There are various ways to map the spectrum of public opinion and model voter journeys from one pole to another, but none applies to Sheila. White-haired and frail, she takes a few minutes to come to the door of her small redbrick terrace house on an estate in Eastbourne’s Hampden Park suburb. She looks tired and explains that medication for a serious illness makes her sleepy. But a glint of something like mischief flickers in her eyes when she’s asked who has her support at the coming election.
It’s a close call. Reform or Liberal Democrat. Sheila likes what Nigel Farage has to say and has backed Ukip before (never the Tories). Pressed to choose, she declares her decision by pointing emphatically at the young man standing on her doorstep holding a stack of orange-fringed flyers. Josh Babarinde’s reputation has preceded him.
Sheila’s granddaughter told her about the Lib Dem candidate’s work campaigning to protect imperilled services at Eastbourne hospital. He grew up on the estate and is recognised at every door as a hardworking, troubleshooting local boy. Babarinde recently turned 31, which is boyish for a Sussex seaside resort that attracts retirees. No one doubts he will unseat Caroline Ansell, the incumbent Tory. He would also break new ground as a mixed-heritage Lib Dem MP – his father is Nigerian – representing a very white town.
Race might be an issue for some Reform sympathisers, but it isn’t an obstacle for Sheila. Nor is it a deal breaker for Will, whom I met earlier in the day when sampling opinion in the town centre. He is 58 and a former Conservative voter who now dismisses the party without hesitation. “They’ve had it,” he says. Will would reluctantly take Rishi Sunak over Keir Starmer as prime minister, but he is more drawn to Reform. “They say the sort of things I’m thinking,” says Will. Also, “the whole system needs shaking up”.
If not Reform, it will be Lib Dem. Will, too, has heard about Babarinde’s support for the local hospital and is grateful. Ground-level activism is the precision instrument that can reach people who would otherwise rally to Farage’s siren.
Voter traffic between Lib Dems and Reform is not a major national trend. Partly it is an Eastbourne quirk. The seat was reliably Conservative through most of the 20th century but was nicked by the Lib Dems in a famous 1990 byelection upset that helped precipitate Margaret Thatcher’s downfall. Since then it has switched a few times from orange to blue and back again. It voted for Brexit but was Lib Dem from 2017-19. The Tories currently hold it by a margin of 4,331 votes. Normally that would make it a battleground seat.
But this isn’t a normal election. The Conservatives aren’t just losing – they are unravelling. Sunak’s gaffe- and scandal-prone campaign hasn’t helped, but outside Westminster that is just background noise. It is the hiss of air rushing out, not a cause of the puncture.
Over the past few weeks I have met numerous ex-Tory voters in various marginal seats and none were sticking with their former choice. Or none would admit to it – an important caveat. Many claim to be undecided. When pressed, the indecision tilts in degrees of change from readiness to give Labour a chance to wanting the whole system dismantled.
I did meet one middle-aged woman in Hastings who voted Conservative in 2019 and whose loyalty was unchanged, but not in a way that helps Sunak. “I know it’s not very fashionable, but I’d bring back Boris,” she told me. She was planning to stay at home on polling day.
Stalwarts of the Johnson personality cult are not a huge segment of the electorate, but they are out there. Like Eastbourne’s Reform-Lib Dem switchers, they are tiles in the mosaic of public opinion that makes a simple picture of Tory devastation when you zoom out to national scale. Bring the lens closer and the image of a red wave sweeping away the blue legion becomes a more variegated, multi-hued composition.
Routine party affiliations, consistent from one election to the next, predictable by geography and demographics, are becoming less common. In the 1960s, only about 13% of voters switched sides between general elections. Now it is more like 60%. Volatility that looked exceptional in 2017 and 2019, when Brexit choices cut across party lines, has not subsided.
Labour and Tory seat allocations have been protected by the electoral system. Tactical voting obscures many people’s true sympathies. There was a glimpse of brittleness the last time a national ballot was conducted by proportional representation. In the European parliamentary poll of May 2019 the Tories got 9% of the vote. They came fifth, behind the Greens, Labour, Lib Dems and the Brexit party.
That was an anomalous result in many ways, reflecting the febrile, polarised mood in the depths of a crisis over implementation of the referendum result. But it also contained a warning about the decline of Tory voting as an automatic cultural reflex for millions of people.
Many Conservatives then saw Johnson’s landslide general election win seven months later as the reassuring return of pendulum politics – an old-fashioned swing from Labour to Tories. In reality it was another spasm of electoral volatility. This time it was the automatic Labour-voting reflex in the party’s “red wall” heartlands that failed. And that wasn’t new, nor was it a unique function of Brexit. Scottish nationalists had capitalised on a very similar dynamic of cultural and economic disaffection to capture dozens of Labour heartland seats in 2015.
Starmer will recapture scores of lost seats this time around. But the fusion of party identity and local belonging – the way people would say, when asked how they might vote: “Everyone is Labour round here” – will not easily be reinstated. There will be no restoration of northern “red walls”, just as many Tory MPs no longer feel safe in their most fortified southern bastions.
Sunak’s last hope for avoiding the total collapse of his party is the emergence of shy Tories on polling day. These are the deep-tissue Conservatives who always turn out and couldn’t vote any other way.
But British politics no longer obeys the rule of things always happening. That is why this campaign feels oddly static and turbulent at the same time, a roiling churn under a still crust. Opinion polls all foretell Labour victory, but on varying scales, generating a spread of very different scenarios. It is hard to know what is more plausible because nothing that has come before feels reliable as a guide to what comes next.
None of this is precedented. It isn’t just the future that feels uncertain but also the past. We are entering a new political landscape, and only once we see the contours of the unfamiliar realm can we really understand how we got there.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
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