Politics on the Edge

Rory Stewart’s memoir Politics on the Edge has been a huge hit. Should you read it? What does it tell us about British politics? And what should we make of Stewart himself?

Rory Stewart is now 51. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he was a soldier (briefly), diplomat, and adventurer, and lectured at both Harvard and Yale. Then in 2010 he was elected as Tory MP for a large, beautiful rural seat, Penrith and the Borders. He looked forward to progressing to a ministerial role and eventually a Cabinet seat. 

But this was where things started to go wrong.

It’s all described in Politics on the Edge (Jonathan Cape, 2023), published in the US as How Not to be a Politician. In it, Stewart describes the horrible life of a backbench MP, the authoritarian party whipping, the mad way ministers are appointed, and the steamy horrors of the Brexit period – from which he emerged with honour, but with his political career in tatters.

The reviews for Politics on the Edge have been excellent. Writing in The Guardian, former Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson compared it to “Orwell down the coal mine, Swift on religious excess. We should be grateful it was written.” In the US, Andrew Moravcsik in Foreign Affairs called it “the poignant tale of a genuinely decent human being …and …the revelation that the political hypocrisy and ignorance surrounding him will thwart his efforts.” The book quickly hit the No. 1 spot in the Sunday Times bestseller list; it’s now out in paperback and is still at No. 3 in Amazon UK’s non-fiction charts after eight months. 

It's helped that Stewart’s had a high profile since he left Parliament; The Rest is Politics, the politics podcast he co-presents with Alastair Campbell, has been very popular (and has been said, by Nick Duerden in The i,  to net him £70,000 a month). And Stewart is a frequent interviewee on TV, radio and the net; the more so since the book; in fact he has spread across the media like Japanese knotweed.

But the fact that critics think it a good book does not make it one. Is it?

The short answer is yes, absolutely; anyone who cares about the way Britain is run should read it. It is also well-written and engaging. But at times it did irritate, even anger, me. And it raises too many questions it doesn’t answer.

The honourable gentleman
At the start of the book, Stewart says he wanted to enter politics as a Conservative because he wanted to make a difference. (Everyone who’s been in politics says they wanted to ‘make a difference’.) He decides the best way to find a seat is to go and see the Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron. Told that Cameron will give him a short appointment, he flies back to Britain. He does meet Cameron, who is not encouraging. He finds a seat anyway, in the Border country. A few months later, he wins it in the 2010 General Election. It’s a safe Tory seat. But his enthusiasm for the Borders and the people seems very real, and he explores the constituency on foot, in winter.

Stewart’s introduction to Parliament, however, is jarring. It starts with the new intake being summoned to a meeting with the Chief Whip, who tells them they are lobby fodder and their job is to shut up and vote the way they are told. They might be called legislators, says the Chief Whip, but they shouldn’t regard debates as occasions for open discussion, and “are not intended to overly scrutinise legislation”. Although Stewart doesn’t say so, this is surely a contempt of Parliament. As the term progresses, Stewart feels increasingly tainted by the tawdry hypocrisies of life at Westminster; the craven text messages one sends to the PM to congratulate him on a speech, or to support a colleague who has been caught with their pants down. “We attended award ceremonies hosted by MPs who had been suspended for corruption; some continued to drink with MPs accused, and later convicted, of assault and rape.” He does like some of his fellow-MPs, but friendship is rare – and not without reason: “Too many of our private conversations seemed to get back to Number 10 and the whips.”

He is under pressure to vote for things he thinks are wrong. In particular, Cameron wants MPs to vote for initial legislation on Lords reform, something he doesn’t want himself but has promised his LibDem coalition partners. Stewart, deeply conservative with a small C, is against it. I think he was wrong about that. But he’s horribly right about something else – Afghanistan; Stewart knows the country and sees that the West’s nation-building efforts are deeply unwise, that you cannot tell a people what to be. This cuts no ice with Cameron. But Stewart will eventually be vindicated. He has since argued (in the influential American journal Foreign Affairs) that the West might have achieved more had it tried to do less. From my own experience (not in Afghanistan but elsewhere), I agree.

