The post you are reporting:
Matthew Parris writing in the Times.
On Thursday an irresistible force gathered momentum on its trajectory towards an immovable object. First the irresistible force. Yesterday we learnt that results in England’s local elections flattered the Tories in many of the places where the Leave vote had been strongest. Theresa May and her MPs will not want to disappoint those voters who liked her party best and rescued Tories from the local government disaster they had feared. She will want to keep faith with her new friends among the electorate.
Hardline Brexiteers among her cabinet colleagues therefore gain another argument against compromise on the customs deal now threatening to blow up in the government’s face. The party (hardline Brexiteers will say) would be letting down its rescuers: former Ukip supporters in places like Derby, Basildon and Nuneaton. This must nudge our government away from a softer and more “frictionless” line in its pursuit of a customs arrangement with our former European partners. The irresistible force gained impetus on Thursday. Now to the immovable object. On the same day, EU negotiators made clear that Brussels would back the Republic of Ireland’s veto on any proposed trade deal that brings friction to the border with Northern Ireland. Even Mrs May’s compromise proposal (the fussy “customs partnership” rejected this week by the cabinet’s Brexit sub-committee) brings friction. So the veto looks as immovable an object as ever.
The collision could occur quite soon. It will be between the Brexit that Leave’s most enthusiastic supporters want, and the Brexit that Britain could reasonably get. The collision will make this weekend’s hoo-ha about local election results look like a trivial fidget in the face of an oncoming crash. Nevertheless these local government elections are the weekend’s political theatre, and we do need to talk about them. As a news event they will be quickly forgotten but they are significant straws in a prevailing breeze. The results show which parts of the geography (including the social and economic geography) of England offer the Tories the easiest pickings. These easy pickings are in the places that had previously been most attracted towards Ukip. The results are therefore bad news for Conservatives like me, anxious to resist any Tory drift to the right.
Social class, too, remains an important if submerged feature in British politics. However distasteful, it is necessary to examine election results from the perspective of class. From that perspective these results show Conservative support has been gently repositioning itself in class terms, away from leafier places like the London borough of Richmond or Trafford in Greater Manchester and towards harder-bitten parts of Essex or the former coalmining district of Amber Valley in Derbyshire; places where a restless and (often with reason) aggrieved class wants populist meat from the Tories — and, from Theresa May’s Tories, is getting it. These local elections are bad news for those Conservatives the populist right like to call the “establishment elite”. It is a fact, not a slur, to say that where they lost on Thursday, the Tories were deserted disproportionately by the better-educated and more professional classes among their former supporters. Where they won they were rescued in places where educational qualifications were thinner on the ground. This cannot be without effect on the thinking of the party’s strategists.
So don’t be distracted by crusty retired colonels or outré Brexit birds of bright plumage in these and other newspaper columns: they are window-dressing, the prisoners of war that Leave has taken among the educated classes. But the dark heart of British nativism is to be found not in castles, libraries or the Carlton Club in London’s St James’s, but in meaner streets: in harder-pressed Nuneaton, Derby or Chesterfield. Here in their millions Theresa May’s “just about managing” had been gathering in what turned out to be a waiting room for Tory affiliation, with “Ukip” on the door.
It follows that Ukip may have lost this latest election in spectacular fashion, but Farageism has done well. The more Farageist the local electorate, the better the Tories have fared. It is futile for people like me to deny it: the collapse of Ukip does not represent a collapse of the populist right, but a growing realisation by former Ukip voters that their best hopes for the kind of policies Ukip used to promise now lie with the Conservative Party.
It seems that on Thursday many liberal, Remain-leaning Conservatives reached the same — for them, mournful — conclusion: doubting, in places like Richmond, that the Tories are any longer the party for them. With Labour bogged down on the left and the Conservative Party appearing to drift right, a partial vacuum is building in the space between. This vacuum should be open country for the Lib Dems, if they are any good. In some local results they do seem to have reaped some benefit, but their advance is so far more a flicker than a surge. But Lib Dems may have some stronger arguments coming their way. Remember that the Brexit ultras, the 60 Tory MPs who make up the European Research Group, actually want the irresistible force to hit the immovable object. A smash-up is their dream; stitch-up their nightmare. If every proposal our government puts to Brussels is blocked by the threat of an Irish veto, the chance that we simply walk away without a civilised deal grows. Britain would certainly then be free to go out into the world and pursue the free-trade deals that the ultras dream of. Never, therefore, suppose that everyone in the cabinet, let alone on the Tory back benches, really wants a deal, or the kind of deal that is remotely available. Some approach the negotiations in the secret hope of failure.
These local election results have strengthened such people’s arm. They have emboldened those who will argue that our government should present Europe with a take-it-or-leave it offer, and that this would actually be popular in Basildon, Amber Valley or Peterborough. And I’m afraid that in terms of electoral strategy they may be right. A big scrap in which Britain kicks over the negotiating table and walks away might well be popular with precisely the voters Mrs May won from Ukip on Thursday. Yet it would not alleviate but deepen their difficulties. Which brings me to a concluding thought that is blasphemy to the spirit of this age. This government would help its new recruits from Ukip best by thanking them for their votes, and ignoring their views.
