‘No true civilisation could have produced such a town, which is nothing better than a huge dingy dormitory’
J. B. PRIESTLEY,
AFTER VISITING MY HOME TOWN IN 1934
There is a sense of pride to growing up in Gateshead. It is not the prettiest town in the north-east of England, nor the most economically buoyant. The continual deprivation and poor education in some areas are a national disgrace. But there is a sensitivity about people in other parts of the region peering down at us, never mind the rest of the country. For some residents, part of that psyche is resentment: a feeling that the town’s best days are behind it and prosperity is too often found elsewhere. For others, it is a comforting insularity: many of those I went to school with were cheerfully proud that they would spend their lives in the town. There may be bitterness too. My friend Pooja Kumari, who grew up a few streets away from my family, told me she felt that the intensity of local pride was powerful enough to trump any negative feelings. She and I moved away at roughly the same time a decade ago – both down to the capital London for jobs and a different life – yet we are still filled with an affection for our home town, especially its high-spirited people. We both return regularly.
Gateshead has long suffered from a perception that it embodied life being ‘grim up north’. Samuel Johnson described the town in the eighteenth century as the ‘dirty back lane leading to Newcastle’. That lane has been widened into a dual carriageway that slices through the town centre, so most visitors are not even aware they’ve been through the town. When the writer J. B. Priestley made his English Journey ninety years ago, his report of Gateshead painted a harsh picture. ‘No real town’, he stated, had such a ‘lack of civil dignity and all the evidences of an urban civilisation’.1 Even in 1933, he felt it was in decline. The then 125,000 people of Gateshead owed their existence to ‘Britain’s famous industrial prosperity’ that was, he felt, waning rapidly. Much has thankfully changed since his visit, and Gateshead has forged a new image thanks to the redevelopment of the riverside. The images most Britons now have of the town are of the Baltic contemporary art centre, the eye-shaped Millennium Bridge and the modern Sage music venue – the legacy of the New Labour era and Tony Blair’s reign from 1997 to 2007. But beyond the glossy waterfront, it faces the same struggles of many English towns. Priestley recommended that ‘every future historian of modern England should be compelled to take a good long slow walk round Gateshead. After that, he can at his leisure fit it into his interpretation of our national growth and development.’ Where better to start my journey – a road trip to examine the political upheaval of the last decade.
This is not a book about me, but I hope a potted biography will explain why I care about this story – the events of 2016 to 2019 were the first political events of my lifetime that affected those I knew and grew up with. I was born in 1989 to an intensely caring and hardworking mother, Bronwen, a secondary school teacher. My father Trevor was a local character, a ‘small business owner’ or Del Boy without the sidekicks. My mother stoically supported our household while dedicating herself to the classroom for forty-five years. My father’s pursuits ranged from selling slush machines to rolling garage doors, to building computers and visiting auction houses. She was born in Carlisle to a middle-class, well-read family; he was brought up in the working-class slums in Gateshead town centre and did not experience an indoor toilet until his teenage years. After brief periods in the RAF and working at the British Library, he returned home and lived there until he passed away at the age of fifty. Both of my parents benefited from secondary education at grammar schools.
The home I grew up in to the south of the town, Ferndene Lodge, was salubrious for the area: an attractive gatekeeper’s cottage covered in ivy, built in the mid-nineteenth century, to a long-ago demolished mansion. It stands opposite the fifty-five-acre Saltwell Park, known as the People’s Park for the greenery offered to the hundreds of nearby flats without gardens. It has everything a child could desire: a boating lake, maze, ice cream and chip shop, and a bizarre tiny zoo – home to a handful of disorientated exotic birds. When I returned during the autumn of 2020 ahead of this road trip, I was delighted to find none of the park’s childhood appeal has waned. My education zigzagged across the north-east: beginning in the state sector at Sacred Heart Primary in Newcastle and St Thomas More High out to the west side of Gateshead. I yearned to study politics and computing, so my mother took the tough decision to invest our limited finances – with no holidays for several years – in sending me to a private school, Dame Allan’s, for my final two years. I was fortunate to have this opportunity, which few can enjoy and, as I wrote in the Spectator in 2015, I owe much of my career to ‘the teaching, advice and encouragement of a small independent school’.2
My earliest memories of Gateshead town are of Saturday-morning shopping trips to the high street: the Halifax building society, bargains in the Kwiksave supermarket, clothes and household goods in Woolworths. Like many of England’s towns, Gateshead suffered from an appalling mid-century concrete redevelopment, the Trinity Centre, an effort to compete with the larger shops across the river in Newcastle. My recollections are of a deserted indoor market and empty shops. The most notable land-mark in the town centre was the multi-storey brutalist car park, which had all the elegance of a sagging sponge cake. Michael Caine made the structure famous in 1971 when he threw his nemesis off its roof in Get Carter – the gritty gangster flick that captures the harsh realities of north-eastern life at the time. The car park was thankfully torn down in 2009, and the town centre redeveloped with an even bigger Tesco, plus a cinema, gym and student accommodation. If those parts of Gateshead life sound depressing, none of it blighted my childhood – spent in a loving family, a community of kindly neighbours, in the company of sparky family friends and exploring the wonderful landscape. When I first brought my now-wife Sophia – an accomplished social researcher – to visit Northumberland, I fell in love with the area all over again, with the curiosity and distance of a tourist.
Gateshead’s politics have barely budged during my lifetime, which is why it is not part of the Broken Heartlands tour. Even with a ten-point surge in the Conservative vote in the 2019 election, it returned a 19 per cent majority for Labour. My upbringing was not party political; no one around us was actively involved in party politics. But current affairs were knitted into the fabric of home life. The maternal side of the family were assuredly middle class – teachers and solicitors – and culturally and politically conservative. The Daily Telegraph was, and still is, delivered every day to the doormats of my mother and her relations. The paternal side was more working class: Catholicism first, instinctively attuned to Labour second.
