — he delivers his campaign video with the robotic flair of a sixth-former running for headboy. When I walk into his campaign office in the centre of the high street, full of students and the odd flat-capped local, Mather is whisked away into a backroom the moment I mention the word “interview”. It’s not hard to understand why. He is most effective when saying nothing and grinning weakly in front of a giant portable screen that reads: Conservative Mortgage Bombshell.

Both candidates are accurate personifications of their parties: the Tories’ an unimaginative clone; Labour’s an anodyne silhouette. Where they are concerned, the belief that “nothing will change” persists. But then there’s the array of political eccentrics who always come out of the woodwork for a by-election. Nick Palmer is one archetypal centrist dad who has gone rogue in the terraced suburbs of Selby. He is the closest thing Yorkshire may ever get to Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down. Striding from a delayed train into Selby, the independent candidate looks and speaks like he’s just had to sit through an entire series of Question Time. Armed with a clipboard with his LinkedIn handle scrawled in black Sharpie, Nick preaches a message of democratic breakdown and a system of “shit processes” from London, carried out by people “scared to have a conversation with people who’ll tell them to piss off”.

He nonetheless emerges as a canny soothsayer for the town’s misery. In a busy cafe near the station, he finds common ground with the clientele sipping cappuccinos as they gleefully watch a set of passing canvassers getting drenched in the rain. A clear “90% of the people who come in here won’t vote”, the cafe owner tells us. “Modern politicians have no power or control over the real decisions,” adds her husband. “So what’s the point?” 

One of the more coherent protest votes against Westminster comes from a former Conservative councillor now standing to establish a Yorkshire Parliament: Mike Jordan of the Yorkshire Party. Does he have anything more profound to say? “He’s more likely to say something profoundly fucking stupid,” a Tory member retorts. Behind this sentiment, however, is a quiet frustration. Jordan will be lucky to come fourth, but he represents a disgruntled Tory demographic. In a narrow race, the regionalist-populist energy he can attract and possibly harness is a potent minority view — one that Labour and the Tories cannot ignore.

The rosy-faced Yorkshireman tells me about his adventures in the Tory heartlands to the north of the constituency to garner interest in his vision for Yorkshire. “I spoke to one lady,” he tells me with relish, “who says this is the first time in 50 years she won’t vote Tory. She’s going to vote for me and Yorkshire instead.” When he took to the stage of the hustings, it took him only 30 seconds to deliver his message: “Voting for me is a chance to send a message to Westminster that Yorkshire needs to be thought about — and what are you gonna do about that, cock?” 

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It’s a straightforward message delivered in straightforward Yorkshire, but tellingly it’s being redeployed by both parties as a means to cut through the apathy. “No one on the doorstep is interested in what’s happening in Westminster,” says former policeman now Tory councillor Tim Grogan, fresh from campaigning in the key battlegrounds to the south of Selby. And taking power and money away from Westminster is about the only thing the Conservative Party has left to talk about up here, a localist stance that puts them in a strange alliance with Jordan. A new devolution deal has just been signed that will bring an elected Metro Mayor to York and North Yorkshire, in charge of £540 million in grants. But the push for more local power feels symbolic. It can’t stymie the disgruntled energy that drove Brexit — and which is now starting to turn its gaze towards Westminster in another effort to “take back control”.

We’re far from the Red Wall, but 60% of people here voted Leave. They feel the democratic deficit all too keenly. And nationally, Labour has tried to address this discontent, too, with their Gordon Brown-drafted “New Britain” constitution that promises a “radical devolution of power”, to “unleash the potential that exists everywhere in this country”. It is seen as one of the key components of Starmer’s reforming project, should he seize power. And much of the document reads like a Yorkshire Party rant condensed into polished policy prose. The irony with this, of course, is that this is likely to create more, not less, of the politics and politicians that everyone in Selby and Ainsty seems to hate.

Regionalism has frequently, and frequently lazily, been proffered to restore the discontented provinces to political equanimity. But devolution was overwhelmingly rejected by the North East in 2004; it’s hard to see that a Yorkshire “parliament” of Mike Jordans would satisfy Selby. One woman looks appalled when I suggest it. “The idea of some of the local politicians getting their hands on more power around here,” she says, standing outside Selby Abbey, “is, quite frankly, terrifying.” Whatever happens on Thursday, this mood is here to stay — a disquiet that all these candidates want to exploit, and none can bear to resolve.