Border country: Stewart's constituency,
Penrith and the Borders

Stewart quickly realises that as a backbench MP he has no agency. But for a long time he isn’t offered a ministerial post, even a PPS, because Cameron does not like him. After the 2015 election, however, Cameron does give him a junior ministerial position at the Department of the Environment, working under Liz Truss. It is a frustrating experience. He finds it hard to get anything done. He also finds Truss asking him for a 25-year plan for the environment, insisting it be ready in a few days. He then finds she has quietly given the task to several other people as well. So they combine their drafts –which doesn’t please her. He finds Truss is interested in no-one’s view but her own, and has a brain that transmits, albeit erratically, but does not receive. Reading this, one is appalled that she ever held ministerial office at all, let alone the Premiership.

Later, under Theresa May, Stewart becomes the Minister of State at the Department for International Development (DfID) – later rising to Secretary of State for International Development and a Cabinet seat. This is appropriate, as unlike other MPs he has hands-on experience in development, in Afghanistan; but he finds the job frustrating and the civil servants obstructive. In between these two development posts he serves as Prisons Minister. Here he begins improvements to security and discipline and also renationalises the Probation Service, the privatisation of which was clearly a blunder. These steps are taken with support from his boss, Justice Minister and Lord Chancellor David Gauke. Stewart has praise for very few senior politicians but he does for Gauke (and for May herself, who he served loyally to the end). Still, Stewart finds ministerial office frustrating, and thinks the way ministers are moved around is arbitrary, frequent and not conducive to good government. I’m sure he’s right.

Posh boy makes good?
But there were moments in this book when Stewart did piss me off. Early on he goes to see Cameron and notes that the Tory leader is surrounded by floppy-haired old Etonians – but what the hell does he think he is? I can’t condemn Stewart for being born posh (besides, I went to the same school as him till age 13). But he can lack self-awareness. I also questioned his judgments about international development. This was my own field for many years. He has genuine experience of it from Afghanistan, but it is deep rather than broad and while I agree with some of his views, others seem sweeping. If, as he says, he had problems with his civil servants at DFiD, this may be why. (He also recently angered me with a slighting reference on his podcast to VSO, the British equivalent of the Peace Corps; I was a volunteer for five years.)

Moreover there is austerity – which Stewart, as a Tory MP, supported. I was struck by a recent New Yorker piece by Sam Knight (What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?, March 25 2024). “Between 2010 and 2018, funding for police forces in England fell by up to a quarter,” he says, “Officers stopped investigating burglaries. …Last fall, hundreds of school buildings had to be closed for emergency repairs, because the country’s school-construction budget had been cut by 46% between 2009 and 2022.” There is much more of this in the piece. No doubt Stewart, and other Tories from the time, would argue that the huge debts incurred in the 2008 bailout had given them little option. But this is also about who was made to pay the price. “Poorer communities [that vote Labour] …suffered disproportionately,” says Knight. “In Liverpool …spending, per head, fell more than in any other city in the country. Public-health spending in Blackpool, one of the poorest local authorities in England, was cut almost five times more, per person, than in the affluent county of Surrey, just south of London, whose eleven M.P.s are all Tories.”  In short, the rich brought down the system and the poor then picked up the bill. Stewart, and every other Tory MP of the time, was complicit in this. 

In fact it would be easy to dismiss Politics on the Edge as a self-justificatory memoir by yet another posh boy who somehow thinks he has succeeded on merit. (Russell Barnes in Civil Service World described it as “400-odd pages of how right Rory Stewart was at the time, and how history will prove him to be a visionary.”)

But that would be a pity, because this memoir really does lift the lid on Parliament and government. Other books have done this before (Caroline Lucas’s Honourable Friends; Roy Hattersley’s witty Who Goes Home; Martin Bell’s An Accidental MP; and many more). But for a vision of sheer dysfunction, few accounts beat this one. No-one can read this book and continue to believe that Britain is a fully functional democracy.