This divide presented itself in my earliest political memory. On 1997 election day, when Tony Blair’s resounding landslide delivered the first Labour government in decades, my mother, father and I walked to the primary school around the corner so they could vote. My father was eagerly voting Blair – ‘he’s clearly on our side’ – while my mother refused to engage in any conversation, sheepishly still intending to vote Tory. Into the ballot box I went with her, I saw the cross go into the box for the Conservative candidate, who had not a slightest hope of victory. As we meandered home, my father badgered her about which way she had voted. She never relented. It was the last election he would vote in. My greatest sadness is that my father did not live until I was an age where we could talk politics, so I cannot say for certain how he would have felt about the events of 2016 and 2019 – but my gut says he would have backed Brexit and Boris Johnson due to his maverick appeal. Thankfully, my mother’s interest in the news remains strong, and we frequently chat about Westminster’s ups and downs. In recent years their politics would have been united for the first time.
Growing up in a politically divided household was unusual for Gateshead, and I hope it has offered me a vague ability to look in a balanced way at the left–right divide, particularly on Brexit. On both sides of my family, almost everyone voted Leave. I was deeply torn: my northern hinterland and instincts pulled me towards Brexit, but after twenty minutes in the polling booth, my head put a tick in the Remain column. In the Gateshead seat, 56 per cent of the constituency backed Leave. (According to Professor Chris Hanretty of Royal Holloway University in London, whose calculations for each constituency’s Brexit vote are the gold standard and will be used throughout my travels.)3 The referendum marked the first moment when voters broke en masse with their tribal ties to Labour, when the logic that everyone voted Labour ‘because my father/grandfather would turn in their grave if I don’t’ was shattered. Among those voters, I suspected, were some close friends, who I took the opportunity to catch up with before setting off.
The Black Horse is a five-minute drive from my family home in Low Fell, a middle-class enclave on the outskirts of Gateshead. On a not-especially-warm Saturday afternoon – the north-east weather is always tepid at best – the indoor bar was shut off due to the coronavirus pandemic, so I nursed a pint outside. First to arrive was Frank Tatoli, sixty-eight, one of my father’s best friends and still a close family figure in my life. Slight, moustached with slicked-back half black/half grey hair, if there was ever a modern Gateshead legend, he is it: second-generation Italian, Geordie, cafe owner and guitarist. His band, Frankie’s Cafe, have toured the north-east for twenty years, playing energetic blues and soul to packed pubs and clubs. Guesting with them on bass guitar in a vague effort to impress my wife is one of my proudest life achievements (she may remember the evening differently). And the highlight of my stag weekend was taking a dozen London friends out of their media and political bubbles to a rural pub outside of Newcastle to see the band perform.
Frank’s father arrived in the north-east after being taken as a prisoner of war in North Africa. He was shipped to Northumberland and sent to work on farms. After the war, his wife joined him in England and Dominic’s Cafe was opened in 1962 thanks to some (dubious-sounding) connections. ‘There was an Italian bloke in Hexham called Big Tony, Tony was a fixer. He used to introduce people in the Italian community to different people, to try and make it easier for you to get used to the place.’* Frank had no desire to work in the cafe and lined up several jobs after school: an apprentice mechanic; working in TV production but his father was taken ill. ‘Sorry, you’re going to have to run the shop now,’ he was told. The cafe remains a beacon for the local community: I visited weekly as a child for a nutritious lunch of sausage, beans and chips. The cafe was a meeting place for my father and his associates, with workmen flowing in and out. Frank retired in 2006 after thirty years on his feet, taking orders and brewing coffee. Behind the counter, he had a unique view of how Gateshead and its people have changed. From the 1960s to the 1990s, when he lived in a flat above the cafe with his wife Irene, he has fond memories of the people and the community. But, without wanting to disparage, he regretted that, ‘unfortunately nothing stays the same.’
The Gateshead of Frank’s youth was dominated by heavy engineering. ‘I can remember at half past four, down at Armstrong Street which runs under the bridges, it was packed with people walking up from the factories. For an hour, you couldn’t get through. They all lived locally, it’s different now. People are not working in big factories, they’re not in a trade union.’ Those tight-knit communities were shattered by the fragmentation of the economy, but also the rise of the car-based society. The Gateshead town centre of his youth was dominated by pubs and Shepherd’s department store, which he said rivalled those across the river in Newcastle. ‘When Shepherd’s closed, you could see the writing on the wall for Gateshead, and they built Trinity Square. That was a disaster, there was a restaurant that never opened.’ The empty restaurant is also fatefully seen in Get Carter.
As with many of Gateshead’s people, Frank does not call himself as political, but, when you probe, strongly held views emerge. ‘During every general election in the cafe, there were a lot of miners, a lot of engineering people used to come in,’ he recalled. ‘If you were brought up in Gateshead, you voted Labour. That was it.’ He rebelled by voting for the Liberal party in his younger days: ‘I never used to vote Conservative or Labour, I always voted Liberal not expecting them to get in, just as a protest.’ He liked Labour’s Harold Wilson, had little time for the Tories’ Ted Heath, respected Margaret Thatcher, but was turned off by the ‘pomp’ associated with the Tory Party. He felt Tony Blair was a ‘breath of fresh air’ for Labour and voted for him in 1997.
Frank was one of the 32 per cent of Liberal Democrat voters who endorsed leaving the EU in the 2016 referendum and, went on to enthusiastically back Boris Johnson in the 2019 election, due to the parliamentary chaos that followed the plebiscite.4 ‘It was a bad time, everybody felt the same way whether you voted to leave or stay. When Boris won the general election, he sealed it good and proper.’ He was not surprised that Geordies backed the Tories in droves for the first time, due to Jeremy Corbyn. ‘Plenty of people were saying if it hadn’t been for that bloke, I would never have voted for Boris.’