True enough, it is as hard to associate Doncaster with the continuing glamour of Flying Scotsman as it is to believe that Diana Rigg — svelte star of The Avengers — came from there. Michael Parkinson said Rigg “radiated a lustrous beauty”; the same cannot be said of modern-day Doncaster, so close to prosperous and pretty York, one stop north on the East Coast Main Line. When it comes to the North-South divide, the latter, cosseted by tourism, doesn’t really have a dog in the fight, whereas Doncaster seems emblematic of all that has gone wrong in recent decades.

The Flying Scotsman symbolises happier times for Doncaster. It owes its existence to what a recent Doncaster Council document described as “the most significant example of levelling up in Doncaster’s history”. In 1849, the town’s Tory MP, Edmund Beckett Denison, persuaded the Great Northern Railway to extend its line north to Doncaster, and to move its works there. By the turn of the century, those works — known as “the Plant” — occupied 200 acres and involved 60 miles of sidings, some tangled with the mineral lines serving nearby pits. The GNR was not exactly philanthropic, as Rowntree’s in York was, but it did reach out to the town. It built two schools for its workers. It helped pay for the construction of Station Road, a handsome thoroughfare along which arrivals by train might saunter into town, past the Oriental Chambers and the Grand Theatre.

In those days, London needed the North. Coal trains left Doncaster hourly for the capital. And the town was a destination, not just a resource. Tourists came for the races, and ambitious young men came from all over Britain to take up apprenticeships at the Plant, including W.O. Bentley, who would use the skills he learnt building fast trains to build fast cars. In 1911, a large, intimidating Scottish aristocrat called Nigel Gresley arrived at Doncaster as Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Great Northern. He designed the star product a new class of unprecedentedly big express passenger locomotives, built to haul heavy, luxury trains at speed along the East Coast Main Line. It was named Flying Scotsman.

The engine is often described as symbolising all that was best in British engineering, but it also represented an early flowering of the nation’s Public Relations industry, becoming a pin-up in many beautiful posters. There would be Flying Scotsman paperweights, jigsaws, ash trays. The loco regularly hauled the train named The Flying Scotsman between London and Edinburgh, and anyone who turned up to find a different engine at the front would feel short-changed, as when an understudy takes the star’s part in a play. The Flying Scotsman had luxury carriages, including the Louis XIV-style first-class restaurant car, a cinema carriage and a barber’s shop, in which shaves with a cutthroat razor were offered and accepted — a tribute to the train’s smooth riding. All these trappings were created in the Plant.

Why all this manufactured glamour? Mainly because of competition for the lucrative London-Scotland rail market, but also because of automobile competition. In the Thirties, people would be unlikely to drive from London to Scotland, but they might take a charabanc from York to Scarborough, and the LNER hoped its mainline publicity would add lustre to its local services, for which it adopted the tell-tale slogan, “It’s Quicker by Rail”.

While they were nationalised, in the second half of the 20th century, our railways were increasingly menaced by the rise of the automobile. Investment would be followed by retrenchment, indulgence by hangover, and in 1958 British Railways fell into the hands of a Transport Secretary succinctly described by Christian Wolmar, in his history of BR, as “a car man”. Ernest (‘Ernie’) Marples drove a Jag. He co-owned a company that built roads. He appointed Dr Richard Beeching, a physicist, to take a “scientific” approach to BR, which, not very surprisingly, turned out to mean cutting the network by a third.

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Diesel and electric locomotives would be outshopped from Doncaster over the next 30 years, but trains had lost their primacy. The propaganda surrounding the Beeching cuts characterised railways as a second-class mode. They lost their sheen and so, therefore, did Doncaster. Marples was a Conservative, but Labour was half-hearted in opposition to his policies. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, Doncaster’s Labour Council capitulated to the motor car, just as similarly-hued councils did in Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford. If you emerge from Doncaster station today, you see an artwork celebrating the town’s locomotive-building history, but all you can hear is the traffic of the town’s inner ring road, constructed in 1970, which creates a barrier between the station and the town.