Moreover Stewart has earned a hearing. Unlike other posh boys (like Cameron), he didn’t swan out of Oxford into a job as a research assistant then progress smoothly into Parliament, rising without trace. He did a lot with his life before politics. His army service was brief, but he then spent some years as a diplomat, serving in Indonesia and later as British Representative in Montenegro. He also founded, and for three years ran, an NGO in Afghanistan, where he met his American wife, Shoshana. He has written a number of books, including The Prince of the Marshes (now relaunched as Occupational Hazards), in which he describes his stretch as deputy governor of an Iraqi province in the wake of the 2003 invasion. In 2000 he took leave from the Foreign Office to make an epic 18-month walk across Asia; The Places In Between (which is excellent) describes the Afghan section, but he has written little of the journey otherwise, and is sometimes said to have been a spy. This is a bit idle; of course he will have passed any useful information to the intelligence services – he was a serving diplomat. But it’s true he may have had much closer links with them; after all, his father Brian Stewart was a very senior spook. And in general, he’s less David Cameron, more Fitzroy Maclean – a man whose life and background were very like his own.

Stewart as a Foreign Office minister, at a conference on
endangered species in 2018 (Foreign and Commonwealth Office)

Beware the slithy Gove, my son
It’s also clear that Stewart cared about his ministerial briefs. But the Brexit-related chaos in 2016-2019 meant Ministers were shuffled around even more often than usual. Stewart held his junior ministerial posts for little more than a year at most, and his Cabinet post for less than three months. For some Ministers, every reshuffle will have been a career opportunity. But Stewart feels, rightly, that this was no way to run a country. You also sense his disgust at the tawdriness of some of his ‘colleagues’ (I wish Tories would not use that word). In particular, the duplicity of Michael Gove was breathtaking.

In the end, however, it’s Boris Johnson who emerges as the villain of this book. And Stewart confronts him. First he stands against him in the 2019 leadership contest; he was the only One Nation Tory to dare do so – and only because none of the others would, by his account. He doesn’t win, although he is probably the candidate best liked by voters as a whole. Then in September he is one of 21 Tory MPs, many of them former Cabinet ministers, who have the whip removed for voting against Johnson’s government on a Brexit-related motion. Some of the MPs later had the whip restored, but Stewart decides to resign from the Conservative Party altogether. He could contest his seat as an independent in the December election, but doesn’t; he may have felt he would not win, but in Politics on the Edge he says he didn’t want to campaign against people who once campaigned for him. If that was his reason, it was a decent one. Politics on the Edge ends there.

It has sold very well and must have earned Stewart a pretty penny. I can’t begrudge him that. Other senior Tories rolled over and played along with Boris Johnson although they knew perfectly well what sort of man he was. Stewart, at some personal cost, did not. Moreover he is an interesting man who has packed a lot into his 51 years. And Politics on the Edge is a good book – well-written, forthright, revealing and important. 

But there is something missing from the book: analysis. Stewart is an old-style conservative with a love of tradition and an innate distrust of too much change. This traditional style of British conservatism has deep roots, going right back to the French Revolution and the events that followed. It is not unreasonable. After all, since then radical utopians have likely killed at least as many people as conservatives. Yet change is needed. Britain’s government and parliament, as seen in Politics on the Edge, are sclerotic and in a way corrupt. And we’ve just had an election in which a party won one of the largest majorities in history with just 33.7% of the vote share – and that’s only of the votes cast; 40% of voters didn’t bother voting at all. This has been followed by serious civil disorder. If this had happened in some hapless African republic the Foreign Secretary would be wagging their finger at them and muttering about suspension from the Commonwealth. But we cannot see what is happening to us. 

Britain’s system is rotten and has run its course, at least in its present form. That is clear from the book; but at no point does Stewart really confront the implications or say how we should address it. I think he should have done. Politics on the Edge is one of the best political memoirs I have read and I strongly recommend it. But in that sense, at least, there is a void at its heart.

