The flag outside the Spalding Conservative Club is at half-mast. This is not because of the wider Tory calamity — though it should be — but, the barmaid says, because a member has died. This is South Holland and the Deepings in Lincolnshire, the safest Tory seat in Britain, Fenland, and a gateway to the Wash. Sir John Hayes, who has held the seat since 1997, had a majority of 37,338 in 2019. The Club is a Queen Anne style house with a rose garden, decked with St George flags and five photographs of Hayes, who looks like a central-casting Tory grandee from the mid-Eighties. Apart from the barmaid, it is empty. Even so, if there is a centre to British Toryism, this is it.
This is laconic Toryism, narcotic, incurious and swagged. Georgian mansions line the river and in the gardens of Ayscoughfee Hall, a medieval red-brick manor and museum, schoolchildren play by an ornamental lake and topiary. If there is decline here, it is hidden at the edges.
Off the market square, where the busker says Elvis is the favourite — he plays for people who had a lot of sex in the Seventies — I find a gun maker selling Barbour dress clothes and, nearby, a gypsy boy by his pony and trap. The horse is called Red Bull, he says, and he drove him from Peterborough for chips. Faced with this landscape — this majority — the Liberal Democrats are remote, and Labour is barely campaigning. The candidate didn’t appear at the hustings where the first question was: who is your favourite king? There are Union Jacks everywhere: on cushions, tablecloths and dogs. There is occasional bunting and a defibrillator on an exterior wall because Tories are old, and old people die. Typhoons from RAF Coningsby rip the sky.
It is Armed Forces Week, and a parade of local dignitaries muster with soldiers, banners and pipers: slowly. Sir John Hayes MP is photographed with the staff of Peacocks. I don’t think I have ever had a Tory MP on the record while reporting an election — they tend to flee — but Hayes is a secure Tory. I ask him why this is the safest Tory seat. He doesn’t tell me about Spalding, but himself, as related to Spalding. He and the town are one — as in Arthurian legend.
“I’ve been here a very long time and over that time I’ve touched many people’s lives,” he says. “As I go round countless people say to me, ‘Oh thank you for what you did for my mother or my child or my neighbour or my friends.’” That, he says, “makes a huge difference. In a way,” — in a way! — “the national brand matters but that brand matters too.”
He campaigns like a lover, and it is amazing to watch. He darts down a line of women, pounces on one, and mutters into her hair: “Look after me on the 4th.” As he speaks, his voice takes on a distinctive London accent and he adds, “you will, I know you will” — like a spell. “I certainly will!” she giggles, a heroine of romance fiction in Spalding. We retreat. “That’s how it is, alright,” he says to me, comfortably. I have only ever seen Boris Johnson do this, but his eyes were dead.
“That intimacy,” he says, “is the heart of good democratic representation, and it’s particular to our system. They feel they own me. I’m a romantic High Tory: a Disraelian High Tory. I keep his picture with me all the time. I will show you.” He gets it out: it sits inside a tiny book of Keats’s poetry. Disraeli stares at us, and Hayes enacts a masterclass in the Disraelian creed: the Tory aristocracy and Tory working-class as one. That is, he speaks the theory into my Dictaphone, and runs into the crowd to demonstrate the practical. He shouts at a greengrocer: “I’m on it, Michael!” Then to another woman: “If I didn’t get your vote,” — he gazes into her welcoming face — “I’d be really worried.” “I think the way you are really matters” he says, “your demeanour”.
I believe in Hayes’s belief: later I meet a man on a mobility scooter. He has a Poppy keyring and a sticker that says: “Send Nudes”. (Spalding has the glossiest mobility scooters I have seen. They are Ferrari red and festooned with Union Jacks.) He says his mother wrote to Hayes — they live in the same village — and a few days later he received the two-bedroom bungalow he wanted.
Jack Braginton, 23, the Liberal Democrat candidate, has been alive for less time than Hayes has been MP. He did work experience in Hayes’s office as a schoolboy, because that is how Spalding works. (In 2019, the Lib Dems got 6.6%, almost half the Labour share.) We meet by Greggs. He says that Spalding’s Toryism is “perhaps rooted in the belief within a rural community that hard graft provides. And deep within this, is the duopoly of thought: personal responsibility for hard work, and a deep sense of community.”
I ask why they don’t talk about it? Why is Hayes the only Tory philosopher in a Tory town? Braginton, who is ruddy and genial, says: “It is not for us to consider larger questions of economy, society or politics.” Rather, “it is the role of a politician to just keep our way of life ticking over, it does not need change or bureaucracy, it just needs to be allowed to continue as it is. That is the genius of the Conservatives — balancing all interests by doing nothing and calling that consensus.”
Spalding is so Tory that the dangerous opposition is also Tory — a former Tory, now Independent — and I wonder if Hayes would smile on this and say: the system works! He is Mark Le Sage, a nurse and local councillor. We meet in the gardens of Ayscoughfee Hall by the lake. He is functional, aggrieved. The meaningful opposition is always independent here. If people are angry on polling day, they stay at home.
“I am a very annoyed, very upset, very frustrated, very disillusioned dad, granddad, nurse,” he says. “I’m so fed up with the system: the lies; the backstabbing; the scandals. I’ve had enough”. He stood, he says, because he was so frustrated, “with the fact that we just been lied to: over and over again. And then they brought David Cameron back — the guy who left us in the lurch after Brexit!”
Here, when you look behind the swag, people are “disconsolate”, though I think they aren’t used to naming it. The cost-of-living and public service crises don’t stampede in Spalding. They crawl. A former teacher tells me girls don’t feel safe in the town. A Bulgarian woman says eastern European immigrants bring crime to Spalding and “make life hard”. A homeless girl says she was attacked with a brick and shows me the scab. A young man tells me his mother died from cancer last winter. It shattered him. It was, he says, like television: “When it’s like, ‘the NHS is on its knees’. I sat with her at Christmas for three hours and nobody came. She deserved so much better.” That is: the outside world intruded on Spalding, and this is awful, and new.
Later I stand in the Spalding’s Gentlemen’s Society, and stare at the curiosities — its members measured a conch by drinking from it, the guide tells me — and the rows of unread books. Spalding had an Enlightenment: it was a progressive town 300 years ago, and that helped to make it rich. If it is in decline now, I think it doesn’t yet know it, and I wonder if that is the spell Hayes casts so well.
At the Red Lion, a group of ageing men in straw hats and women in bright dresses sit in the sun, drinking. They are the affluent, self-made Tories of Braginton’s analysis. Their fear of Labour is semi-religious, with inbuilt legends. “Keir Starmer is a paedophile-lover,” says a woman. “Exactly,” says a man. “I don’t trust him one little bit.” Tony Blair is a war criminal: “All those soldiers that lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan: that was down to him.” Jeremy Corbyn is, “the worst thing that ever happened to this country”.
“Poor Rishi Sunak,” says one, “He got fined for saying, ‘Happy birthday,’ to someone.” The table silences itself in sympathy: then someone moans that Sunak came home early from D-Day, “because he’s not an Englishman”. What is their main concern? “Too many foreigners,” says one, and he points at his friend. “He’s from Peterborough.” They cackle.
Reform is no threat to this kind of Toryism: it is dysfunctional, messy, a threat. “Nigel Farage is a complete cock,” says another. “What is he going to bring to the table?” Their main resentment, though, is towards the civil service. They think it stymied Brexit. They are grateful we left Europe, despite everything: they think it is doomed. But not Spalding in its sunlight, with defibrillator and swans: the last, gasping vestige of British exceptionalism.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/