By this point, my next family friend had arrived with further pints: Mark Brown, who took over Frank’s cafe with his wife Pam in 2006. Mark left school at seventeen and began his career with an apprenticeship in a Gateshead foundry in the early 1980s. He won national apprentice of the year – beating rivals from Rolls-Royce and British Aerospace – and spent most of his career in a series of small manufacturing firms. He was made redundant following the financial crash and set up his own logistics company, working closely with the NHS.
Mark also fondly remembered the Gateshead of his youth: the sturdy men in the factories, the comradeship of guiding young ones through apprenticeships. But he isn’t consumed by nostalgia. ‘Communities, the clubs, that social gathering of people from the same community, that’s all gone. And it’s a shame that we’ve lost that. You’ll have the hard left that still cry on for the days of the unions. But the world changes, we’ve got to learn to adapt and move forward.’
His politics were typically Labour until 2019. ‘Did I think about voting for another party before? No, because of how tough things have been for the area. But also, what have Labour really done for people here?’ In his heart, Mark thought of himself as a social democrat who ‘wants to see a little bit more fairness, of distribution of wealth at the top.’ He was buoyed by how society changed during the pandemic – especially the focus on ‘everyday people’ driving buses and working on supermarket tills.
A year on from the election, he was pessimistic for Labour’s future. ‘I don’t see a way back for them. It’s a broken party. What’s the future? How can they make a comeback? Tax the rich more?’ Mark put the blame on Labour’s Brexit stance. ‘I really found out about the true feeling of staunch Labour supporters – of how disgusted they were with Labour for sitting on the fence about Brexit. It really opened my eyes.’ Nor does he make much of how the party has changed under Keir Starmer’s leadership. ‘I just don’t think people really connect with him either.’
For Mark, the political events of 2016 to 2019 broke his ties with the party for good. ‘I couldn’t genuinely see myself voting Labour – not just because I run my own business. I just don’t think that the party has a coherent strategy, the way they went about themselves over the last few years.’ And how did he vote? ‘I voted Conservative, which was the first time since I was old enough to vote. Broken Heartlands indeed,’ he laughed.
The last addition to the drinking session was one of my school friends. Richard Bruce attended Dame Allan’s school, making the arduous hour-long commute from Durham daily, and we have remained close pals over the past fifteen years. In my first politics class, he introduced himself simply as Bruce, and thus he has remained since. He lives in Durham, working for the university’s student union as their policy supremo, and has a keen eye on politics locally and nationally. He agreed with Frank that Corbyn was the driving factor in the Tories’ 2019 victory, along with Brexit.
‘With some people who were “I will vote Labour until I die”, Corbyn pushed them away. In other areas they didn’t agree with Labour’s stance on Brexit.’ Among his older relations, Bruce spoke of a fatalism stirred by memories of the past. ‘There was a lot of more genuine fear of Corbyn, especially those remembering the 1970s in particular. At the younger end of the spectrum, there was a lot on the pro-Corbyn side of things. But those people in their forties and fifties I can think of, there was a lot of “Well, I’m not really a fan of Corbyn even though I voted Labour all my life,”’ he said.
Bruce did much soul searching in 2019. He was fed up with Brexit and wanted it resolved. ‘I was quite frankly sick of the Brexit story. But by the same token, I was still fearful about the impact of it. This slightly jingoistic line of “it’ll be fine, because we’re British” was quite worrying to me.’ Like Frank, he was inclined towards the Liberal Democrats and ultimately stuck with the party, without enthusiasm, based on their local candidate. Bruce agreed that anti-Conservative feelings were dominant during our childhoods, particularly whenever Margaret Thatcher’s name was mentioned. ‘That visceral hatred was very, very palpable and real. It seemed to have crossed generations, even to people who weren’t born when Thatcher was in power. Partly because there was that general cultural feeling of “we hate Thatcher”, which had originated in the mines and all of that economic upheaval,’ he said. Frank was not surprised by the 2019 election, but Bruce was. ‘I was quite stunned. If I think of some of those areas, the working men’s clubs and the miners’ clubs, I just can’t imagine a victory party in there for a Tory candidate.’
I was keen to know if Bruce’s early political memories chimed with mine and how he felt about the north-east’s regeneration. ‘That cultural investment is really interesting because earlier in the nineties, my memory of Newcastle is dereliction and empty docksides, and bare concrete spaces. And then not too many years after that, you’re talking Millennium Bridge, Baltic, Sage and the renovation of some of the other galleries. Durham gets a little bit missed out of that but Newcastle changed enormously between the mid-nineties and the mid-two thousands.’ Like me, he felt there was pride mixed with insularity, which fed into anti-establishment feelings on the EU question. When the national political orthodoxy was Remain, the north-east went in the opposite direction. ‘The idea that Westminster was behind staying, there was a contrarianism. There is something in the north-east of “We don’t like Mr Southerner, whatever that is”, whether that’s convenience, coffee, or the EU.’ An earlier example of that sentiment was the 2004 referendum of regional assemblies. In Dominic Cummings’ first political campaign, 78 per cent of the north-east voted against further devolution. The concept was judged as too remote from voters, too expensive and too orientated around cities.
This attitude is partly due to decades of government neglect. Bruce had recently spent much time in the north-west of England and reckoned this feeling spreads across the whole of the north. ‘If you look at what London gets from central government, it’s very easy to see why there’s that resentment. If you look at the quality of the roads and railway stations, there’s a long-term feeling of neglect. If you live in some of these pit villages, you can understand why people would just hate Westminster.’
These feelings made much of the north-east prime targets for Boris Johnson’s boosterism. ‘When Johnson came along with his optimism and being so ebullient about everything, you can see how that speaks to people. Because they want some positivity,’ Bruce said.