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

The Red Wall: How Labour lost its safest seats

Britain’s Labour Party lost many of its “safe” seats in 2019. Can it get them back? First it must know why it lost them. Two books explain why, after decades of voting Labour, voters deserted the party

The Red Wall is a group of parliamentary seats in England’s North and Midlands that have traditionally voted Labour; they form a line across the north and Midlands, hence the name. Depending on who you ask, there are about 43 of these seats. In the 2019 General Election, the Tories took 29 of them (and a 30th, Hartlepool, in a by-election some months later). These seats were a large proportion of the 47 that Labour lost to the Tories in 2019, leading to their severe defeat.

Hartlepool: A Labour loss
(Alexander P. Kapp/Wikimedia Commons)

So what happened? How did Labour lose all these seats that had (mostly) been theirs for 80 years? In 2020 two people, researcher Deborah Mattinson and journalist Sebastian Payne, decided, separately, to find out.

Sebastian Payne is Whitehall correspondent of the Financial Times; he also pops up on Sky News and elsewhere quite often as a political commentator. He is only 31, looks younger and seems one of those infuriating young people who have risen without trace. But he is very well-connected; some very prominent people talked to him for this book, and they had a lot to say. Deborah Mattinson has long been a Labour advisor and strategist. She worked until May 2021 for Britain Thinks, a market research and strategy, a research agency that she co-founded, and for which she undertook numerous research and public opinion jobs on behalf of Labour. She is now Director of Strategy for Labour leader Keir Starmer.

Their fieldwork took place some time ago (in Deborah Mattinson’s case, in early 2020) and both books were published before the autumn of 2021, when Boris Johnson’s government made a series of missteps that have cost it crucial support. If the polls are to be believed, the Tories wouldn’t hold many of these seats in an election now. But there could be nearly three years to go before the next election, and as Harold Wilson said, a week is a long time in politics. So Labour still needs to know how it lost those seats in 2019. After all, as Mattinson points out, it needs a net gain of 124 seats next time if it wants an absolute majority of just one. So it needs these seats back. Besides, both these writers are politically influential and their opinions on the Red Wall are of more than passing interest, whatever the polls may have done since.

First, Sebastian Payne.

*

In 2020 and 2021 Payne braved the COVID pandemic to visit the so-called Red Wall seats. Broken Heartlands: A Journey Through Labour’s Lost England is the result. On the basis of this book, I’d say that Payne is a Tory – perhaps with political ambitions of his own. But he’s a good journalist; he’s talked to a lot of people from both sides, and the fact that he’s himself from Gateshead will have helped. At the end, you don’t have to accept his conclusions. This is a good enough book to help you reach your own.

Not liked in the North? Corbyn visits a hospital
not long before the 2019 election
 

Payne sees two immediate causes of Labour’s defeat in the Red Wall; party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and Brexit. One of Tony Blair’s senior ministers, Alan Johnson, now retired from front-line politics, tells Payne that Corbyn is at least partly responsible for 2019. “Absolutely no question, they hated Corbyn,” he tells Payne. “They had sussed out his hard-left politics, his lack of patriotism, this view of the working class, a patronising view, that we have no agency whatsoever, we have to be moulded and directed by middle-class people from Islington.”

Payne also cites the party’s refusal to fully get behind Brexit although its northern voters had supported it. On the latter point, he detects real anger across the North. He is clearly at least part-right about Brexit being a driver for the Labour loss in 2019; it’s pointless Remainers trying to deny that. But was this was about Brexit itself or the turmoil it unleashed? It could be argued that voters simply wanted the whole wretched business over and done with. Still, Payne stresses the anger that some voters felt when Labour seemed anxious to frustrate the Brexit vote, and the resentment they felt at being told “you voted wrong”. It’s a point clearly acknowledged by Labour MPs Payne talks to, such as Lisa Nandy, who tells him: “We were told that these people are xenophobic, they were racist. Or we were told that people were just in so much despair about how terrible their communities were that they had nothing to lose. All of which is deeply offensive and completely wrong.” Nandy could have added that the Remain campaign in 2016 was hopelessly complacent, and should take some blame for its own defeat.

