Conclusion – Hartlepool and Westminster

‘Boxing in Hartlepool started on the beach at Seaton Carew, where the fighters fought bare knuckle.’

STEPHEN RICHARDS, AUTHOR OF BORN TO FIGHT1

The seafront of Seaton Carew on the County Durham coast was more than bracing. Over the May bank holiday weekend, it was cold, overcast and wet. The promenade was littered with police protection officers, Conservative party activists and perplexed bystanders enjoying an early fish and chip lunch. Three days before the people of Hartlepool voted to choose their next MP, Boris Johnson made his third sojourn to the industrial town to campaign in a by-election that helped answer the question posed at the start of this journey: was the collapse of the red wall a confluence of Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn? Or was it reflecting a structural change in how England votes?

Hartlepool was not on the Tories’ radar during the 2019 election; it was deemed ‘too far out of our reach’, according to one strategist. Yet Labour’s majority still dropped to 3,595, and had it not been for the 10,603 votes taken by the Brexit Party, the Tories might have taken it. Peter Mandelson, who served as its Labour representative from 1992 to 2004, told me he felt it would have gone blue had it not been for their presence. The resignation of Mike Hill as the incumbent MP on 16 March prompted one of the most closely watched by-elections in years. Such contests are either local knife fights or a barometer of the national mood. Hartlepool had the honour of being both: its remote location – thirty minutes’ drive from the nearest large settlement – creates a sense of disconnection from the rest of the Tees Valley and County Durham, never mind the rest of the country. The national significance of the campaign was in what it might tell us about the future of the red wall.

At midday, the prime ministerial motorcade pulled into the car park, Range Rovers with blue sirens, and Johnson leapt out onto the campaign trail. With Jill Mortimer, the Tory candidate, he paced up the seafront in his trademark blue suit – sans coat, despite the weather. He was mobbed. Soon, the traffic piled up as every car stopped to point and shout, ‘Boris!’ He was the Pied Piper in the middle of a hurricane. He asked each voter he stopped to talk to if the party could count on their support. Bar some who were uncertain, every one answered in the affirmative. No one said they were backing Labour. The response was unlike any I have seen to any politician on the campaign trail, in any election: dozens of Hartlepudlians wanted selfies and elbow bumps with the prime minister. You cannot imagine David Cameron or Theresa May eliciting such a response.

A little later, Johnson arrived at the Surfside Fish Bar, a short drive away, for a quick-fire round of interviews. Throughout these, he downplayed expectations for polling day – pointing out that no Tory had been elected in Hartlepool since 1959. When quizzed as to why he was back here if there was little chance of winning, he joked, ‘Unless you hear otherwise, assume I am in the north-east.’ He’d been dogged by a series of headlines about donations to redecorate his Downing Street flat – but Johnson told the collected journalists he thought voters had more important priorities. He was in a chipper mood. As we sheltered from the gale with Americanos for our one-on-one interview, he launched into his own explanation about what happened in 2019. ‘There is a change, I hope that there is a long-term change, because people understand that the Conservatives are now on the right agenda.’

That agenda is levelling up, a term that Johnson started to use the morning after his election victory in 2019, but one that has remained a source of confusion in Whitehall. Civil servants, ministers and even some close to the prime minister were uncertain about what it meant. He admitted, ‘I’ve got lots of people in Downing Street for two years saying, “Levelling up? Nobody understands what that means.”’ Yet his experience on the doorsteps suggested people are starting to appreciate it. ‘I think people do intuitively understand it. It doesn’t mean you don’t think that London isn’t the greatest city on Earth. I do. But it means that you go for the whole thing.’

Johnson harked back to his pre-parliamentary roots as Mayor of London as the inspiration for tackling regional inequality. ‘Of course I’m a believer in the City of London.’ He reminded me that throughout the financial crisis, he supported the sector ‘through thick and thin’, once going as far as to declare nobody ‘stuck up for the bankers as much as I did.’2 He went on, ‘I also think that the agglomeration effects of London – the mass transit systems, all those are amazing – we’ve got to keep investing in them.’ For the first and not last time in our conversation, he expressed his dissatisfaction with his Labour successor, Sadiq Khan. ‘I think it’s a disgrace that the mayor hasn’t done Crossrail Two, his performance on Crossrail has been abysmal. He’s done no new river crossings, he’s done virtually nothing.’ Voters seemed to disagree – Khan was re-elected with a thumping mandate in May 2021.

One of Johnson’s notable traits is a desire to be liked, and to be a unifier. It was striking how often he mentioned his love of cities and delivering for the red wall did not require zero sum decisions. ‘I’m a believer in a giant metropolitan economy, I love it and I’m a creature of it. The insight that I had when I was running London was that politicians can drive change. You can and it takes leadership. It won’t just take national leadership, it’s going to take local leadership.’ With passion rising, he stressed the importance of mayors. ‘When you have a visionary local leader, who is running an operation that has got to be clean, it’s got to be fair and it’s got to be progressive, but when it’s passionate about that area, nothing can stop it.’

By far the most notable statement the prime minister made was on economics. Zarah Sultana, the left-wing Labour MP for Coventry South, was criticized by her party colleagues in January 2020 for decrying ‘forty years of Thatcherism’, which piled together the New Labour years with the Conservative governments that came before and after.3 Yet Johnson offered a similar criticism: the UK’s economic model since Margaret Thatcher came to power has not worked and needs refreshing. ‘The Treasury has made a catastrophic mistake in the last forty years in thinking that you can just hope that the whole of the UK is somehow going to benefit from London and the south-east. There is potential for everyone, but there isn’t the same opportunity.’

Levelling up is the new model, but how exactly would he define it? Johnson, once again in full rhetorical flow, said it was about ‘unleashing the potential of everybody in the whole country’, especially the ‘brilliant kids growing up across the whole of the UK, who simply don’t have the same quality of education or opportunity as other kids.’ He felt that such inequality was not only ‘unjust’ but also ‘economically dumb’. ‘That’s why as a free-market conservative I object to it so much. It’s just stupid. This place, Teesside, is bursting with ideas – it’s the same for everywhere else in the UK. But you look at the attainment gap, it is huge.’

Johnson conjured up a verse from the Bible, St Mark’s Gospel, about the importance of creating the right conditions for learning: ‘For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.’ If this gap is not changed, he described the UK’s economy as ‘solar systems moving in different directions’ that will result in a ‘total waste.’ Again, he returned to how he believes he delivered change in East London following the 2012 Olympics, even if some of the gentrification priced out poorer residents. ‘Look at what we did with the Olympic Park in East London. You know where had the fastest rise in property values in London when I was mayor? It was Walthamstow, it was Waltham Forest, East London, it was Stratford. It’s all about giving people the belief that they can make a change. That’s what I hope that the people of Hartlepool want.’

Is he at all concerned that the pandemic, which occupied much of his first eighteen months in office, has neutered his aspirations for the red wall? And did it expose greater problems in the fabric of British society than we knew existed? Johnson said it had ‘made some things easier’ in the sense that issues were ‘revealed more clearly’ – such as social care and the need to reform the NHS. Coronavirus also proved costly to the whole economy, with an additional £300 billion added to the public debt by May 2021.4 Yet the prime minister felt it would not temper levelling-up ambitions: ‘I don’t think so and I don’t think it should.’

Johnson did not think the Tories will have to make a choice between holding their new seats in the north and traditional leafy strongholds in the south. ‘We will be fighting for every seat’ – as you would expect him to say. He argued that levelling up is important for the whole nation. ‘The level-up agenda is right for the seats in the south. If you’re a liberal, relatively affluent, one-nation Conservative, do you think your long-term prosperity is going to be more effectively secured by building a country where people across the whole of the UK feel happier, more involved, with better life chances? Or do you think it’s going to be better if you just continue with the current approach of the last forty years, or the post-war approach?’ He said bankers and financiers were ‘brilliant’ and ‘clever’ people who realized that ‘the long-term health of our economy depends on us changing now’. Johnson returned to his core theme of economic change. ‘We cannot continue with this model; it’s not right and [change] will bring greater prosperity to the south-east, not less.’