Did the trio think the Tories can cling on in the north-east, or even make more gains? ‘If it looks like there is not only physical and financial, but also emotional investment by Westminster in the north-east. If people in Westminster genuinely seem to value the opinions and lifestyles of people in the north-east, then yes, I can see it sticking.’ Frank and Mark nodded vigorously, agreeing with what Bruce said. With three rounds sunk and the cold setting in, it was off to pick up my first road-trip companion to better understand what the ‘red wall’ is.
That same autumnal weekend was one of James Kanagasooriam’s first visits to Gateshead. As I took him around Saltwell Park, he remarked, ‘This is really middle class, this could and should be a Tory area.’ After I showed him the town centre and the urban housing streets, he acknowledged that the Tories would have some way to go. Kanagasooriam is one of the most interesting minds in British politics. He arrived in Westminster from banking, working for the pollsters Populus – including on the Scottish Conservatives’ successful campaigns in 2016 and 2017. We met soon after his first front-line success and bonded over a nerdy enthusiasm for numbers. I have an affection for political data, a hangover from my days as a computer scientist. Whereas I am not especially good at it, he is excellent.
As the 2019 election geared up, Kanagasooriam called me up and asked to visit the Financial Times to present a model he built for the upcoming campaign. ‘You’re going to want to see this,’ he urged. In a presentation to senior editors, he produced a table (see here) ahead of a potential winter election, on which seats the Conservative Party could potentially gain. The multitude of articles, features and columns I researched during that campaign on the red wall phenomena suggested his model was accurate.
The first column contained UNS, or ‘uniformed national swing’, seats which are those that could go Tory, based on the fact the party was significantly ahead in the opinion polls. The far more interesting column was the one titled ‘red wall’, which Kanagasooriam named after the Brian Jacques children’s fantasy novels. In his explanation, this is what they are:
‘There are two buckets of red wall seats. The first is what most people refer to the red wall as: a series of contiguous seats stretching from North Wales, through to outer Merseyside, Lancashire, dipping into the East Midlands and going into South Yorkshire. Fundamentally there’s a bit of Britain that, going back to 1997, 2001, 2005, is a massive band of red. It crosses about eight different counties but those areas, despite having completely different histories and dynamics, have something shared, in that they’re all traditionally Labour areas. The second bucket is a series of clustered seats around the north-east.’
With hindsight after the campaign, Kanagasooriam and I sat down at my family kitchen table in Gateshead to review the data over dinner and figure out what was right and how the model coped with real-world anomalies. For the first time, he was eager to explain and discuss his work publicly. His model was a success, omitting just two red wall seats: Redcar in the north-east and Leigh in the north-west (the former has a volatile voting record, while he had deemed the latter too urban to go Tory). There were also three swing seats that went Conservative in London and the south-east due to the collapse of the pro-Remain Liberal Democrat vote. Reviewing the 2019 election results, we agreed four criteria that define red wall constituencies:
1. Never returned a Tory MP since 1997, with a subset that had not returned a Conservative since the Second World War
2. Significant vote to leave the EU. On average, red wall seats returned a 63 per cent vote for Brexit compared to the national average of 52 per cent
3. A substantial Labour majority during the 1990s
4. A substantial minority Tory vote that never threatened Labour but never fully waned either
Not all constituencies that are sometimes described as ‘red wall’ meet these criteria. Many, for example, are more demographically middle class and returned a Conservative MP during the peak of Margaret Thatcher’s years in power. Darlington, a railway town in the north-east, is often cited as red wall but returned a Conservative MP in the 1950s and again from 1983 to 1992. There are also four constituencies that meet the core characteristics that went blue for the first time in the 2017 election, two years prior to Boris Johnson’s victory: Mansfield and North East Derbyshire in the East Midlands, Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland in the north-east, and Walsall North in the West Midlands. Why these fell in 2017 and the others did not will be explored in chapter seven. In total, there are forty-eight seats we can confidently define as red wall, with the Tories winning thirty-four of them in 2019. That leaves fourteen others as likely targets in the next campaign. I put this to a senior Labour figure involved in the 2019 election, who confirmed their strategists feared the result could have been much worse. ‘We looked at the north and Midlands and thought the whole thing could just go, it could have been another Scotland for us,’ the aide said, referencing the near total wipeout the party suffered north of the border in 2015.
What sets the red wall seats apart from typical marginals is the intersection between their heavy Brexit support and their strong Labour support over the last two decades. Kanagasooriam said, ‘You’ve got the recipe for mass switching; overlaid on top of that is the fact that they are all from an identifiable area that is contiguous, where there is a series of common analyses and common reasons why they’ve ended up Conservative.’ He explained that the Tory vote is very modellable for strategists. ‘There are common features of why certain areas vote Conservative: people who tend to own cars, live in detached houses, live in un-dense areas, the countryside or hamlets.’ I pointed out that Conservative campaigners used to note where to find their likely voters based on whether there was a hanging basket, which he flagged as something that has disappeared with the red wall, as the Conservative voting coalition has become less prosperous.
Kanagasooriam spotted early in his 2019 work that the demographics of the red wall seats meant they ‘should be slightly more Tory than they are’. If many of the first-time Tory constituencies were situated in, say, Kent or Essex, they would have returned Conservative MPs long ago. Some stereotypes have emerged about these old Labour heartlands – that they are poor, small failing towns and all white. None of them are accurate. Thanks to the unique moment of 2019 – the combination of Brexit and Corbyn’s abysmal ratings – Kanagasooriam predicted from a purely statistical viewpoint that they would flip as a batch.
Brexit broke the dam of traditional Labour voters abandoning the party and flipping Conservative. David Cameron’s pledge in the 2015 election for a referendum on EU membership was widely criticized by other political parties for destabilizing Britain’s political system – and abruptly ended his own career. But, it can also be seen as a Tory masterstroke that commenced the decoupling of certain older voters from Labour – mostly white (plus a strong part of the Asian population in places like the Midlands), mid-level education, mortgage-free, medium levels of private wealth and healthy pensions. The process continued in 2016 with the referendum, and again in 2017 when Theresa May called an election to settle the issue of Brexit, and once more in 2019, when Boris Johnson repeated the same trick, albeit much more successfully.