Payne is on to something else as well. One of his key observations is that Labour’s traditional support in the north is amongst the industrial working class – and they’ve changed. The landscape he travels through is peopled by families with homes, cars, aspirations; Labour messages about deprivation and misery didn’t strike a chord. In fact the opposite; if you’ve got your life together and are doing OK, you really don’t want to be told that you’re part of suffering humanity. They felt patronised. Labour wasn’t really speaking to those working-class voters whose lives have got better and whose aspirations have changed as a result.

So far, Payne may be on the money. Dislike of Corbyn and annoyance about Brexit drove much of the 2019 defeat. So did the fact that many of the northern working class had moved on, and Labour couldn’t see it. Payne also hears a broader feeling that the political class at Westminster is simply out of touch and has stopped caring about what Northern voters want. It’s a point put to Payne by John Bickley, who very nearly won the Heywood and Middleton seat for the pro-Brexit UK Independence Party in 2014. “I look at the British political class and I’m afraid I have nothing but disdain for them,” Bickley tells Payne. “I think back to the old Labour Party, the front bench did seem to be populated by people who’d done proper jobs, people who had some substance to them, and some intellect. It’s the same for the Tory Party. I look around now and I see career politicians. I don’t see a level of intellect, commitment to principles.” Bickley eventually left UKIP after it swung too far to the right; he seems to be someone who supported it because he wanted an upheaval and renewal, and he thinks its voters did too.

This disillusion is widespread and again, it may be that Brexit had become a vehicle for it, rather than a cause in itself – something Payne does not really unpack. But he does point out that the defeat wasn’t as sudden as it seemed; the Labour vote in some Red Wall seats had been slipping for a while. Northern voters had been losing faith in Labour for a long time, but the party continued to take them for granted – something that comes across also in Mattinson’s book (more of that below).

But there are also forces that Payne notes, but perhaps underestimates – and which may have been key factors behind the Brexit vote and its aftermath, especially in the old industrial areas. One is the whole question of lost identity. Early in the book he meets Dan Jackson, an NHS executive but also a local historian of Northumbria (and author of a book, The Northumbrians). Together they visit a colliery, long closed now but site of a long-ago mining disaster, and tour a rather tired-looking Blyth shopping centre. Mining has gone. So has shipbuilding, an industry in which Tyneside was once preeminent. (As a child I twice crossed the Atlantic in ships built on Tyneside.) New industries and activities have emerged to replace these, and besides, one wouldn’t necessarily want them back; mining was a dangerous, dirty and uncomfortable industry – a point Neil Kinnock makes to Payne when they speak. Fishing was also physically demanding and very hazardous. But they carried with them an identity and a sense of community that (say) a software startup does not have.

Payne certainly does get this, whether he realises its importance or not. He writes that “Maintaining some sense of community spirit part is a crucial part of where English politics heads next. Jackson’s departing remark circled in my mind. ‘The north-east was about big industry, we never did small boutique firms. That’s why the region was hit so hard when the heavy industry began to close.’” He seems to doubt that newer jobs can replace the sense of identity that the big industries gave. Later, in Grimsby, Payne comments on the effect of the collapse of the fishing industry. “Whether it was mining in Northumberland, steel in County Durham or fishing in Lincolnshire, there was a collectivized lifestyle in the red wall that bound people together.” A friend of mine from the north of England tells me that this is true – and thinks this has changed people’s values, making a link with the new aspirational class referred to earlier. “My cousins who work at Nissan feel nothing like the same pride or solidarity of their forbears, “ my friend tells me. “They now focus on owning their own house, the best car and the individual needs of their family.”