He will measure success in levelling up by three metrics. ‘It is skills. It’s going to take a while, it will take ten years, but it’s skills. It’s quite a lot of infrastructure. And you’ve got to find local leadership. That is [Ben] Houchen not [Sadiq] Khan. You need local leaders who take responsibility, don’t blame and who have pride.’ His peroration on his successor as London mayor continued. ‘I mean, when do you ever hear Sadiq Khan say that London is the greatest city on earth? When do you ever hear him say what a great, fantastic place London is?’ Khan does actually talk up London in his own way. Days after he was re-elected as the city’s mayor, for example, he said, ‘London is in my blood: and it’s a privilege to serve the city that has given me everything’.

The red wall Tories I met on my journey are not your typical free-market Tories, who worship the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher. Yet Johnson said he did not see an ideological clash ahead, insisting his free-market credentials were as strong as ever. ‘The freak that I am, because I want people to have agency, I want people to have control, I want people to be able to run their own businesses and run their own lives.’ He added that he was still eager to pursue deregulation. ‘There’s lots of regulations we can do better with and have less of.’

Did Johnson feel that the Tories are unnecessarily stoking ‘culture wars’, turning movements such as Black Lives Matter into wedge issues to create a dividing line between Labour and its traditional voters? He certainly did not think that, but described the idea of challenging Britain’s history as ‘totally bananas’. Banging the table hard, he said, ‘I believe in putting statues up, not tearing them down. I think on statues . . . it’s so ahistorical and so barbaric. It’s iconoclastic and dumb. Why would you do that? I get very impatient with this stuff and I think it’s fundamentally bollocks.’ Instead, what he felt mattered more was ‘opportunity’.

Recalling the scenes on the beach front, I asked why he felt he was so personally popular with working-class voters, despite his Eton and Oxford background. Was it that he was seen as an unconventional political insurgent? After running his hand through his mop of hair several times, Johnson said, ‘Look, it beats me.’ He appeared to be on the cusp of revealing more, before restraining himself. ‘It’s not about me, this is about this country.’

Outside the black door of Downing Street after his 2019 victory, Johnson proclaimed of the first-time Tory voters, ‘Those people want change. We cannot, must not, must not, let them down.’ He intended to demonstrate that trust had not been misplaced with tangible changes to public services. ‘I’m going to show that we did build forty hospitals, that we did recruit 20,000 more police, that we did recruit 50,000 more nurses,’ stressing each area of spending. He went on, ‘But much more profoundly than that, I’m going to show that we got Brexit done and we delivered the change that we thought we could, through a £640 billion infrastructure programme. We’re revolutionizing skills. We’re going to tackle social care. We’re going to do all the big things that the government set out to do.’ He admitted that ‘some of it won’t be at all easy’ to deliver on, but he felt that by 2024 – confirming that he had no intention of calling an early poll, as some in Westminster have predicted – ‘people will be able to see a great project of uniting and levelling up is underway.’

Johnson also fleshed out the argument of what could be his 2024 re-election pitch: vote Labour and the UK will slide back towards EU membership. ‘I’m going to level with you,’ he said firmly. ‘We’ve got to keep it going because I do think the risk is if we were to be stopped, if we [the Conservatives] were to be pushed out, the whole thing will slump back . . . we will be back into half of the things of the European Union before we could say it. I’m serious about things we’ve been able to do: the freeports, the vaccine rollout, scuppering the Super League’ – a reference to several English football clubs ill-fated plans to join a European Super League, which collapsed under pressure from fans, his government and beyond – ‘I can tell you this: those European clubs, as soon as they heard of the UK government’s new powers of visa and curbs. Game over. We couldn’t have done it in EU law.’

Shelley, Johnson’s harried operations manager, appeared smiling over his shoulder – our time was up. Johnson drained the last of his coffee, donned his black face mask – complete with Number 10 logo – and re-entered the media scrum outdoors. After more selfies and arm bumps with the bemused lunchtime diners of the fish bar, the prime ministerial motorcade whizzed off to his next stop: the market village of Yarm in Stockton, where he paced the slippery cobbles to campaign for Ben Houchen, the mayor of Tees Valley. Another traffic jam was caused on the high street as the pair scuttled from pavement to pavement under umbrellas.

On 6 May, the voters of Hartlepool confirmed they wanted the change Johnson spoke of. Jill Mortimer was elected as the first Tory to represent the town in a generation, with a landslide victory. It marked only the second time in forty years that a sitting government won a by-election. Thanks to another brick out of Labour’s red wall, Johnson’s working majority rose. And Ben Houchen, who delivered the first indication the red wall was collapsing in 2017, was re-elected as metro mayor in the first round with a remarkable 73 per cent of the vote. If there was any further evidence that a structural realignment in British politics was taking place, albeit aided by a successful vaccination programme, these two results were it.

After leaving the prime minister’s entourage, I walked back through Hartlepool town centre to the Roker Street car park for another wind-blown conversation with one of his foes. Angela Rayner was notionally in charge of Labour’s campaign for the 2021 local elections, and is a rare example of an authentically northern working-class voice in the party’s upper echelons – the sort of figure they lacked during Ed Miliband’s leadership years. Rayner made her national reputation during Corbyn’s leadership as an effective shadow education secretary and stood for the deputy leadership when he exited the stage. Although she endorsed Keir Starmer’s left-wing rival Rebecca Long-Bailey for the leadership, the pair appeared to be the perfectly matched duo: north and south, clipped tones and broad Mancunian, male and female, university and further education.

In an enthusiastic chat, Rayner painted the duo as one unit, waging an intense battle for the party’s future. During the 2021 election, she reported that voters were pleased with the progress under Starmer’s ‘New Management slogan’, but felt they still had ‘a long way to go’. She continued, ‘The truth of it is, me and Keir took over just a year ago. If you look at where our results were in 2019, it’s very clear that people were angry, the core Labour vote.’ In what she called the party’s foundation seats – its former heartlands – some progress in rebuilding its reputation had been made, despite the pandemic. ‘A lot of people are starting to give us the opportunity to speak to them again,’ she said. Although Rayner was re-elected comfortably in her Ashton-under-Lyne constituency in Greater Manchester, her majority dropped from 11,295 to 4,263 votes. She recalled the campaign, ‘Sadly, I got a grilling on the doorstep. It was not just specifically Jeremy [Corbyn] or Brexit, it was all of those things accumulated, so people said, “You’re just not listening to us.”’ Addressing those feelings that Labour wasn’t listening was the focus of her efforts around the country during the local elections.

Much of Rayner’s conversation with me was dominated by her assiduous loyalty to Keir Starmer and praising how he had moved the party on since 2019. She spoke warmly of his ‘strong Labour values’, defined as ‘principles of fairness, principles of a hard day’s work for a good day’s pay, all of those things that bind us together.’ She praised his work as opposition leader throughout the pandemic, especially for ‘pushing the government on things like making sure that we’ve got the support for business and furlough, making sure our kids have got the support they need in education. He’s been constructively trying to make the government better and improve things.’ Although her job and the opposition leader’s were ‘very difficult’ in the circumstances, she felt Starmer had proved ‘he wants to govern in the interest of the whole country.’

Just days after we conducted our interview, she was abruptly sacked by Starmer as party chair for her role overseeing the 2021 local elections, where the Tories scored a hat-trick of Hartlepool, Tees Valley and the West Midlands mayoralties – as well as picking up control of dozens of councils, unheard of for a party a decade into power. Labour made some gains, including the directly elected mayors in West Yorkshire, the West of England and Cambridgeshire, but they were overshadowed by yet another internecine war over who was to blame for the party’s problems in the red wall.

Rayner used Starmer’s name twenty-one times during our chat and consistently praised the Labour leader, arguing that his stature would counter the ‘strong personality of Boris Johnson after the public had more opportunities to know him. I’ve got a huge amount of respect for Keir.’ The pair were not close before 2020, despite being elected to Parliament in the same year and concurrently serving in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. But once he became leader and she was elected deputy, Rayner was won over by his ‘very strong, very dependable’ personality. It may be the opposite of Johnson’s emotional image, but she argued Starmer could be trusted by voters of all ages and demographics, as well as having a personality she felt ‘needs to come out. Keir’s not the oversharing type and I think that, as the public get to know Keir, they will fall in love with him. They’ll feel he’s the sort of guy that you definitely want running the country.’ Despite the abrupt demotion, she remained Labour’s deputy leader, with her own mandate from the membership.

Labour’s biggest challenge, in Rayner’s view, is to earn the respect of the electorate and rebuild the lost ‘emotional connection’ that she sensed had disappeared in 2019. ‘We’ve got to the point now where people are saying, “Okay, we’ll let you in the room”, and it’s a question now of tentatively proving that we’ve got the right answers.’ She also felt that the party was too self-critical and wasted its energies on critiquing the New Labour years. ‘I refuse to condemn the Blair years when they gave us education, Sure Start centres. Gordon Brown helped many single parents like me when I was growing up.’

