“Were you still awake for Raab? Or Hunt? Or Gove?” On the morning after next year’s election we may be asking each other that, remembering the magic early-hours moment in 1997 when Michael Portillo lost his seat in Enfield Southgate, north London, symbolising the earthquake that brought down the Tories after 18 long years. Imagine the shock of Tory A-listers’ seats tumbling in the forever Tory fiefdoms of Surrey.
I had never imagined it, so what I discovered while canvassing with the Liberal Democrats last weekend in Michael Gove’s Surrey Heath constituency was terra incognita to me. Before, there was no point in following the fortunes of forlorn opposition candidates trying to knock down impenetrable home-county blue walls. There is now.
On Surrey Heath borough council – Tory since the dawn of time – Lib Dems already hold 10 council seats to the Tories’ 18 after the last elections in 2019 (plus four independents, two Green and one Labour). They may gain control, after taking over next-door Woking last year (Woking, awoke!). It seems like a sign of change when the majority of Tory councillors in Surrey Heath are not standing again, including the council’s leader. “Running for the hills,” gloats a Lib Dem councillor. Local results don’t necessarily translate to general elections; angry voters can use locals as a free hit at the government of the day, before returning to old loyalties for Westminster. But listening to an unexpected array of outraged voters switching away from the Tories, it was hard to think many would be returning next year or any time soon.
This is Lightwater, a ward so blue no Lib Dems even bothered standing here in 2019. In a row of luxury executive homes bedecked with columns, just as you would expect, a polite elderly man says he’s very happy with the Tories, has a good private pension and private health insurance, owns rental properties and would never vote any differently. What you wouldn’t expect across the way is the younger man who says: “Like the rest of the country, I’m really tired of the Tories.” He moved here but couldn’t get his children in to a local school, “but going private costs me an arm and a leg”. Esso has built a pipeline and damaged trees behind his house, “but Michael Gove did nothing”.
Nearby, in more modest homes, an avalanche of voters tip away from the Tories. “It’s time to shake them up,” says one woman. “I’d never, never be Labour, but Liberal Democrats, OK.” She’s just one who raises potholes, for which they say Surrey is famous: on that very day two cars were stuck in a single pothole, and had still not been winched out. Someone jokes: “Britain used to drive on the left, but now it drives on what’s left.” Next door a middle-aged man says: “We’re the squeezed middle, on £30,000, renting this house. No, we’re not getting by.” As with one house after another, the Boris Johnson/Liz Truss mayhem is still raw. “We’re sick of the lying and cheating and lining their own pockets,” he says as his wife adds, “You feel they’re laughing at you now.”
Down the road a critical care nurse from Frimley Park hospital, where the roof is precarious, is shocked by the food bank set up for nurses. In his garden a few doors down, a man calls Gove “not a nice man”, which is a common sentiment, and why Lib Dem leaflets here always refer to “Michael Gove’s Conservatives”.
But here was the dream Lib Dem door-knock: a young couple with a small boy, ex-Tory voters who had voted Brexit and were now full of indignant regret, had a lot to say and out it all poured. “We were turkeys voting for Christmas,” said the father, shaking his head in disbelief. His company supplies many others struggling with Brexit fallout: “They can’t sell into the EU, takes too long, too expensive.” Why did they vote Brexit? “I wish we hadn’t,” says his wife. “I just thought, ‘We’re British, we don’t want to be pushed around.’ We had no idea how well we did out of it. Oven-ready? Boris had nothing. He just lied and lied, even to the Queen. We won’t forgive Tories.”
The Lib Dems hadn’t knocked these streets before, and there’s nothing psephologically significant about a random canvass. Vox pops can be chosen to suit, but out of the first 15 conversations, only three would vote Tory: in Lightwater, of all places, this felt seismic. The cost of living, the NHS and renegotiating Truss-inflated mortgages were all mentioned, but above all sheer disgust with the Tories was everywhere. Immigration didn’t get a mention, so as the political scientist John Curtice suggests to me, it may not be the Tories’ hoped-for salvation, as they head for the wilds of Suella Braverman/Jacob Rees-Mogg Conservative extremity.
“They need to persuade people that Conservatives can restore a reputation for economic competence,” Curtice says, yet Surrey Heath council has been criticised for its “disastrous” decision to spend millions on a shopping centre the value of which plummeted by 50% in four years. People talk about the length of NHS waiting lists. Sewage has also been a shocker, the Lib Dems revealing that filth has been gushing into rivers such as the nearby Bourne, a campaign that has been picked up by the rightwing press.
Labour needs the Lib Dems to tear the heart out of the Tory heartlands. As one longtime Labour voter says, in Lightwater he will vote Lib Dem tactically “because it’s necessary”, and so it is. Curtice tells me: “The last time I saw tactical voting on this scale was before the 1997 election when voters just wanted to get the Conservatives out.” And they did. It needs no secret pacts, just each party reserving all energy for its own winnables.
Besides, if Labour voters can forget the Lib Dems’ coalition shame, some may welcome the influence of their stronger Brexit resistance and support for proportional representation. Labour HQ wants them to do well in a general election – without going so far as holding the balance of power. If they did, would they use their leverage more effectively this time by refusing to vote through a Labour budget without a referendum on PR, with a binding Labour commitment to back reform to the hilt? Nick Clegg’s fatal error was allowing David Cameron to throw his party’s mighty campaigning weight against it. Since then, public opinion has swung behind electoral reform. If Labour fails to win outright, the Lib Dems will say its choice will be between a PR referendum and a far more reckless one on Scottish independence to win SNP backing.
Ed Davey has wisely abandoned “equidistance” between the other main parties, as Paddy Ashdown did before 1997, encouraging tactical voting. There will be no Tory/ Lib Dem coalition and the chance of an outright Tory victory looks remote. But watch them try to win back Tory switchers by warning: “Vote Lib Dem, get Labour”.
In the meantime, wait for the votes in these local elections to be closely dissected for general election impact: the few overnight results will be misleading. But as the tea leaves take time to settle, watch the Tory teapot cracking apart.
• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