But that process goes beyond the last five years. Kanagasooriam argued there has been a long-term drift of Labour’s traditional voters as the party has become increasingly metropolitan in its nature, something most pronounced under Ed Miliband’s leadership of the party from 2010 to 2015. ‘He set politics on its current course. In policy terms he is a classic interventionist. But the fact that he was an MP parachuted into Doncaster; the fact that he looks less authentic than many of the local Tory candidates; that chipped away at what Labour was.’ When Jeremy Corbyn succeeded Miliband in 2017, a whole new group of voters – younger, urban ethnic minorities, middle-class public-sector professionals – flocked to the party, which masked what was happening in its traditional heartlands. ‘The reality of the red wall was hidden by the fact that the Labour Party picked up almost equal countervailing votes, but had swapped its electorate.’ While Corbyn was very popular in some parts of the country in 2017, the picture had changed drastically two years later, thanks to his much-criticized response to the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury, struggles with anti-Semitism, his ineptitude on the Brexit question and the overall steady decline in his standing. Corbyn did not cut through in the same way in 2019, or as my dinner guest joked, ‘You can’t reinflate a balloon’.
Having worked in polling since 2014, Kanagasooriam has seen first-hand the dramatic upheaval in the electorate. In most elections prior to 2017, the Tories retained 90 per cent of their vote and Labour around 80 per cent. In 2017, the first election following the referendum, one in four voters changed sides. But Theresa May’s success, which went mostly unnoticed due to her abysmal campaign, was to maintain 85 per cent of the Conservative party’s vote from David Cameron’s last election – and then improve upon it. The shift away from Labour was therefore much more gradual than the dramatic outcome of 2019 would suggest.
‘Boris then kept that coalition, so the change is more modest. The Tory vote in the red wall was already at 30 per cent and had increased significantly over the prior decade. There has been a huge change in the political landscape, but those singular events hide the fact that actually this is a more gradual process. I would estimate that seventy per cent of the Cameron coalition were probably the same individuals who subsequently voted for Boris Johnson,’ he said.
The party’s victories in 2010 and 2015 were described by the new places Cameron won: Putney and Battersea in south-west London. Kanagasooriam put this down to the nature of those commenting on politics. ‘Journalists who are London-dwelling live precisely in the areas that are the hardest edge of voter flows. If you live in south-west London, you would have seen three different parties take control in the last ten years, so you might lead yourself to the conclusion that politics is incredibly volatile.’ He dryly noted that, ‘The Conservative Party does revolution often by stealth and slower than people think. It creeps up. Something is deemed a revolution when people don’t notice and then suddenly do.’
Were it not for the fall of the red wall, Kanagasooriam thinks Boris Johnson would have won a majority similar to David Cameron in 2015, of around ten to twenty seats. The emergence of the red wall concept is a ‘game changer’ for the party because it offers a smoother path to much bigger parliamentary majorities – and in turn more power over how the UK is governed. The prime minister’s personal appeal in the Labour heartlands is part of that, as Frank Tatoli highlighted for Gateshead’s residents: ‘He’s a politician that many in these areas want over for tea, they want to talk to him, they laugh. It’s the ability to connect, be human and self-deprecating while at the same time making people feel that it is within their gift and their opportunity to better themselves.’ Some people decry Johnson’s appeal as mere celebrity or Trumpian, but neither is wholly correct. Celebrities struggle to win more than one-off elections; Johnson has never lost one; London mayor twice, the Brexit referendum and the 2019 election. And whereas Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign was about stoking anger and grievances, Johnson promotes optimism and sunlit uplands.
Whether Labour can rebuild its red wall will be established at the ballot box. The arrival of Keir Starmer as Labour leader in 2020, with his ‘new management’ slogan to distance himself from Corbyn, has picked the party up from its 2019 defeat. However, there is no clear indication of whether he is making the necessary gains in the red wall to have any chance of forming a future government. Kanagasooriam reckoned that the Tories’ hold on these former heartlands was strong. ‘I think once you’ve broken the link about voting for a particular party you have a historical legacy with, it can be very hard to reattach it.’ The rise of the Scottish National Party affirms this: once the historical link between the Labour Party and working-class voters is broken, it takes something new to win them back. The party has yet to find an answer for Scotland, never mind in England.
The 2019 election campaign began in late October that year, after MPs acquiesced to ending the parliamentary stalemate over Brexit. The six-week campaign was shorter than those of recent years, with few dramatic moments. Isaac Levido and Michael Brooks have worked on successive conservative campaigns in the UK and Australia under the tutelage of Sir Lynton Crosby, the Australian ‘Wizard of Oz’ who masterminded David Cameron’s 2015 victory. The 2019 campaign was the Conservative’s first under the duo’s command. Levido is carefully and softly spoken, never someone to use ten words when two will suffice. He was the Tories’ campaign director, gaining his own chant of ‘Oh, Isaac Levido!’ to the tune of the White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’ whenever a victory was scored. Brooks is chatty, unusual for a pollster and data scientist. They always do business as a pair. Back around my family dinner table they began by explaining the huge relief when the results confirmed their data and modelling was accurate. Did they expect the majority to be as big as it was?
‘We were pointing towards that sort of result for the last sort of ten days. You saw it reflected in the public numbers that it was a relatively stable picture for the final week,’ Levido said. ‘We got the framing right at the start and we held it. That is no mean feat. You need an incredibly disciplined effort from the whole team and obviously the boss [Boris Johnson] and the other guys on the front line.’ Despite his confidence, nerves were fraught on polling day at Conservative Party HQ after a short campaign where pundits second-guessed the polls throughout.
