THE TORY ABYSS
ACaTheDraL-sizeD church gazes down on an endearingly wonky medieval streetscape devoid of satellite dishes and most of the usual retail chains.
if you want a Greggs sausage roll, it’s a half-hour drive to another district. The marketplace next to the handsome town hall still hosts the same twice-weekly market that has been here in saffron Walden since 1141.
you might even find nearby resident Jamie Oliver sniffing artisan cheeses at the current holder of Britain’s ‘Best small Outdoor Market’ award.
This rural essex town is a perennial entry in all those national lifestyle charts of the ‘Best Places To Live’. it exudes an unshowy sense of permanence and prosperity, as it has done ever since a booming local crocus industry — producing saffron for use in cloth-dying and medicine — gave the town its name.
Today, while many residents might commute to London or Cambridge by day, this is no dormitory town. There is a lived-in feel about the place.
This has also been a rock solid Tory seat for as long as anyone can remember. you sense that it would take a Marxist coup to shift the Conservatives here. Or would it? For, just a few days ago, they were not merely defeated. They were annihilated. Overnight, they lost more than 80 per cent of their seats on the local authority, Uttlesford District Council, as 24 seats shrivelled to four.
Of course, we cannot extrapolate a prediction for the next general election from this one poll of the good folk of Uttlesford. however, it is emblematic of a dramatic shift in the shires, the bedrock of British Conservatism.
‘People simply felt that the Tories had stopped listening to them in Westminster and that it was the same here on the ground, too,’ says John Lodge, the new council leader and the man in charge of the revolution here in saffron Walden.
ExCePTthat there is nothing revolutionary about his residents For Uttlesford party which has just overrun council hq, taking 26 of the 39 seats.
a collection of lawyers, business people, doctors and engineers, they look — on paper, at least — like typical members of a Conservative association, except that they also include ex-Lib Dems and ex-Labour supporters, plus many people who had never been interested in politics of any sort.
Nor is this some flash-in-thepan protest vote waving a Nimby (Not in My Back yard) placard. The ‘r4U’ are now in their fifth year of running the town council and there are similar insurgencies across the home Counties.
This lot have multiple grievances — mainly Tory plans for various huge developments without corresponding plans for new infrastructure — and a visceral sense of disappointment.
There are very serious lessons here for the Tory party as a whole.
i have been following politics at national and local level since the days of Margaret Thatcher. i have seen Tory triumphs and collapses — from John Major’s shock win in 1992 to multiple batterings at the hands of Tony Blair.
yet what we have seen in essex — and elsewhere — feels like a seismic shift of a different order.
Uttlesford ( a twee name invented by Whitehall bureaucrats in 1974) is a large rural patch which not only covers 80,000 people and 250 square miles of true- blue Middle
england, but also stansted airport. Never before has a major international airport fallen under the jurisdiction of a local residents’ association.
and similar stories are popping up across the english Tory heartlands. such is the dire state of the national party, however, that few show any sign of having noticed.
‘To be honest, we expected to end up forming some sort of coalition, not actually winning,’ says John Lodge, a yorkshireborn, Cambridge- educated entrepreneur (from a family of ‘working class Tories’). ‘ and we never expected this sort of margin.’
On that point, he is in agreement with pretty much everyone, from the vanquished Tories to the editor of the local paper.
‘ i think the result was a complete shock to everyone,’ says John Brooker, editor of the Walden Local.
Down at Westminster, all eyes are on Theresa May’s impending departure and next week’s supremely pointless — if rather gripping — european election. inevitably, it will tell us nothing we don’t already know.
The remain vote will be fragmented. Millions of traditional Tory and Labour voters will vote for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party because they want to give Westminster a sharp poke in the eye; because they haven’t changed their mind on Brexit; because they know this election will have no more impact on their daily lives than the battle for this year’s Love island.
What should really be preoccupying Tory hq, instead, is the slow, steady, incremental corrosion of the party base in the heartlands. Because that will have a far greater bearing on the party’s fortunes at the next election.
in one Conservative stronghold after another, the party is not just having a hard time. it is imploding.
Take, for example, surrey, also quintessential Middle england Toryland. at the start of this month, the party controlled eight of the county’s 11 councils. Now, it has four — and only just.
Nowhere was the loss more pronounced than in Guildford, where Tories suffered their worst defeat since the borough was created nearly half a century ago — dropping from 35 of the 48 council seats to just nine.
MOsTdamage was inflicted by two residents’ groups bitterly opposed to Tory plans to build more than 10,000 homes on greenbelt land.
a few months ago, i spent a day with locals who were trying to block plans for 1,800 executive homes on ancient protected downland known as the hog’s Back while the council ignored vacant, fencedoff brownfield sites in the centre of Guildford.
Those residents have now had their revenge, albeit too late to stop the bulldozers.
yet this was a vote which went far beyond mere Nimbyism. On one point, the winners and losers agree: Tory disarray at the national level was a central factor. Not long ago, shire Tories used to describe Theresa May as a diligent
woman doing her best in an impossible job. ‘Poor woman. i feel sorry for her,’ was the familiar refrain we heard time and again. Not any more.
Day after day, the strength of feeling is there for those who choose to look.
in one local association after another, formal soundings produce calls for the Prime Minister’s prompt defenestration — 76 per cent of members in Chatham (Kent), 86 per cent in Gedling (Nottinghamshire) and so on.
Few places, however, have been as emphatic as North essex. ‘i have never voted for anything other than “the usual” until this election and now i have voted for the residents’ party,’ says educational publisher Paul Price- smith, unwinding in the King’s arms in saffron Walden.
‘The Tories just thought they had got essex tied down but they hadn’t.’
helen Chessher, who has run a flower shop in the town for 16 years, has had enough of ‘horrendous’ traffic and wants new infrastructure improved ahead of any new housing. she is delighted the insurgents have taken over the town and the district.
‘Change is good,’ she says. ‘i sense that people are more