The Red Wall is already rejecting mushy Toryism

Like the Thatcherite conservatives, rust-belt voters are starting to dread a rerun of the Nineties

Is the honeymoon period already over? While No 10 fully expected the first cheeky glints of Johnsonism to spark discontent among the traditional Tory grassroots, something else intriguing is happening: unanticipated Red Wall resistance towards the Government’s unwieldy brand of enlightened progress.

It is, of course, early days. Trade negotiations with Brussels are yet to get going (if there will be any talks at all). Details on the contents of next month’s Budget are considerably less prolific than the swirling rumours of the stink between Sajid Javid and Dominic Cummings. Downing Street’s war on Whitehall has barely begun. Mr Johnson is also poised to clear the dead wood and thorny ideologues from his Cabinet in a reshuffle.

But the Government already faces a basic problem. In its newly won constituencies, some MPS admit that enthusiasm for the Tories’ spending pledges is tepid. Although the cliché goes that HS2’S opponents are the Nimbys whose suburban piles graze against the edges of the route, for example, one MP for an inner-city Northern seat that stands to benefit confessed to me that, for every constituent who says with a sigh that it must be done, two more complain that it is a waste of limited funds.

Things are also already looking iffy for “cultural conservatism” – the medley of values that the Tories are supposed to be espousing, from common sense to tough justice, to cultivate their “emotional connection” with the working class. For once, the Tories are struggling to be dishonest. Pious gesticulations on climate change and agnostic ditherings on how to deal with violent Islamism this week betrayed the party’s hyper-liberal sensibilities. This has caused as much irritation in England’s old mining towns as in the villages of Surrey.

Perhaps the London boffins charged with calibrating a “dataresponsive” One Nation Tory strategy have overlooked the intelligence to be found in our rust-belt’s regional newspapers. Take the Black Country, which has greeted Grant Shapps’s pledge to reverse the Beeching cuts with scepticism. The Express & Star dismissed “promises which sound ridiculous when they can’t even get services working properly”.

On Jacob Rees-mogg, they are just as scathing. The father of six’s decision to join in the criticism of a Walsall councillor, who had the temerity to observe that some families in his borough are struggling financially because they have four or more children, has not gone down well. “I never cease to be amazed at the crass comments of people who put themselves forwards as our politicians… while having little or no idea of life as an average wageearning person,” seeths Clive Potts from Bilston in the Express & Star letters page.

Other highlights include Ewan Cowie from Cramlington (of the newly gained Blyth Valley seat in Northumberland), who wrote in to the Northern Echo, appalled by the Government’s virtue-signalling ecohypocrisy. Criticising the decision to award the new North East Metro fleet contract to Swiss firm Stadler – with all the accompanying carbon costs of importing trains over hundreds of miles – he vented his disgust at the MPS “in thrall” to Extinction Rebellion who demonise grouse moors and block local coal mining. Somehow, I suspect the PM has little sympathy. This week, he has partaken in photo ops with Sir David Attenborough and announced a ban on the sale of new petrol cars in 2035, in an imperious act of bureau-catastrophism that could have been ripped from the regulation book of Theresa May.

In the canteens of Parliament, Tories talk of the need to “consolidate” their northern gains. In fact, they risk reducing post-brexit Toryism to a blancmange that has collapsed under the centrifugal forces of hand-wringing and crackdowning.

For now, though, one can detect in the air the pong of vanilla. The PM’S eloquent eulogies to modernisation are reminiscent of 1997. Back then, Tony Blair played the man of the people while quoting Milton, promising to “liberate” the masses (“innovators, adventurers, pioneers”) from the new elite (“moneyshifters, middlemen, speculators”) by unleashing the power of the information age. Today, our Prime Minister frames himself in similar terms, but quoting Churchill.

Perhaps the resemblance in tone is understandable. In the past 20 years, the basic challenge of British politics has not changed: constructing a populist rather than paternalist modernism that taps the riches of globalism without pillaging the soul of the nation state. Blair not only failed, but forsook his original mission on the altar of progressive Western salvation.

Mr Johnson must finish what Mr Blair threatened to start. But to do so, he must ignore the myth that you win in the middle. You win in the mainstream – a bracing new confluence between Home Counties Thatcherites and a thrifty, anti-paternalistic working class with little regard for wokeness.