DAN HODGES ON THE HUSTINGS
AROUND Thursday lunchtime, I took a break from my chilly polling-station vigil in West Auckland and nipped f or a sandwich in the nearby Eden Arms. Waiting for it to arrive, I opened Twitter and began to acquaint myself with Jeremy Corbyn’s triumphant march on Downing Street.
London’s polling stations were grinding to a halt in the face of a ‘youthquake’. Iain Duncan Smith was being routed in Chingford. Dominic Raab’s leafy citadel of Esher was set to fall. Labour activists were being ordered to Uxbridge, where t hey would deliver the coup de grace to the reviled Boris Johnson.
But then I started to catch snippets of a conversation taking place at the bar. People were talking across each other, and Spanish football highlights were playing on TV. But the gist of it went like this. ‘Yeah I voted… you too… Conservative… of course… Corbyn… he supports the IRA… despise him.’
If you believe – as many do – that
Brexit is the biggest challenge facing the nation since the war. And if you believe – as many clearly did on Thursday – that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party represented the biggest peacetime threat to the stability and security of that nation, then we have just lived through the most seismic domestic political event of our lifetime.
In County Durham, everywhere I went on Election day I was met by the same staccato drumbeat. West Auckland Memorial Hall. ‘Brexit… Corbyn… IRA.’ Jubilee Fields Community Centre. ‘ Corbyn… IRA… Brexit.’ Shildon Civic Hall. ‘IRA… Corbyn… Brexit.’
At 9.30pm, I drove over to Trimdon in Tony Blair’s old Sedgefield constituency to watch the exit poll. The Royal pub is about three minutes’ walk from Myrobella, the doublefronted cottage where Blair once played host to George W. Bush.
When I arrived, I got chatting to Robert Martin, a carer who had just returned from his mother’s funeral. I explained I’d been visiting Bishop Auckland, which was vulnerable to the Conservatives, but said I thought this seat was probably safe. ‘Here? It’ll go Tory,’ he told me.
As Big Ben struck ten, and the exit poll flashed on the screen, I asked security guard Philip Solomons what he thought.
‘Unbelievable,’ he said. Unbelievably good or bad? ‘Oh, good.’
Pharmacy manager Andrea Hughes seemed less sure. I presumed she’d voted for sitting Labour MP Phil Wilson. She shook her head. ‘ I’ve lived here all my life, and I’ve always voted Labour. But I just couldn’t this time. I voted Green.’
In last week’s Mail on Sunday, after a month and a half travelling from Bolsover to Canterbury, St Ives to Chingford, Wrexham to County Durham, I predicted t hat Labour’s vaunted Red Wall was on the brink of collapse. I was wrong. It didn’t collapse. It was smashed into a billion pieces. Atomised by the arrogance, ideological blindness, self-righteousness and viciousness of Jeremy Corbyn and his cultish followers.
When first elected in 2015, they inherited a battered but proud and functioning party. By the time The Absolute Boy made his graceless resignation speech in t he early hours of Friday morning, all that was left was the political equivalent of the Manson clan.
I’ve often been critical of Boris Johnson. And part of me still finds something distasteful about the way Theresa May – a woman who dedicated herself with flawed but unflinching purpose to the service of her country – was hounded from office, leaving Britain’s Greatest Showman to sweep in and reap the plaudits and rewards.
But neither life nor politics are fair. This is Boris’s victory, and his moment. When I left Westminster on the final day before Parliament rose, I couldn’t find a single Minister or MP who could identify a credible path to a Tory majority. Boris – guided by his mercurial adviser Dominic Cummings – found one. The scale of their triumph is dwarfed only by the scale of Corbyn’s defeat.
This morning there is an understandable sense of relief – even jubilation. The Corbynite danger has passed. The Brexit log-jam is about to be broken. The post-referendum political turmoil has been ended, at least for the next four or five years.
But we need a serious national inquest now. Into how we got here. How we came so close to disaster. And how the British people were again required to save our entitled political class from itself.
The first thing everyone needs to grasp is that while Thursday was a Conservative victory, it was not a victory for backwards-looking conservatism. There is a settled narrative, shared across the political spectrum, that the working men and women of Britain are terrified of change. This argument says that traditional communities, still reeling from the loss of inter-generational industries, are rebelling against the transformation they see all around them. Immigration. The break-up of the extended family. The insidious, all-intrusive penetration of social media.
But the constituencies I visited were not packed with 21st Century luddites, longing for a return to a sepia-tinted 1950s Britain. No one in Bolsover wanted the pits reopened. Few people I spoke to in St Ives expressed a longing for their children to earn a living from the sea. Their anger wasn’t generated by the fact the world was changing too fast. It was that it wasn’t changing fast enough. And the change that did occur was being imposed, rather than reflecting individual or community will.
For Labour there was also a very specific lesson. The clue to obtaining the trust of the British working class lies in the name. They are the working class, not the freebie class. Everything they own they have worked for. They harbour an innate suspicion of anything gifted, not earned. And an even greater suspicion of the person hawking it. Jeremy Corbyn never understood that. But then there’s no reason why he should. He has spent his political career focusing on the hard-pressed communities of Gaza and the Chagos Islands. Wrexham or Chingford are like another country to h i m. Former Labour MPs like Phil Wilson do understand. Speaking before a single vote had been counted, he told me why he’d lost Sedgefield. ‘People here are genuinely patriotic. Lots of them in this part of the world have links to the military. And when they see what Jeremy
Corbyn cares about Gaza. Chingford is like another country to him