Some in Labour have exhausted themselves trying to argue that Boris Johnson’s Tories have been in power for a decade and should shoulder the blame for the changes in society. Rayner has picked up on this and put it down to ‘very different’ messages. ‘The Conservatives have been in power since 2010, yet they reinvent themselves every couple of years. Every time they get a new leader, it’s like “nothing to see here”. Boris Johnson is going around the country saying “we’re putting 20,000 police on the street”; they literally took 22,000 police officers off the street! We’re the complete opposite of that. We tend to beat ourselves up about the things that we wanted to achieve or that we haven’t achieved.’ In too many instances, she thinks the Labour movement ‘set the standard and bar so high that sometimes even our membership can’t reach it.’

I put it to Rayner that, based on her background, she would now demographically most likely be a Conservative voter. How did that make her feel? She responded, ‘I don’t blame the voters for going Tory’, and attacked those in the party who argue ‘it’s the voters that are the problem’. But nor does she think people in the red wall are now automatically Tory supporters. ‘I think the voters want to come to us, it’s that we prevented them from doing that. I don’t think they’ve all suddenly just switched to the Conservatives.’ When quizzed on what will draw these people back to Labour, Rayner said it would not be a platform of slogans and platitudes. ‘It’ll be a programme that will change things the way the Labour movement did after the war; in the way that the Tony Blair government did in the late 1990s . . . raising the country all together and making sure that education is important, that business and prosperity across the whole of our country is important, and bringing people together.’

Rayner, who has vied with Boris Johnson at the parliamentary dispatch box, thought that voters would punish the prime minister on his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and Brexit. ‘He’s had the slogans, but at the end of the day, we’re seeing the situation in Northern Ireland, which is very worrying and concerning. Ask any business that works across the EU and they’ll tell you that the promise the government gave is not what they’re currently delivering on. This is not about whether you agree with Brexit or not, this is about the genuine promise that was made to the people in this country and the inadequate way in which the government has been able to perform.’ Although many of the effects of Brexit had yet to kick in by May 2021, there was no indication of a voter rebellion coming to pass.

The levelling-up agenda, which sees cash being pumped into seats like Rayner’s, is not something she is concerned about, dismissing the spending efforts of the government as ‘jam tomorrow’ that would not tackle the structural issues. ‘You can say you’re going to give a little bit of money here. But if that money, like the Towns fund, doesn’t actually come down to people being able to get the skills, get those jobs, then people in the north, those towns and cities will get more and more frustrated.’ She is especially concerned that social mobility will be hampered until such reforms take place. Rayner cited the example of Durham University, and asked me how many working-class kids from the city attend. Having spent three years there, I can confirm the answer was very few. She cited the same problem with the BBC’s relocation to MediaCity in Salford. ‘That’s wonderful it came to Salford, but how many people move from London to work in MediaCity versus how many of the kids from Oldham got jobs in MediaCity? Unless you deal with a structural inequality, which we’ve seen grow, then actually all you’re doing is putting a nice shiny building in a town for people that are already doing well and will continue to do well.’

The overwhelming sense I had of Rayner was a politician especially hungry for the power to change people’s lives. ‘I’m not in this to lose the next general election. I have watched over the last ten years – and certainly since I’ve been in Parliament – time and time again the government does things that damage the area that I grew up in,’ she said, with passion rising in her voice. ‘That has rolled back the opportunities for the kids, put kids in poverty again. I used to be on free school meals, I used to sit on the kerb and wait for my mates to come out after they had their dinner. And over summer, I was so upset.’ Rayner was reprimanded for calling her fellow Greater Manchester MP, and fellow interviewee in this book, Chris Clarkson, ‘scum’ in a heated debate during the pandemic. She did not think the language was un-parliamentary, and was upset. ‘I thought we’re going back there again and leaving kids starving. I don’t want to watch that anymore. I do not like being in opposition and I’m not in this now to be the deputy leader of the Labour Party in opposition. I mean to be the deputy prime minister.’

Rayner concluded by reiterating her core message: ‘What myself and Keir have been very clear on is that the number-one priority for us is the voters. We want to be in power, we want to change people’s lives for the better.’ Whether the Rayner–Starmer coalition continues until the next polling day will be the test of that. Hopping back into the Mini for the last time, I left Rayner to return to the campaign trail and made the journey south to the place where Rayner dreams of holding power: Westminster.

It was time to meet two final figures, among the most prominent in British politics, and who will both be key protagonists in the fight over whether the red wall stays blue, or whether Labour can rebuild it and reconnect to its lost heartlands. The first stop was a building I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about in my role as the Whitehall Editor of the Financial Times: the Cabinet Office. By far the most inscrutable Whitehall ministry of the British state, it emerged a century ago out of a necessity to connect the more established ministries – it’s the lubricant for the machinery of government. Based in a grand white building on the corner of Whitehall and Downing Street, its physical location symbolizes its power and importance. Its chief occupant under Boris Johnson’s government, Michael Gove, is crucial to his government’s mission. As well as delivering the UK’s full exit from the EU, his department was tasked with reforming the civil service and overseeing the shift of 20,000 officials out of Westminster within a decade. The parts of levelling up that require the British state to function better were entirely in his purview.

In his large office, decorated with a handful of ornate oil paintings and white armchairs that could have belonged in a charity shop, I reminded Gove of a conversation we had at the start of the 2019 election campaign. On a train back from Birmingham, where the Conservative Party had launched its election campaign, I was collecting beverages from the buffet car after an extremely long day. I was greeted by heckling from the other end of the carriage, and found the source to be a third of the Cabinet. One of those present was Gove, who was especially excited about the impending campaign. I asked him then which seat I should look out for that no one was watching. ‘Redcar’ was his response, which duly went Tory for the first time in 2019. When I reminded him of this, he confessed it was mostly a fluke guess. In his quirky Scottish accent, he described the ‘euphoria’ of the 2019 election night results. ‘I was sitting next to Dawn Butler [a Labour shadow minister] in the ITV studio when I heard the news, so I had to maintain an impassive facade. But I could just see out of the corner of my eye the spad team dancing in the corridor outside. I didn’t quite believe it. I only really believed it was true when I had the Blyth Valley result.’

Gove did not spend much of the campaign in the north of England, but recalled a remarkably warm response in the East Midlands seats of Chesterfield and Bolsover. ‘The doorstep conversations were almost exactly what you might have dreamed of; in attitudes towards Corbyn, in attitudes towards Brexit, in attitudes towards Boris.’ He felt they were so positive that it could have been a set-up. ‘I wasn’t sure whether or not I could believe that it was true, because it seemed as though I walked into a stylized voxpop designed to boost our morale.’ He put Brexit as the primary issue that drove voters towards the Tories, but argued it was tightly linked to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. ‘While the [Westminster] bubble knew about Corbyn’s real views in 2017, it wasn’t sufficiently credible with voters. When we were critical of Corbyn for IRA links people thought, That’s ridiculous, that’s incredible, no Labour leader would do that, this is clearly made up. Then, by 2019, there was more than enough information about the type of leader he was for people to think he’s not really Labour.’

The difference between 2017 and 2019, for Gove, was the Labour Party’s unstable Brexit position. Whereas in Corbyn’s first election the party was ‘skilful’ at not presenting itself as seeking to overturn the result, while also being ‘a vehicle for Remainer anger’, it was not able to strike such a delicate position two years on. ‘The twists and turns of everything that had happened in Parliament meant that Labour’s role, collectively through Corbyn’s position, was seen as enigmatic. It was impossible to see Labour as anything other than seeking to block and frustrate.’ The Tory message that people ‘just wanted it done’ was crucial, in his view. The recurring view Gove heard was ‘“We’ve given our views, we’ve explained what it is that we wanted, and you’re just not listening.” But again, I think it’s impossible to disinter the importance of each specific thing.’

Much of the Cabinet Office’s capacity in 2020 and 2021 was dominated by the coronavirus pandemic. Gove was one of the Cabinet ministers involved in the key decisions about lockdowns, procurement, vaccine passports and equipment. He was often seen as one of the more pro-lockdown voices in the Johnson government, with some of his more authoritarian instincts contrasting with the prime minister’s innate libertarianism. The experience of the pandemic made Gove believe that the state needs to be more ambitious in tackling inequalities. ‘I think, if anything, the ambition is sharper because of the need to demonstrate in short order that a difference is being made. I wouldn’t say that it’s easy, quite the opposite,’ he said. ‘What Covid has also done is draw even sharper attention to some of the inequalities in society, and therefore placed more of an onus on the government to address them.’

