How rare it is to be able to pinpoint the day you witnessed the winds of change sweeping away the old political landscape. As I wrote just before the local elections, I felt that great doorstep surge in Lightwater, in Michael Gove’s Surrey Heath constituency. Sure enough, those angry Tory voters did desert his party in droves, turning three forever blue seats Lib Dem yellow and giving the Liberal Democrats control of the council.
What’s Gove’s response to his constituents’ rebellion? He ignores it, heading off to the wilder shores of rightwingery that has just been rejected, to speak at the National Conservatism three-day jamboree in Westminster. This low-tax, small-state religio-populism, which has much in common with the Tea Party movement, Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump, is on another planet from Gove’s voters. With other senior colleagues who also attended – some fresh from another Tory rightist rebel conference at the weekend – they reveal how little they have absorbed of views expressed through the ballot box at the local elections.