Since Johnson entered Downing Street in the summer of 2019, Westminster had talked up the possibility of a snap election to resolve Brexit. Levido acknowledged it was on the cards soon after Johnson become prime minister due to the ‘arithmetic problem inside Parliament’, the fact there was no majority for delivering Johnson’s formulation of Brexit. Another senior Tory official involved in the campaign told me this framing was also driven by Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s chief strategist who freelanced on the campaign. ‘Dom told us “We go so hard to get out [of the EU], whatever it takes. And in order to stop us, they’re going to have to do something really unreasonable. And they’re going to have to do something that will be very, very unpopular in the country. And if they do that, we’ll smash them in the election.”’ The decision of MPs to force a third Brexit extension on Johnson while rejecting his reworked Brexit deal became that unreasonable act.
Levido said, ‘every effort’ was made not to result in an election. ‘I didn’t want to run a general election campaign in December in the UK. But that was what came to pass. Ultimately, the key strategic imperative that we needed to have demonstrated to the British people was that there was no other way to resolve the parliamentary deadlock over Brexit.’ Brooks and Levido were hired by the party in August 2019 to lay the groundwork in case a poll became inevitable. Millions of pounds were poured into research, with a particular focus on the red wall constituencies which the Tories came very close to taking in the 2017 election. Brooks chimed in that this was not a fluke: ‘We went looking for the voters open to supporting us: what are the issues they were facing, and what were their hesitations in supporting us. Then we went through very methodically in trying to mitigate any hesitations they might have. It wasn’t just like, which seats are of interest or open to voting for us?’ Another party aide summed up what the campaign was about: ‘If we held on to the Tory voters while bleeding to the Brexit Party, then we aimed to get a bunch of the Labour leavers over.’ That official recalled the struggles of planning an election during the summer of 2019 when the party had little sense of the battleground. ‘It all sounds very obvious now, but at the time it was so uncertain on whether there’s going be a deal or not.’
In polling and practical terms, the 2019 election was uneventful. One campaigner who had served the Tories in several elections described the whole six weeks as ‘very smooth, especially compared to the past’. On 6 November, the night Parliament voted for an election, YouGov put the Tories eleven points ahead of Labour.5 The last poll on election night by Survation also put the Tories eleven points ahead.6 And on election night, the Conservatives emerged 11.7 points ahead. There was only one major wobble, insiders said, when Labour released its manifesto chock-full of spending pledges. Increasing the health budget, ramping up the minimum wage, nationalizing the big six energy firms, the railways, Royal Mail, National Grid, scrapping universal credit, building 100,000 council homes a year. All those pledges proved popular, while the Conservative manifesto risked looking dull in comparison. In the following weeks, the Tory lead sank to six points, according to ICM.7 Levido confirmed that Conservative HQ briefly lost its crucial campaign framing on Brexit. ‘I did not adequately foresee how focused the media treatment of our manifesto was going to be as a comparison to the 2017 general election. A lot of the content had been previously announced during the campaign and the overarching story was a cautious platform without the nasty surprises of last time.’ While Johnson and his party were telling the country they represented change – by resolving the EU question and investing in public services – their manifesto felt like more of the same. Levido insisted their policy plan was a ‘fundamentally transformational document’ but had been presented as a safety-first manifesto given the scars of the last campaign.
Brooks and Levido worked on Theresa May’s 2017 campaign, which suffered from an overcrowded manifesto and a campaign that struggled to find a narrative. Dominic Cummings summed up the Johnson platform in simple terms, telling aides their aim was to sell: ‘Blairism without caring about the causes of crime’, a hint towards the electoral coalition they were seeking to rebuild. Brooks said the biggest transformation since 2017, however, was not the mechanics of the campaign but their opponent. ‘People knew more about Corbyn. There was just greater awareness of him and what he stood for. The critical thing that was different was that in 2017 there was no risk with Labour, because nobody believed Corbyn could win. And in 2019, because 2017 had happened and it had turned into a hung Parliament, we were therefore able to infuse a vote for Labour with the risk of Corbyn actually becoming prime minister. Whereas if you said to someone in 2017 that Jeremy Corbyn was going to become prime minister they would have laughed you out of the room.’ The chaos of the 2017–19 Parliament, which resulted from Theresa May’s failure to gain a majority in the election, helped make the case Corbyn as PM was a real possibility. ‘That gave a lot more sharpness to the choice that [voters] were facing,’ Brooks said.
The other crucial message the Tories put to the country was that they could simply make politics go away. The series of knife-edge Brexit votes in the House of Commons that I endured night after night from the press gallery were joyous for political pundits and constitutional experts, but exhausting for ordinary voters. Speaking to that emotion, through the lens of resolving Brexit, helped the Tory team win over many disgruntled Labour voters. Brooks said, ‘They wanted politics to go away, they knew they were sick of politicians arguing, they wanted politicians to focus on fixing things like the NHS, crime, schools, all the things that they perceived have been neglected over the last few years.’ All of the things, in fact, people had voted for Brexit to change. The Tory campaign had to convince the public the Conservatives were best placed to do that – most clearly articulated in their party political broadcast titled ‘End the argument. Get Brexit done. Vote Conservative.’8 To the choral strings of ‘Zadoc the Priest’, bickering politicians with rolled-up order papers were seen ‘arguing about arguing’ over dinner tables, bus stops and living rooms. With almost four million views on YouTube, the ad encapsulated the campaign’s motivation. Brooks said, ‘It was almost, at times, a quite mechanical message about “here is how you can use your vote to achieve the outcome that you want.” We weren’t trying to persuade voters of the outcome that they wanted – they already knew that – but rather we were telling them how to get there.’