I put to Gove the economics question raised throughout the road trip: has the liberalism of the David Cameron–George Osborne era disappeared? And, similarly to Boris Johnson, does he believe that the Thatcherite consensus of the last four decades has ended? His response was as stark as his party leader’s: ‘I think we’ve got to focus upon fiscal prudence, but what we can’t do is pursue an ever smaller state.’ Keeping the state small has defined the Tory Party in recent history. He put forward the view that Johnson will be ‘a more traditional Tory’ in his economic thinking. ‘For quite a lot of the Tory Party’s twentieth-century – and indeed nineteenth-century – existence, it had close links with business but it wasn’t a purist economic Liberal Party. Obviously we’ve got to do lots of stuff to bring the budget into balance over time, but I don’t think that we will be pursuing a Thatcherite federal economic reconstruction.’

His view on delivering ‘levelling up’ mirrors that of many Tory MPs: small, tangible changes in people’s lives will be proof that the Johnson government is delivering for them. ‘A little can go a long way,’ as he put it. ‘The most important thing is care and attention to the specific concerns of those communities. That doesn’t necessarily require massive investment, but it does require thoughtful investment and working with businesses and individuals in those communities.’

As the Cabinet minister for education and justice, as well as a brief spell as chief whip, Gove was a core part of the project to modernize the Tory Party, until he fell out spectacularly with Cameron over Brexit. With hindsight, and the party’s newfound ability to win majorities after the election, he felt that an image problem developed during its return to government in 2010. ‘One of the things that was more harmful for the Tories was not necessarily trying to bring the budget under balance per se, it was the perception that we were a party of the rich and the south.’ He added, ‘The point was made that the people who had missed out from Tory modernization were the working classes, however they’re defined. And Brexit provided an opportunity for that breach to be healed.’

With the next election in Johnson’s eye for 2024, Gove suggested that the cultural split is going to create significant structural issues for Labour in the future. Although 2019 was ‘a uniquely capricious set of circumstances’, he argued, ‘I think parties of the left across the Western world risk a preoccupation with identity politics and risk being the echo chamber for a particular alliance of academics, public-sector professionals, human rights lawyers etc. And so it has proven more difficult for parties of the left to combine a working-class base with a traditional social democratic intellectual element.’ He rightly noted that the traditional left-wing parties in France and Germany are suffering from the same issues in keeping their traditional working-class base on side, while seeing the ‘hipster intellectual’ element of the party’s agenda being taken over by the Greens. ‘My hunch is that, while Keir Starmer understands much of this intellectually, and many people in his team do, they don’t appreciate this in the way that Blair did; that you have to reorient your party until it hurts.’

Gove was also disparaging about Keir Starmer’s efforts to keep both sides of the Labour coalition happy. ‘I think if he attempts to square the circle, he won’t succeed. It’s the lesson of all oppositions, that you always have to go further in renovating your party than you think.’ He also argued that the Joe Biden example, which has been mentioned by several Labour figures during my journey as an aspiration, does not translate to figures within the party. ‘Notwithstanding everything, [Biden] has authenticity because of his background. The squad [a reference to four especially liberal congresswomen who have campaigned to take the Democratic Party leftwards] – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez etc – didn’t dominate the [2020 US election] campaign in the way that they might have done. And then Trump was Trump. So the irony is that he assembled a particular coalition that perhaps the other Republicans wouldn’t have been able to.’

Along with Johnson, Gove was the central figure in the Vote Leave campaign, the spokesperson who gave the cause more intellectual authenticity. With the UK having formally exited the bloc in January 2021, he believed that the identity divide would last, even if the particular issue of Brexit had less significance. ‘One of the problems that Labour has with Keir – as he was an obvious standout candidate – is that he was someone who was so clearly and strongly identified with the battle against Brexit.’

Whitehall is one of London’s most famous roads, separating Parliament from the civil service, MPs from officials, and power from opposition. On the Embankment overlooking the River Thames, Norman Shaw South stands as one of the grandest buildings in the Palace of Westminster. Once home to Scotland Yard, it was converted into offices in the 1970s for MPs, with the second floor dedicated to a hallowed suite known in Westminster jargon as Loto, or the Leader of the Opposition’s Office. It is a place where many Labour leaders have devoted decades to plotting a path across the road to Downing Street, only to find their plans thwarted by the small matter of the electorate. The corridor to the conference room overlooking the River Thames was lined with mid-century election posters. ‘Let’s go with Labour and we’ll get things done’, one proclaimed. Another screamed out ‘You know Labour government works’. Nostalgia, perhaps, for an era when the party won elections.

Sitting opposite me at a long oak table, Keir Starmer launched into his reflections on what went wrong for the party in 2019. Freshly out of Prime Minister’s Questions, his tie was gone and a pair of grey glasses were balanced on top of his iPhone. As one would expect of a former head of the Crown Prosecution Service, he was clear and articulate in talking about his despair at the result. ‘We’d lost heavily to everyone everywhere – including seats that were held for many, many years – so I thought it was devastating for our party and our movement.’ Unlike some in the party, he appreciated the size of its trials. ‘As the days and weeks emerged after that election, I began to appreciate the scale and extent of the challenge that we had ahead.’

Starmer was not surprised by the result, but was taken aback by the scale of the party’s collapse. ‘We were behind at the polls and it was always a challenge and we had real issues on the doorsteps. But the scale of it was a shock . . . for the Labour Party to have the worst result since 1935 should be and was a shock.’ Although we were speaking primarily about the red wall, he was eager to point out his party ‘lost everywhere across the United Kingdom’ – in the east, south, south-east, Wales and Scotland. Labour ‘lost heavily and badly’ and his chief concern was that the party should not turn inwards. ‘One of the things that it’s very important for a party to do when you lose that badly is not look at the electorate and say “what do you think you were doing?” but to look at your own party and say “what were we doing?”’

During the 2019 campaign, Starmer visited over forty constituencies and found four ‘strong themes’ on the doorstep that were to blame for the 2019 result: ‘Jeremy, as leader of the party; Brexit; the manifesto, which people felt was overloaded, promised too much which couldn’t be delivered; and antisemitism.’ In some parts of the country, concern about antisemitism was more prevalent than in others, but he said there was ‘no denying’ those issues dominated the campaign. ‘If anybody says they weren’t the four issues I’d question how many campaign doorsteps they actually went to. Because whether they’re fair or not is secondary. We’ve got to be honest about what the issues were.’ He acknowledged that factions have their own reasons for emphasizing different parts of what went wrong. ‘People will have their battles as to whether they think it was Brexit more than it was Jeremy, whether it was antisemitism more than it was the manifesto. Actually, it was probably all of them taken together, where there was a quite a deep sense of “you’re not listening to us”, and “you’re not presenting us with a credible offer for the future.” We have got to recognize that defeat in 2019 was down to us, not the electorate, and therefore that listening needs to be good and hard.’

But Starmer agreed there were structural and deeper issues that contributed to the party’s failure to win in 2019. He argued that the slightly longer-term view of the decade since Gordon Brown was ejected from office was crucial. ‘I’m very mindful that we’ve lost four elections in a row. This was not an election where everything had been going fine for a decade and suddenly we were confronted with this inexplicable election defeat.’ He rightly identified that around the red wall constituencies, there were harbingers of seats that flipped. ‘Even within those seats, our vote had been declining, although there was a bit of that up to 2017. But the bigger political questions are: what’s happened over that ten-year period? What have the changes been? How’s the Labour Party responded or not responded to them? While we can have our internal battles about what the primary factor was in 2019, that’s probably not as important a question as what’s been going on over the last decade.’

Although he used ‘red wall’ frequently in our conversation, Starmer said Labour had to be careful in using catch-all terms. ‘Whenever I’ve tried to get underneath the skin of what the change is, what the political issue is, then I see in those seats something that I also see, actually, in other parts of the country. If you go to eastern England, if you go to some of the coastal towns, go to Plymouth and places like that, the emotion that I think was driving certainly the 2019 election and the referendum is not dissimilar across the country.’ I pointed out to him the clear demographic and political trends that separate the red wall from the rest of country, but he felt that Labour’s problems needed to be seen in a national context. ‘I think it is probably wrong to say, “here’s a band of seats which are unlike other areas in the United Kingdom”. Certainly, when you look at other towns around the United Kingdom, southern England, coastal towns, parts of Wales, arguably, the same emotion is there.’

