“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.