The pair also cited Boris Johnson’s communication skills as important to the result. ‘In what he says and how he says it, the PM has an authenticity which is incredibly important in modern politics,’ Levido said. ‘What voters really don’t like is someone who they can transparently see is pretending to be something they are not. People can just sense things about politicians and with Boris Johnson they sense that what you see is what you get from him. When you see him out on the road, people just warm to him.’ Voters also warmed to Johnson because of his views on spending, heavily influenced by Dominic Cummings. One Conservative HQ staffer at the time said, ‘Dom is the anti-austerity person. He was saying this election is going be very difficult for him because it’s a change election and we’re not change.’
Of course, not everything went to plan for the Conservatives. Candidate selection proved a challenge, with the unpalatable views of several prospective MPs flagged up in the media and resulting in rapid deselections. Levido said, ‘A campaign is only ever one fuck-up away from cataclysmic disaster, or events that can knock you completely off course if you don’t respond correctly. Anything could happen at any point: Donald Trump came to town, there were floods, a fire in a university dormitory, all manner of things could have gone wrong.’ Another campaign insider told me that there was widespread concern over whether the party had made the wrong decision on avoiding a set-piece interview between Johnson and the BBC’s Andrew Neil. ‘There was constant wobble over that,’ the person said.
The other major election event was the terror attack on London Bridge on 29 November, where five people were stabbed, including two fatally.9 Campaigning was briefly suspended and the prime minister’s aides were engaged in how to respond. One recalled that ‘Dom [Cummings] basically said we lock them up and throw away the key. The Justice Secretary said “That’s going to cost quite a lot of money” and he responded, “Don’t worry, we’ll pay for it.” We then came up with a policy which was essentially very, very tough on terrorists and obviously you can’t be too tough on terrorists.’ When Jeremy Corbyn was faced with that question on TV, he said terrorists should not be locked away forever.10 The team had navigated a tragedy and returned the framing to Brexit and their plan for the general election in the final few days.
Far away from another election, the framing of the next campaign is tough to decipher. Levido said the issue of the cultural divide between Labour’s London success and its traditional working-class voters is likely to cause problems. ‘I would be worried if I were Keir Starmer because he will get dragged to the left on some very uncomfortable issues.’ Brooks said it would be a test of Starmer’s convictions, whether these issues will dominate and if he can assert his will. ‘One of the key things when you look at the PM, he makes difficult decisions. He has always been very clear in standing up for his convictions’ – not something everyone will agree with – ‘and I think that’s a critical test that voters set for prime ministers. It’s one that Starmer will have to pass.’
Brooks pressed the case that every election is a unique ‘confluence of events’ and the role of people like himself and Levido is to direct. He remained uncertain whether the red wall collapse was a generational shift or a simple one-off event. ‘The way someone will vote should never be taken for granted. Voters look to the future and say, “Given the circumstances I’m facing today and the things that I think need to change or need to be reinforced in my life, who is the best placed to do that?” It’s our job as campaigners to convince them it’s our side.’ Levido called it a ‘purchasing decision’, adding, ‘the best predictive factor if you’re going to vote for a party is if you voted for them before. But there will still be a lot of people that voted for [a party] for the first time that are reserving judgement for now.’ He also noted that some of the red wall seats turned Tory because Labour voters stayed at home. In Bassetlaw, Nottinghamshire, the Labour vote dropped 25 percentage points in 2019 and the overall turnout was down 3 per cent. Without that change in turnout, would not have gone blue.
Our dinner took place as the UK’s vaccination programme actually proved world-beating – unlike other aspects of the nation’s fight against Covid-19. At that moment, Levido predicted that voters would be unforgiving on jabs: if the roll out went well, the government would be highly praised; if it goes badly, they would be punished. ‘Voters vote on the future not the past,’ he said. Brooks added, ‘This is a really important distinction that politicians always get wrong. They think “I have delivered, therefore voters should reward me.” It is important to remember the voters [in 2019] are the ones who took the chance the first time around. They were the ones who bet on changing to a different government, and they’re the ones who bet on the government delivering.’
As our long evening came to a close, Levido and Brooks mulled over how the next campaign might look and the challenges the Tory Party will face in making itself feel fresh – while fulfilling the promise to its first-time supporters to deliver tangible differences during a global pandemic. Both agreed a second Johnson term would require convincing voters that change had been delivered and more would come down the tracks. The prime minister has set about trying to do this through his ‘levelling-up’ agenda, which remained an amorphous concept a year after his election victory.
Rachel Wolf, a long-time advisor to Boris Johnson who co-wrote the 2019 manifesto told me that ‘tangible differences’ were necessary for the Tories to keep those voters onside. ‘They need to be able to show quick, tangible change to how places look and feel, and that means things like cleaning them up, more police on the streets, security guards returning to markets, shops re-opening, cultural events, bus services people can get on.’ She also thought that progress would need to be made on the bigger infrastructure projects that would eventually produce jobs and ‘make other parts of the country more productive.’
In her view, the phrase ‘levelling up’ was akin to a slogan people can project whatever they want onto – see also, ‘one nation’ or ‘progressive’. When pushed to define it, Wolf thought it captured an effort to show to the first-time Tory voters that ‘their lives will be tangibly different and better than they were two years ago, five years ago.’ Through her focus groups, she revealed not everyone likes the concept. ‘Most people haven’t heard it because most people are terribly proud of where they live and are happy to insult it themselves, but don’t really like other people saying that it needs to be upped from down.’
Levelling up has been set back significantly by the pandemic. At best, Johnson has two or three years after the pandemic to deliver that tangible change after the worst of coronavirus. The government has spent significant sums of money on dealing with lockdown – almost £300bn by May 2021 – which has left many of England’s towns in a worse state than in 2019. ‘If we take the high street as an example, people still really want towns where they can shop and there are places to meet and things to do for their families. Those places were already really suffering. You saw shops closed. You saw graffiti on the Cenotaph and they’re now on their knees, and it’s not at all obvious how rapidly retail, the high streets and cultural events are going to be able to reappear.’