There was much of Ed Miliband’s view of the world in Starmer’s outline of what produced their defeat in 2019, and why people voted for the Conservatives as their route for change. ‘One [factor] is, very strongly, Britain isn’t working for us, and you’re not listening. That is a very, very strong driver – whether it’s the economy that’s not working for people – we’ve got a short-term economy, low wage, low standards, low productivity, low investment, not working for millions of people – whether it’s public services, which aren’t working for people, whether it’s the health service. There’s a strong sense of “it isn’t working for me”, and “you’re not listening to me”, a frustration, almost, of “I can’t influence this”.’ That feeling manifested itself during the referendum, where Starmer was firmly on the Remain side. But he explained, ‘I never underestimated the power of the phrase “take back control” and the emotion that that triggered. Because obviously there was the referendum question, which was membership of the EU or not, but there was the deeper question, which is almost a referendum on the state of Britain.’

During the Brexit wars, Starmer was seen within the party as one of the chief proponents of adopting a second referendum. Does he offer a mea culpa for a policy position that, judging by almost every conversation I had during the tour, played a major part in the party’s 2019 defeat? ‘There’s no question that came up in the red wall. It was one of the issues on the doorsteps,’ he said wearily. ‘It’s fair to point out that it came up differently in different parts of the United Kingdom. You didn’t have to campaign for very long in Scotland to realize there was a different read out there, or in other parts of the country.’ That may be true, but the explicit issue of Brexit was problematic for the red wall. He admitted, ‘Was it a factor? Yes. Did it impact on the result? Yes, it did. Do we need to accept that Brexit has happened? Yes. We do.’ He explained this was why he whipped Labour MPs to support Boris Johnson’s withdrawal deal after the 2019 election. ‘I was not so much thinking about the election result in 2019, I was thinking about the election in 2024 or 2023, whenever it may be . . . it is very important for the Labour Party to be able to speak to the country then and say, “If you vote Labour, it will make for a better Britain and therefore we will make whatever this arrangement with the EU is work.”’

After his election as Labour leader in April 2020, Starmer had intended to travel the country to the areas where the party lost. He did the same after the 2016 EU referendum, visiting Hull several times. With a sly dig at his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, who gathered thousands of eager young supporters to his rallies, he said, ‘Whereas some Labour leaders like to go to places and be surrounded by Labour supporters, I wanted to go to places where people were going to say, “I did vote Labour and don’t vote anymore.” We tried, by and large, to make sure that we didn’t have too many Labour voices. Unfortunately, due to the coronavirus pandemic, these visits had to be virtual.’ He was eager to hit the road in the summer of 2021 to do these exercises in person, but even through Zoom he was struck by the emotion of those speaking to him on these calls. ‘I could almost see them asking the question, “Is he listening to me?” It wasn’t fierce arguments about Brexit, or the manifesto or even the Labour Party. It was a raw thing: “Is this fella now leading the party listening to me?”’

I put to Starmer that many of the red wall seats do not resemble a scene from Billy Elliot. The rise in private housing that I saw in North East Derbyshire, or the new industries in North West Durham, has made them structurally more favourable to the Tories. He agreed there had been a significant economic transformation since deindustrialization and that Labour had to find ways of connecting with these voters. ‘It is certainly true that people [in these parts of England] have got good jobs in manufacturing or whatever it may be; highly skilled, good jobs and some increasingly decent housing. But there are those that haven’t and they sit side by side, you can almost see it in those communities.’ Labour’s standard message appeals to those who have not benefited from the changing nature of these seats, but Starmer is also set on winning over those who are better off. ‘For those that have got a good job, are skilled, have aspiration – real aspiration for themselves and their family, which is a great thing – I feel the Labour Party hasn’t been talking to them for the last five years. In other words, we have not been clear enough that we are a party of aspiration and opportunity, and that aspiration and opportunity are a good thing.’

Starmer referenced his personal backstory as an example of what that message should look like: ‘Look at me. My dad worked in a factory, my mum was a nurse. And it was their greatest pride that their son went off to university and became a lawyer and then ran the Crown Prosecution Service, now an MP. That is the story of Labour.’ He went on to cite how Labour’s three successful periods in power were defined by such a message: ‘1945 was aspiration, opportunity, building a better Britain. Then you had the 1960s with Wilson, and when he was talking about a better Britain he was saying “the white heat of technology is all about how Britain can be better”, once we understand and harness this technology. Blair, as well, was saying, “Britain can be different, it can be better”, and we’re only going to win if we are able to say we’re optimistic about the future.’

This tied into Starmer’s view on patriotism, and why he has embraced Tony Blair’s stance on the issue. ‘People seem surprised when I say I’m patriotic, but actually it is a belief that your country is fantastic and can be better that lies deep within politics.’ I took the opportunity to put to Starmer two comments about Labour’s cultural split with the red wall. First, I recalled the two men in the Doncaster pub who said the image of him taking the knee in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement was proof that ‘he hated white people’. Starmer’s response was to decry the ‘characteristic’ of the last decade of looking at politics through what divides people. ‘What’s the difference between the town and the city? What’s the difference between urban and rural? What’s the difference between black and white? What’s the difference between old and young? What’s the difference between the manufacturing and the service worker? And you see in it America, you’ve seen it here, and it’s toxic.’ Instead of being split on cultural issues, he said that what most people were seeking to hear from Labour was about economics. ‘They wanted an economy that works better than the one we’ve got. Almost everybody agrees with that. And they want quite big changes to the economy. So there are really uniting factors. And if you look at the last twelve months of the pandemic, what we’ve seen there – not much good comes out of a pandemic – but one thing is the solidarity, the looking out for each other, the empathy, the values and emotions that have been buried pretty deep in the last ten years.’ I pointed out that trying to win elections with emotion alone, as Alan Milburn argued in Burnley, is impossible. He disagreed. ‘I do think there is a stand-back moment where we say, if all we do is pick away at what divides us, what makes us different, this group over that group, then we’re going nowhere.’

The second cultural point I put to Starmer was Tony Blair’s argument that Labour, while still supporting the sentiment, should not subcontract policies to movements such as Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, MeToo and trans rights groups. His curt response was, ‘I certainly don’t think we should outsource anything to anyone as the Labour Party; we have confidence in our own arguments and have confidence that we’re a party that can pull people together.’ But he went on to say that Labour under this leadership would never ignore injustices and inequalities. ‘If we shut our eyes to that, we’ll be making a huge mistake. The question is, how do we make that a unifying argument and an argument about a better future for all of us? That is the single biggest challenge that we face as the Labour Party.’

Starmer will face a formidable opponent at the next election. Boris Johnson has moved the Conservative Party into new terrain that will see government spending and investment on a scale Labour would traditionally propose. His belief is that the government will fail to deliver on levelling up – or to use a phrase he trotted out at PMQs in the early months of 2021, ‘the mask will slip’. The prime minister’s words and actions ‘don’t very often match up’, and Starmer thinks this will provide Labour with an opening. ‘What people are hearing about levelling up is a big agenda that will genuinely level-up people and communities and Johnson will not deliver on that.’ For emphasis, he said it again: ‘He will not deliver on that.’

Why not? ‘If you’re going to level up, you’ve got to tackle the difficult issues in the economy, you’ve got to be prepared to tackle the short-termism of the economy head-on. People say “Oh, well, isn’t there a bit of big economics going on?” What the government’s done in the pandemic is, understandably, put quite a lot of money into supporting businesses. That wasn’t a change of ideology. That was a necessity caused by a pandemic. You’ve seen that across the world, including across Europe, in the sort of global ideological shift that happened in about March, or on 23 March in this country last year – this was the economics of necessity.’

But what if Johnson does deliver? What if the first-time voters in the red wall do feel their lives have been improved by voting Conservative? Is it not a high-risk strategy to base your chances of electoral success on someone else’s failure? ‘Now, obviously, we’ll see how that plays out over the next few years. But with Johnson, it’s action versus words. Words are easy.’ He pointed to how the government has looked to wind down the state’s largesse as the pandemic has seemed to ease. ‘The chancellor’s first question is, “How quickly can we withdraw the support that we’ve got?” Compare it with other countries, where the support is going on for longer. The uplift in Universal Credit isn’t going to be there, the council tax for families is going to be imposed, the pay freeze for those in the public sector. These are not the hallmarks of a government that’s had an ideological shift towards changing the fundamentals of our economy.’