Doncaster, like most Northern towns, is uglier than it used to be. Elegant Station Road was obliterated by the construction of a huge shopping centre with five levels of parking above it. The only survivor is the Grand Theatre, which stands derelict opposite the station, a great white haunted house. Along the pedestrianised High Street, formerly the Great North Road, attractive premises that once housed grand banks and coaching inns are occupied by fast-food outlets, charity shops, barbers’ shops offering “Haircut £6”. In Doncaster’s most beautiful building, the Minster, I spoke to a local man in his eighties.

“There aren’t more than a couple of really good shops left on the High Street. Fifty years ago, they were all good, and you had some railway first class menswear shops and tailors.” (He was very well-dressed.) When asked how long times had been hard, he said: “I’d date it back to the pit closures.”

Unlike many other places that started to lose their mines in the late Eighties, Doncaster had railways to fall back on. But it suffered a more complete loss of machismo after it made its last loco in 1987. Today, the town retains what the council calls its “diverse railway cluster”, which employs 7000 people, 2000 more than the old Plant. But whereas everyone knew what went on in the Plant, the cluster is mysterious. No one person seems to have the complete list of its tenants. There’s the iPort, for example: an “intermodal rail terminal” signified by a mass of containers visible a couple of miles south of Doncaster on your right from northbound trains. Some containers are brought from abroad including, it is rumoured, by a train that comes via the Chunnel from China. Near the iPort are giant, blank-faced warehouses: Amazon distribution hubs. Doncaster has the dubious honour of being the only place in the UK to have three of these. A woman who works in a Doncaster café said to me: “Today, Donny is a distribution hub — don’t ask me what’s being distributed.”

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Admittedly, there is a good deal of railway-related activity within the cluster. But this being modern “British industry”, many of the names are foreign. Wabtec Rail, an American-owned firm, refurbishes rolling stock at Doncaster. And there’s Volker Rail, a Dutch railway infrastructure company. The foreignness of the cluster is typical: of the 30 or so train operators in Britain today, only half a dozen have British owners. Professor Paul Salveson, a railway expert, says the Doncaster scene exemplifies “the willingness of British governments over the last fifty years to relinquish engineering — the idea that we don’t need to make things”.

Was this an ingredient in the overwhelming support for Brexit? All the towns in Yorkshire except the three most prosperous — York, Leeds, Harrogate — voted to leave the European Union, Doncaster by 69%. In a pub in the city centre, a local explained that people supported Brexit “because they thought something might change”. When asked what had changed, he said: “Nowt.”

But Doncaster’s economy was actually growing faster than the regional average pre-pandemic. Construction — some undertaken on the territory of the Plant — played a part: Doncaster is being regenerated. And it remains an important railway centre, both for passengers — six lines radiate from the town — and the industry. But the glamour is gone. As for the Scotsman, it pursues its whimsical afterlife. Having been saved from scrapping in 1962, it was owned by a succession of rail enthusiast-millionaires — two of whom it bankrupted. They ran it all over Britain until 2004, when it was acquired by the National Rail Museum — located, of course, in lucky old York.

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In his book, Parallel Lines, Ian Marchant wrote that there are two railways in Britain: the railway of romance and the railway of reality. The latter, he added, was “largely shit”, and here might lie an opportunity for Doncaster. Our privatised railway is fragmented, with its separation of track and train operators, its multiplicity of ever-changing brands and liveries. Unlike The Flying Scotsman or the LNER, it is unknowable, and this is reflected in the anonymity of the Doncaster railway lands.

Great British Railways, the state-owned body expected to take over the nation’s industry, will supposedly fix this problem, providing a central “guiding mind”, and a more integrated network. What with the energy crisis and the recent political turmoil, the Bill to create GBR has been postponed. But the location of its headquarters is expected to be announced in 2023 even so. Doncaster made the shortlist — and it seems by far the most deserving candidate among Birmingham, Crewe, Derby, Newcastle and York.

There is no grand panacea for the sites of former industry. Steps to a better future will mostly be incremental. But occasionally there will be strides. Victory for Doncaster might top even the arrival of the Great Northern Railway as an instance of real levelling up. The city would unequivocally be a railway place once again — an even better thing to be in 2023 than in 1923, perhaps, given the newly recognised environmental kudos of rail. Skilled workers would flock there once more. There would also be intangible benefits: restored pride, an escape from the melancholic retrospection. And perhaps the starry locomotive will have assisted. Doncaster’s pitch for the role contained a killer line: “We built Flying Scotsman”.

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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