The reinvention of town centres is not about turning them into mini replicas of London, in her view, but about making them ‘nice places to live. It’s a pleasurable existence, a huge proportion of what people want are safe clean streets, local museums, weekly or monthly markets. This is not about creating or putting Deloitte or a big manufacturer into the middle of a town.’ The small, tangible changes will be the most important. ‘People compare their place to towns they like going to. They always talk about things like if it’s clean, there are hanging baskets, the shops are open, there’s a local football club. These sound incredibly simple, but they actually give people both pleasure and pride. They are symbols that these are places that people look after because they have ownership of them. I am absolutely not saying that doing these things suddenly makes you richer. I’m saying that they are a very reasonable thing to do to make people’s lives better.’
Another ally of Dominic Cummings recalled that his hopes for the future were even simpler. ‘I remember chatting to Dom two days before the election and asking what’s the strategy for getting re-elected. He said, literally, “Build shit in the north.” But they have been delayed in building because of everything that has happened with Covid.’ Cummings’ vision has morphed into Johnson’s ‘levelling-up’ agenda, to tackle long-standing regional inequalities and equalize opportunities in England’s less prosperous regions.
From my first conversations in Gateshead, some early themes emerged about why the Conservatives won over Labour working-class heartlands in 2019. The first contingent factor is Brexit: much of northern England is inherently Eurosceptic and found itself falling out of step with the party during the 2016 referendum. Although Jeremy Corbyn proclaimed to be ‘seven and a half’ out of ten on his enthusiasm for the EU, the majority of the party and wider trade union movement were avowedly Remainers.11 Despite some notable Leave voices in Labour, voting for Brexit was a break with orthodoxy. The second contingent factor was the leader himself: a combination of his personality and what he stood for. Jeremy Corbyn entered the 2019 campaign as the most unpopular opposition leader since polling began.12 The hope and optimism he inspired during the 2017 snap election had disappeared by the start of the 2019 election, with just 16 per cent of voters voicing approval of his leadership. His economic pitch did not speak to the increasingly middle-class make up of Labour’s traditional heartlands: the dichotomy that Britain was a country of billionaires and the homeless did not chime with most people’s lived existence. His persona and ideas harked back to an era that many people concluded was long forgotten.
The road trip was about exploring the extent to which both of these contingent factors gave Boris Johnson his victory, alongside other, longer-term structural factors. As per Frank Tatoli’s recollections, northern England is no longer the industrial workshop of the world, nor has it been for many decades. The communities have changed, their jobs and economies unrecognizable from old stereotypes. One of the achievements of Tony Blair was to paint New Labour as the political force embracing and shaping that change, yet his successors have chosen to jettison. Part of the journey is to explore the legacy of the New Labour project, which had its roots in northern England but detractors claim did little of substance to improve the region. I confess to setting off with some scepticism: the cultural regeneration of Gateshead was clearly a boon, but the shaky jobs market and societal challenges for those who live there raise the question of whether those efforts were misguided.
Pinning the 2019 result on just Brexit and Corbyn is the easiest rational explanation. Before setting off, it was something I had been guilty of doing, convincing myself these two contingent factors were responsible for half of the outcome each. But the consequences of that election were so great that I felt this simple dichotomy needed probing. Labour’s collapse was significant and the journey was about exploring that.
Based on James Kanagasooriam’s modelling and the election results, I picked ten constituencies that fit the red wall criteria in different regions of England. The red wall extends into Wales, but I have decided to focus on England due to Wales’s devolved Parliament and distinct cultural hinterland. The electoral upheaval in Scotland and Northern Ireland deserve their own books. On each stop, I sought out key members of the communities, residents, businesses owners, local politicians, and MPs past and present in an effort to answer a question: was 2019 a fluke, or a realignment? Along the way, I brought in national political figures who are relevant to the particular themes of each stop.
This is not a comprehensive examination of every inch of the red wall, but all regions of England where the Conservatives made gains are covered: from Blyth Valley in the north-east to Burnley in north-west; Don Valley and Wakefield in Yorkshire, to Coventry suburbs and Derbyshire countryside in the Midlands. At each stop, I dug into policy themes of the past and present: deindustrialization, ailing infrastructure, austerity, devolution and the rise of green manufacturing to name a few – all while keeping in mind the key question of whether the collapse of the red wall was a one-off event or a structural shift. The journey wraps up in Westminster, where I spoke to senior political figures about the trip and their views on whether Labour can win back the red wall, or if the Tories can make it theirs.
No road trip is complete without a suitable vehicle. In my first political journey across the UK during the 2015 election, I purchased an old-style red Mini, nicknamed Ruby by my flatmates for her bright paint job – which later turned out to be a respray, and not a very good one. ‘One lady owner, it’s had a new clutch and clean as anything,’ went the patter. Never have I been so conned – as one mechanic told me, ‘You’ve got yourself a lemon, son.’ For this much longer trip, I was sensible, adopting a reliable and much more comfortable modern Mini Cooper – all bright red, deep exhaust and boy-racer stripes. The car was some loose metaphor for British industry: designed and built in Oxford, sold around the globe as a symbol of Britain, German owned. It’s nippy and a joy to drive. The less you hear about the car in any road trip book, the better it is going.
My travels took place from autumn 2020 to spring 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic had ended normal life. Politics was essentially frozen – much like me, as most encounters took place in inclement climes while observing social distancing. Despite my best efforts, I managed to catch the coronavirus during my travels, but thankfully recovered without long-term effects. This book is not about coronavirus, so I will only dwell on the pandemic when it affects the red wall story, even if it made the logistics rather tedious.
The first stop, Blyth Valley, is a mere thirty minutes from Gateshead on the Tyne and Wear Metro. I set off to meet someone who had kindly offered to take me around their home town as a starting point on my journey exploring the England that Labour has lost.