With the loss of the Hartlepool by-election, the wolves on the Labour left began to circle and doubts were raised about whether Starmer would even make the next general election. When I departed from Loto, with Starmer off to a Zoom call with activists, he insisted that the party’s direction would be entirely set by him. ‘Going back, whether it’s Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, or all past leaders – and I talk to them all, it’s important to talk to them all – what happens next in the next few years is down to this Labour Party, this leadership and the team that I’m leading. We’ve got to do this from first principles, going forward.’ As I walked back through the Norman Shaw building to my desk in the parliamentary press gallery, I wondered if I had just met the next prime minister, or another Labour leader who would try and fail to get his party back into power. After 6,000 miles, over 120 interviews and dozens more conversations, plus three coronavirus lockdowns and one bout of the virus, the latter felt more likely than the former.

Before I set off on this journey, I had a few preconceived ideas about how permanent the electoral changes in 2019 would be. I would not have devoted almost two years to researching this book if I assumed the Tories’ triumph reflected a one-off fluke, contingent on a very particular set of circumstances in which Britain found itself in December 2019. Without a doubt, a structural change has taken place in how England votes, and it is not yet over. As politics continues to polarize, reflecting the Remain–Leave lines, more potential gains will open up for the Tories, while the identity challenge for Labour will become even trickier.

The strength of these factors is abundantly clear throughout the ten constituencies on my journey. In every place, in almost every single conversation, Labour’s stance on Brexit and the unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn were top of the list of why the party lost its fourth election in a row. Combined, they handed Boris Johnson his eighty-seat majority, aided by a particularly effective Conservative campaign and a chaotic Labour one.

Had Labour taken a different stance on Brexit, entering the 2019 election without a second referendum attached to the party’s manifesto, Johnson’s message of ‘get Brexit done’ would have been far less effective. And had Labour not entered the campaign with a leader who failed to connect with most of the electorate, voters would have been less open to Boris Johnson. These contingent issues, however, are structural too. Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership was delivered across the Labour movement – MPs, activists and trade unions all endorsed him to be the leader.

It is impossible to separate out the issues of Brexit and Corbyn, as the two became intertwined in voters’ minds. Corbyn’s equivocation on the EU question was one of the most notable examples of his poor leadership. Alan Johnson was correct to argue that the greatest missed opportunity for Labour was after the 2017 election. Within the disrupted, uneasy parliament that followed, there was a majority for a softer Brexit, but the circumstances never existed for it to emerge. Labour MPs in pro-Brexit seats professed publicly to be committed to delivering on the referendum result, but the majority, in the backs of their minds, still harboured hopes Brexit could be stopped. Had senior Labour figures all firmly committed to delivering on the referendum result, I remain convinced Theresa May would have done a deal. There would have been a terrific political fallout: ardent pro-EU campaigners in Labour may have split off into the Liberal Democrats; some hardline Brexiters in the Tories may have gone the other way and formed a new force with Nigel Farage. But it may have propped up the red wall for a little longer, and given Labour the opportunity to rebuild its standing.

The prevarication was disastrous. The intellectual vacuum around Corbyn’s Brexit policy paved the way for the People’s Vote campaign. After the referendum, Labour’s initial message to its pro-Brexit voters was the right one: it would implement the result and campaign on their behalf for the best deal. Further back, however, there is little doubt that the referendum itself was very damaging for Labour. The disconnect that grew between the party leadership and its traditional supporters – starting with the rise of UKIP – was forced into the open. The 2016 referendum was the first time that millions of the party’s traditional supporters went against their historic family attitudes towards politics. In many ways, the referendum acted like a bleach on their prejudices towards the Conservative Party.

When the furore of the Brexit years has settled and the events of 2016 to 2020 can be reflected on from a distance, the referendum will be seen as more disastrous for Labour than the Tories. The collective nervous breakdown of the Conservative parliamentary party during the Theresa May years was acute and very public, but it was rapidly resolved. Under Boris Johnson, the party has become the Brexit party and its voting coalition has reflected that. What happens to the pro-Remain Tories, especially those in the south-east of England, could be the next major story in English politics. The policies Johnson will have to enact to deliver on his pledges of delivering fundamental change to the red wall will cause consternation in what could be termed the ‘blue wall’ – the Home Counties. The Liberal Democrats are the natural force poised to seize this opportunity; their combination of pro-EU attitudes and social liberalism are ripe for progress. But whether their leadership and political nous are up to beating the Tories in Tunbridge Wells is unclear.

My road trip across the red wall could not possibly cover every inch or speak to an equal sample of voters. But thanks to the pollsters Opinium, I conducted a comprehensive survey of forty first-time Tory constituencies – including Hartlepool – to examine the themes of the road trip, and my sense of structural change was reflected in a wider analysis of how voters feel. The data affirmed the feedback and overall conclusion of my journey: the parts of England that voted Tory for the first time in 2019 have no regrets and, in some parts, have become more Conservative.

Conducted at the end of May 2021, as the country was emerging from the third coronavirus lockdown, the poll put the Conservatives on fifty per cent of the vote share in the red wall – twelve per cent ahead of Labour and up three percentage points from their nationwide result in the 2019 election. There was no indication of voters changing their minds since the last general election: eighty-six per cent of Tory voters from 2019 election said they remained happy with how they voted.

Fifty-nine per cent of those polled had voted Labour in the past and we probed why these former supporters had gone elsewhere. Jeremy Corbyn was the most common reason (which should be heeded by his supporters who claim that the leader was actually popular in the country), followed by Labour’s stance on Brexit – both for its lack of clarity and for being seen as anti-democratic. But the variety of other responses are telling about Labour’s challenges in winning back these voters, particularly on the issue of leadership. This is a selection of the comments from the 800 voters polled:

– ‘At the moment, they are not credible. I dislike the stance they seem to have taken of just disagreeing with everything the government does during the pandemic. It seems to just be for the sake of it.’

– ‘Became too left-wing, London-centric, youth-focused and spending policies became truly crazy.’

– ‘Didn’t like the way they were going. Didn’t like the party leaders or their policies.’

– ‘They have lost touch with what they stand for and they do not represent my own views any more.’

– ‘They no longer represent people like me. They are a joke.’

– ‘My political beliefs have changed since I was a teenager.’

– ‘They are woke and racist against the white people of the UK and want to replace us with ethnic minority groups.’

– ‘They do not like anyone who is employed.’

– ‘The way they spent money I felt was wrong.’

– ‘No leader of the party [was] strong enough or who I trusted enough to deliver.’

– ‘I got more for my money with a Conservative government.’

– ‘How Labour ran the country.’

– ‘Distrust in their ability to run the country.’

– ‘Party values, permitting terrorism/terrorists.’

– ‘They have lost their direction and connection to the working classes.’

– ‘Weak policies on immigration, human rights, judicial system. Inability to balance the books.’

The number one reason that would persuade voters to back Labour again was a ‘better connection with working people’, cited by twenty per cent. Fourteen per cent said they would back Labour again if it dropped some of its more left-wing policies, such as widespread nationalization of industries, while an equal number said they would never vote for the party again. Thirteen per cent said that new leadership or a ‘greater emphasis on British values’ would entice them back to the party.

Tony Blair was right in his deduction that a lack of leadership on cultural issues has created a consensus that is not reflective of where the party’s voters are. Half said that historical statues of those involved in activities such as the slave trade should remain standing. A quarter felt that plaques should be added to explain their links to the slave trade, with only eleven per cent supporting their total removal. But Labour’s schism is that while a clear majority of Conservatives want statues left as they are, a third of Labour agreed with them and another third wants plaques added. And sixty-two per cent stated the Conservative Party was patriotic compared to just thirty-seven per cent for Labour.

On the question of leadership, Boris Johnson outstripped Keir Starmer in every category – often with substantial leads. Overall, the prime minister had a +18 net approval rating for his leadership while the Labour leader was -18, a large gap that Starmer will have to reverse if he has any hope of winning the next election. Forty-eight per cent said that the Tories under Johnson are better at ‘standing up for Britain’ compared to twenty-three per cent Labour under Starmer. Thirty-nine per cent back the Tories for ‘representing your values’ compared to twenty-eight per cent for Labour. Johnson’s Conservatives had a twenty-six-point lead ahead of Starmer on running the economy. The parties came closest on the issue of improving the NHS, where the Tories are five points ahead of Labour.

