Tories risk Boris leaving them a hollowed out party – stranded between the red and blue walls

This is Iain Martin’s newsletter for Reaction subscribers.

Well, this has been quite the week for the upending of assumptions. How the mighty are fallen, a bit.

“Boris,” a very senior Conservative who knows his politics told me early in the week, “is in such an unbelievably strong position.” Not a cloud on the horizon. Nothing touches him. Nothing sticks – until it does.

On Thursday, the voters of Chesham and Amersham in Metroland, in the semi-rurual, demi-suburbs outside London took a baseball bat to that notion and to the Conservative party’s majority there. A true blue seat is now a Lib Dem stronghold by a majority of 8,000 following a by-election.

There are a number of plausible theories about why it happened. Voter hatred there of HS2, the high-speed rail link that scythes through the seat but does not stop, looks like the main cause, as we say in this week’s Reaction leader. There could be something else going on in addition, though.

The valid claim made endlessly by pro-leadership Conservatives and others since Brexit, and particularly since Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, is that a cultural revolution is sweeping though British politics. The Tories have constructed a new coalition – echoing the party’s achievements in the late 19th century – that includes many working class voters in the North East of England.

It seems entirely plausible that some voters in southern seats have noticed this, what with them owning televisions and having access to the internet, and concluded they do not like the implication that they are on the wrong side of a divide and blamed for it. To those voters could the Boris Johnson Conservative party look arrogant, swaggering, contemptuous of legal and behavioural norms, incompetent, over-mighty, vulgar? You bet.

Without stretching the parallel too much, the expectation was that England would crush Scotland on Friday evening in the Euros. The Scots were given nae chance, even by Scotland fans like me. We’re used since the 1970s to it being the hope that kills.

Again, the mighty fell, a bit. Unexpectedly, the Scottish team produced a disciplined, impressive performance resulting in a 0-0 draw, or what we Scots, used to winning only rarely at Wembley, describe as a moral victory. English commentators were then mired in excessive gloom. 

England will go on to the next stage and may even yet win the thing. In contrast, history demands that we Scots will lose 4-1 to Croatia on Tuesday evening and crash out.

Officially, the Conservative defeat in Thursday’s by-election is a blip, on a freak 25% swing. Normal service will be resumed. Soon, everyone can go back to talking about how many elections Boris might win.

The risk for the Tories is that they become squeezed between the red and blue walls, or rather they get stuck in no-man’s land between the two.That means losing ground to the Lib Dems and the Greens in the South and Labour, at some point, elsewhere.

The cultish aspect of the Boris project is matched by his suspicion of new talent and an unwillingness to draw on those experienced enough to provide challenge. In this way, parties in power too long can get hollowed out. Cabinets remain weak and further down candidate selection deteriorates.

On policy, the appeal to voters in the red wall seats, formerly Labour, is predicated on “levelling up”. That is a very vague phrase designed to emphasise that there will be a lot of generalised Boris boosterism that magically brings jobs, regenerates high streets in towns such at Hartlepool and puts the forgotten parts of the North on a level playing field with Notting Hill, or at least Norbiton.

Number 10 is looking for ways to engineer this. The cerebral Neil O’Brien MP has been put in charge of the effort and told to come up with practical ideas. Perhaps this will succeed. It seems unlikely, though, to be a job done by the time of the next election in 2024. After decades in which the South has had such deep advantages, rooted in services, infrastructure, economies of scale and the City, the government will be lucky if it has made even the slightest discernible difference in the next few years. The opposition will say that false promises were made to the red wall and broken.

In the blue wall, it is not hard to see how the Chesham and Amersham effect spreads, if as is likely voters in prosperous seats get the message they now have a way to punish the government over plans to liberalise planning, or if they just dislike the populist tenor of the Johnson administration. Henry Hill of ConservativeHome detected this early, in the local elections earlier this year. The university-educated professional classes, mocked as the self-regarding, smug,  cognitive elite, tend to hate Boris and the Tories intensely. They’re out for revenge.

The backdrop will soon be tough decisions on public spending and higher inflation, leading to the rises in interest rates that will be required to check it. On Friday, US markets were spooked by suggestions that those rate rises are coming later this year, and not next year.

Of course, Labour’s travails give the Tories a huge advantage that may persist for years, regardless of by-election upsets. Sir Keir Starmer looks wooden and unconvincing. His stern demeanour is no match for Boris’s cheery chutzpah.

There is a glimpse of an opening though, a faint glimmer of hope for the opposition parties after eleven years of the Tories in power. If, that is, Johnson’s luck goes. In charging ahead, pursuing the dream of a historic realignment in the red wall, he has left the door ajar in the blue wall.