Despite the missteps of 2020 and 2021, the government emerged with a positive rating for handling of the pandemic in the red wall: fifty-four per cent state their approval. Twenty-nine per cent also said that coronavirus has improved their view of Boris Johnson, although forty per cent said it has not changed their past views. Unsurprisingly, the UK’s vaccination programme has emerged with a glowing endorsement: three quarters approve, including two thirds of Labour voters. All of the positive endorsements of Johnson and the Tories should be viewed through this lens, the glow of the vaccine programme will eventually subside.

Emerging from the pandemic, the top priority for the red wall was more job opportunities. The second priority was better local health services and tackling crime. The other issues – improving high streets and better skills and retraining – were cited as lower priorities. But there was widespread pessimism about the economic progress in the past and future. Over the last decade, forty-three per cent think their area has become poorer but only twenty per cent think their area will become richer over the next five years, although the numbers are significantly higher for Conservative voters. Remain supporters are also more downbeat about the future. And overall opinion on Brexit was balanced: thirty-five per cent think it will not make their local area better off, but forty per cent think it will – including six in ten Conservative voters. Nonetheless, a mere seven per cent felt that leaving the EU has already made them better off.

The most fascinating responses were on the question of which prime ministers have had a positive or negative impact on the respondent’s local area. Given that he is fresh in voters’ minds, it is no surprise that Boris Johnson emerged as the figure having the most positive impact on a local area – the only individual to have a net positive rating. The two least popular figures were the least charismatic prime ministers: just ten per cent felt John Major had a positive effect on their area and fourteen per cent for Theresa May. Gordon Brown did not fare much better either, with only fifteen per cent believing he had a positive impact on their area.

Strikingly, red wall voters jointly placed Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher in second, with twenty-three per cent believing they had a positive impact on their area. But the divisive qualities of Thatcher persist: many felt she did good things for their communities but a significant part of the electorate felt otherwise, including thirty-two per cent of current Conservative voters. The party that adored Thatcher as a modern-day icon is not the party’s voting base today, which explains why Boris Johnson has had no qualms about forswearing her free market outlook and defined a levelling up mission to tackle some of the long tail effects of her deindustrialization policies.

A structural change has taken place. The Hartlepool by-election was evidence that the Tories could indeed win once Brexit was delivered and Jeremy Corbyn was no longer leader (or even in the Labour Party). It is important to recognize that the collapse of Labour in these seats did not suddenly arrive in 2019. In some the erosion of those massive majorities from 1997 has been gradual. In others, a wave started in 2010 and grew in each election over the coming decade. First it touched the classic marginal seats in the Midlands, like Nuneaton. Then it was the more rural Labour-aligned seats, such as Morley and Outwood in 2015. Then, prompted by Brexit, the specific red wall effect kicked in in 2017, with the first four constituencies collapsing. And by 2019, the trend was clear: Labour’s support in the larger cities grew at almost the same rate of its decline elsewhere in England. Gain after gain, the Tories were winning places that had the demographic profile of a traditional Labour stronghold.

There are, however, two clear categories of red wall seats. Some of the first time Tory areas are more urban – centred around larger towns like Blyth and Wakefield – while others are more rural, made up of lots of smaller settlements. The more prosperous ones, such as Sedgefield, will be easier for the Tories to hold. They have been marginal for longer and the structural changes will help Johnson hold onto them. Changes have taken place in the poorer ones too, but in a less pronounced way. The upcoming boundary changes, which will redraw the political map based on population moves, could hand the Conservatives another ten or so seats based on their 2019 polling, but it will also mean others will disappear. The shift in population towards cities means that some seats, such as Blyth Valley, will be subsumed. When the redrawing is complete, only then can the specific impact be seen.

Despite their thumping victory, the boundary commission will highlight a clear demographic trend that should worry the Conservatives: Britons are moving increasingly towards cities. Many of the red wall seats have declining populations that are becoming increasingly older. Over time, this is going to create more electoral challenges if the Tories cannot find a way of winning again in cities. Boris Johnson was clearly aware of this, hence his emphasis in our fish-bar conversation on his love of London and cities. Ever the shape-shifter, he will no doubt seek to pivot back to his roots and look to expand the party’s appeal again in the country’s great metropolitan areas.

There is a case to be made that Labour’s problems will prove existential. The party came into existence at the beginning of the twentieth century based on a specific set of circumstances: the prominence of socialist intellectuals combined with the emancipation of the working class – overwhelmingly white men working in manual jobs. While the intellectuals continue to be prominent in society, mostly found on social media, universities and in newspaper columns, the working class has changed beyond recognition. As Phil Wilson put it in Sedgefield, the world has changed and the Labour Party has not changed with it. Too often in elections, it is focused on the arguments of the past and the present instead of the future. The most needing in society are now those working in the Boohoo warehouse in Burnley. Yet Labour has failed to find a way of engaging with these residents, despite campaigning against zero-hours contracts for a decade.

Robert Oliver, a Conservative councillor in Sunderland who has campaigned for the party in the north-east for over two decades, thought the passing of time has been crucial for the change in the party’s fortunes. ‘Young people were not alive when the last mine closed in Sunderland in 1990, but they use it as a reason to hate the Tories. Whereas people who were alive at the time have possibly moved on a bit, they can see the sense in letting it go. They’re not blaming people who were not responsible for it at the time. Once Thatcher and Major had gone, you’re blaming people who had nothing to do with it.’ Oliver noted that in Jarrow, on the banks of the River Tyne, Labour continued to use the Jarrow March in their election campaigns. ‘It’s approximately a hundred years after it happened! For some people it will rouse up passions and feed the anti-Tory vote, but I think a lot of people are saying, “It’s too long ago”.’

The Tories’ biggest challenge, however, is combating the structural changes. Skills and education are by far the most important public-policy challenge for the government. A better life in every red wall seat is about a more resilient local economy. I was surprised in every place I visited at how well they have recovered from deindustrialization (once you look beyond the decaying buildings), and the new, more diverse economic bases that have emerged. The collapse of the red wall has demonstrated the long-tail effects of Thatcherism. The decline of Britain’s unproductive heavy industries created years of economic problems, yet it also laid the foundations for the rebirth happening today. Until Labour appreciates how much these places have changed, it will not make inroads.

Labour’s long-standing Hampstead-to-Humberside alliance has been destroyed by Brexit and it cannot be rebuilt on the old foundations. Neil Kinnock’s narrative of security is the strongest I’ve heard, and may be able to bridge that gap once again. Keir Starmer has made a solid start to regaining the trust of these voters, but he still has far to go. Labour is further away from power than it has been at almost any time in its existence. Barring an economic, political or constitutional upheaval, the default assumption has to be that the next election will be an uphill battle for the party. The Labour Party could gain one hundred seats at the ballot box in 2024 and still not have enough MPs to form a majority.

For the Conservatives, holding onto the red wall has been complicated by the pandemic. Lost time and money has meant their ambitions for the levelling-up agenda have been curtailed. At the time of writing, the phrase continues to baffle people in government and it is surprising that not a single minister or Whitehall department has been devoted to the most crucial factor in the government’s hopes for re-election. In the 2021 Queen’s Speech, Johnson set out some of the policy areas that will define what the agenda should look like – house building and adult education to name two – but how much he can achieve before returning to the polls is doubtful. Instead, he is likely to be inspired by the message of Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen: ‘a record of delivery, a promise of more’. If the prime minister can tour the country and point to physical, tangible improvements in people’s lives by the next election, voters may feel rewarded.

Johnson should not underestimate the scale of the challenge. Cracking the nut of productivity has vexed British politicians for generations. Although it rose consistently after the war, the long tail of poor productivity is not quick to fix and there is no guarantee of success. The UK’s economy is imbalanced; as Johnson argued in Hartlepool, it is in the interests of the whole country to tackle that. Many of the most immediate fixes are small policy tweaks – better training for small businesses in using accountancy software, for example – that will take time to have an impact. The construction of new further education colleges and the adjustment of the national curriculum to give equal balance to technical education will again take some years. The best that the Tories can hope for is to put these ideas in motion, acknowledging their completion may not be seen until the election after next, which would be 2029 at the latest – almost twenty years since the party returned to power.

And finally, there is character and charisma. Whether you like him or not, Boris Johnson is the most effective campaigner of his generation – and arguably beyond that. He has never lost a major election: the London mayoralty in 2008 and 2012, the 2016 EU referendum and the 2019 general election. He wears his ideology lightly, but as John Gray argued, his instincts have landed him in what is the new centre ground of British politics. By taking the Tory Party leftwards on economic issues and remaining centre-right on social and cultural ones, he has found a formula that can span most of England. In this respect, he is the real heir to Tony Blair. It is forgotten how media-savvy and combative the latter could be in his prime – Noel Gallagher visiting Downing Street, front pages of the Sun bashing Brussels, his tough stance on migration. Johnson is more Eurosceptic than Blair, but on domestic policy, his agenda is essentially an updated version of New Labour’s.

Barring a catastrophe, he is the favourite to win again in the next election. He is often described as a ‘formidable campaigner’, but that does not tell the whole story. Johnson is an international celebrity, who could walk down the streets of most capital cities and be recognized. Keir Starmer cannot match that, nor any of the other figures prominent in the Labour Party today. Only Tony Blair from its recent history comes close. Johnson has been in the public spotlight for two decades, his strengths and flaws are well known to the country. If Labour wishes to beat him, they will need to find a fresh emotional message that can counter the long-held feelings many have about Johnson.

Across the spectrum of those I have interviewed, there is a clear consensus about what needs to be done for the people of the red wall. The majority of interviewees have highlighted that the issues are primarily economic, not cultural. While identity will continue to provide headaches for Labour – and the Tories will no doubt continue to push them now and during the next election campaign – the Tories will have to counter issues created by their economic agenda of the last decade. The structural, economic and societal changes have made these parts of England more Conservative, but there is no doubt that reform is needed, hence Boris Johnson’s levelling-up agenda. Johnson has made a clear break on the orthodoxy of the austerity years; the gap between Labour’s 2017 manifesto and the Tories’ agenda in government is surprisingly small.

Johnson’s leftward nudge on spending and the role of the state leaves little room for Labour to define an alternative, except by veering further into radicalism. The decades of underinvestment on infrastructure needs to be righted – especially on local bus and rail services. The nostalgic pull of reversing the Beeching Cuts to the railways warms the cockles of the heart of older voters, recalling their childhood memories of steam trains. But better connectivity from towns and cities, and between cities, is critical for tackling the productivity gap.

It will cause headaches in the south of England where land is tighter and nimbyism is more potent, but an aggressive housebuilding programme is also important for providing the red wall with better housing stock to encourage aspiring families to move there. The liberalization of planning laws will also help to get rid of the old derelict warehouses, but there is an absence of strong economic visions on a local level. Central government cannot decide what each town should look like.

On skills, there is full agreement about more emphasis on non-university education and the plans set out in the 2021 Queen’s Speech go some way to achieving that – if the promise is fulfilled. Other towns should follow the example of Burnley College: a strong further education college that works with central government, the county council and local employers to ensure it is training up the right people with the right skills. With a relentless focus on the benefits of further education, the snobbish attitude to technical advice will begin to wane.

The towns I have visited suffered from a poor physical environment in places, and allocating small pots of money to improve the feel of these places will help. Rachel Wolf, who wrote the 2019 Tory manifesto, will be delighted to see more hanging baskets in the coming years. Local councils and their leadership, however, need to be more empowered to craft individual visions of what these places look like. The shells of some town centres can be filled with independent retailers and boutique shops; others will be wholly leisure-focused with pubs and restaurants dominating. But, again, the key is localism: the future of Grimsby will be nothing like Middleton, and Whitehall should not define it.

For me, the success of levelling up cannot be purely measured in metrics, but in a palpable sense that life is getting better. For an eleven-year-old child, growing up in a northern town who started secondary school in 2019, their life chances should be better when they leave seven years later. His town should have better further education opportunities, a stronger local economy, new businesses opening, better connections to neighbouring settlements as well as cities. He should not feel disconnected from the national debate or disenfranchised by Britain’s institutions. Crucially, it should be recognized that parts of the south of England are as poor as the most deprived in the north. This continued divide in how we think about the country is unhelpful. There is also not enough political leadership and grip on the machinery of government to achieve this currently. Levelling up poses as big a challenge, if not greater, to the British state as Brexit, which had a cabinet minister, a series of junior ministers and hundreds of civil servants to deliver it. Yet there is not a single member of the government specifically responsible for it. If Johnson is serious about this agenda, he should designate a ‘Secretary of State for Levelling Up’ who sits across the Cabinet Office, the Treasury and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Taking inspiration from civil service delivery expert, Sir Michael Barber, that minister should start every day with an overview of the key metrics for delivering on the agenda, the status of all the major and minor infrastructure projects and assess which is on track and those that are behind. This minister needs the full backing of the prime minister’s office and the authority to intervene in other government departments. Without a ruthless focus on delivery, the project will drift into the ether of Whitehall and risks becoming another failed political slogan.

Above all, what the red wall needs is empowerment. The votes of 2016, 2017 and 2019 were a cry to be listened to. Our national spending and policy decisions will always be taken in Whitehall, but devolution is going to be critical to rebuilding England after the pandemic into a better society. As well as pumping more money into local government, there needs to be more power to accountable figures. Bluntly, there needs to be more directly elected mayors, with more powers and more authority to shape their communities. They also need more resources and improved capacity to fulfill their roles.

Whether it is Andy Burnham, Andy Street, Ben Houchen or Tracy Brabin, some of the most impressive politicians in the UK today are not found in Westminster for good reason. They recognize that real power lies in being able to wield the most direct influence on people’s lives. The model should be replicated elsewhere, even if it causes central government some uncomfortable moments when the political priorities do not match. This is something voters can decide on at the ballot box.

Mayors can also solve the English question. The rise in the angry English identity that Nigel Farage highlighted came in part due to the rise in Scottish and Welsh nationalism, reinforced by the devolved parliaments. David Cameron’s half considered English Votes for English Laws (EVEL) programme has little connection to voters. Something far more radical is required.

The House of Lords needs to be scrapped. I adore an archaic institution as much as anyone, but it is living on borrowed time and is a symbol of all that voters dislike about Westminster. The only reason it has not been dramatically reformed so far is that no politician is willing to squander the political capital to do so. Tony Blair’s efforts to rid the upper chamber of hereditary peers in the late 1990s ended in a half-finished job.

My solution would be to form a new chamber, still with the intent of revising legislation instead of creating it, with say two hundred members. Half of this new body would be made of legislative experts, serving up to two five-year terms and therefore avoiding the ‘job for life’ accusations peers currently face. They would be appointed by an independent panel with a fair mix of party representation, backgrounds, locations, gender, ethnicity. This component would ensure that the second house still fulfils its main objective of making better legislation.

The other half would be formed of the directly elected mayors and representatives from the devolved parliaments. The fracturing ties of the United Kingdom and the British identity, since the 2016 referendum, mean that something urgently needs to be done to better integrate the parliaments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland into the national debate while also giving due balance to England. The pandemic has proved that virtual representation is possible, so these members would not be required to spend their lives on trains and planes to be part of the Westminster debate.

Reforming the House of Lords is one of the most complex constitutional questions facing the UK over the next decade – one that I believe Boris Johnson intends to grapple with. A whole book could be dedicated to the intricacies of what and how it would work. But a clear signal is needed to Britons who feel disconnected from the political process. A new architecture has already emerged through devolution and this should be seized on.

But whether the red wall stays blue or begins to revert back to its original form, what I have found most uplifting about these years in British politics is the focus on places that were politically forgotten. Economically, Labour did aid its traditional seats while in power, but politically they were taken for granted. They may have been ‘our people’, but the New Labour project was focused on the marginal seats it had to win to stay in office. The 2016 referendum brought these corners of England to the fore of political debate, which I have found a fulfilling and much-needed phenomenon. The distrust many former Labour voters have towards the party is deep, but there is also a brittleness of new Conservative support. They may like Johnson now, but they still do not wholly trust him. The pressure to deliver for these people is huge, and one of the greatest challenges Johnson faces is to prove that levelling up is more than a slogan. Voters will be unforgiving if he fails. From Blyth to Burnley, these places feel less abandoned than at any time in recent political history. They are the new battlegrounds. Whether the Conservatives remain in power, or Labour takes over soon, the political incentive to win the voters of these places means that the 2020s will be the decade when my personal heartlands will begin to feel less broken.