The old identity: An anchor chain for the
Mauretania, Tyneside, 1907
(Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums)

I am reminded of the final passages in The Stars Look Down (1935), by A.J. Cronin; a novel of a Northumberland miner, Davey Fenwick,who gets elected to Parliament. Deciding, in the end, that it is useless, he returns to the pit; and at the end, as he walks to the pithead with the others at the start of his shift, he is heard to think that he is a miner, he has always been a miner, that’s who he is. (The book still seems to impress those who read it, and the 1940 film has a 90% score on Rotten Tomatoes.) I’m also reminded of Kahlil Gibran’s words:

Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave,
eats a bread it does not harvest,
and drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine-press.

Is this the driver behind a lot of the discontent that Payne finds in the Red Wall seats? Might it also be the driver behind Brexit – a search for an identity, especially among the English? Is nationalism replacing the old collective identities? Payne never says so; he may suspect it, but I wonder if it’s something he underestimates. 

More of this identity question later, when we look at Mattinson.

*

There was much to like about this book, but I did feel Payne had ignored some elephants in the room. Two of them Mattinson also ignores – again, I’ll come to them later. But with Payne in particular, there was a failure to challenge some dubious statements by his interviewees. Thus he talks to Imran Ahmad Khan, who won Wakefield off Labour's Mary Creagh, and who tells him: “Nothing has lifted greater numbers out of the pernicious state of poverty than free trade, and for free trade we also require free markets.” But Ahmad Khan is a Brexiter who supported removing Britain from the only really large free market there is. Payne does not challenge him on this hypocrisy.

There are other points where Payne’s interviewees says things that he could have at least questioned. During his visit to Grimsby he talks to Lowestoft fish auctioneer June Mummery, part of Fishing for Leave and a former MEP. She tells Payne she is furious about the fishing deal, turning down all interviews at the end of 2020: “I couldn’t speak for three weeks. ...This government just took away our aspirations and opportunities. By handing over our industry straight back to the EU when our prime minister said he would take back full control.” But Boris Johnson never meant to fulfill those promises; he knew full well he couldn’t – he just did not hold enough cards in his negotiations with the EU, and had bigger fish to fry, so to speak. Loads of people could see that at the time, and Mummery damn well should have done too. Payne does ask the new Tory MP for Grimsby, Lia Nici, to comment on the fishing question but her answer seems evasive. Again, he does not really challenge her. Payne could argue that he was there to listen, not to put his own view; but taking that approach means some readers might assume he is endorsing Mummery’s, or Khan’s, views. Is he?

Even so, this is a book with huge strengths. Payne has made a long journey and spoken to a lot of people on both sides – including both party leaders. He also speaks to Tony Blair – who, predictably perhaps, blames the defeat on Labour’s swing to the left under Corbyn. And he has an interesting conversation with Neil Kinnock (now Baron Kinnock). He does not speak to Jeremy Corbyn, which is unfortunate given how much he blames him for Labour’s defeat. However, he doesn’t say why he didn’t; it may be that he was just not granted an interview. He does talk to one or two key Corbyn allies, including John McDonnell.

Payne does seem to be a Tory, but that hasn’t stopped him listening carefully to his Labour interviewees; in fact, on a personal level, he seems to have liked them more. In Hartlepool, Payne has an extended interview with Boris Johnson himself, but one senses he does not really like him that much, though he doesn’t say so. On the same day he meets Angela Rayner and seems to respond to her quite warmly, as he does to Lisa Nandy. You can quarrel with Payne’s analysis (or lack of it, sometimes), and I thought he should have challenged some of what he heard. But he lets his interviewees speak, and their views are frank and interesting. And some of his insights seem very shrewd.

*

So to the second book, Beyond the Red Wall: Why Labour Lost, How the Conservatives Won and What Will Happen Next?, by Deborah Mattinson. She is from the other side of the political spectrum, and since writing the book she has become Director of Strategy to Keir Starmer.

For her book, she talks to an entirely different group of people. Payne drives around much of the Red Wall and speaks to MPs, ex-MPs and prominent locals, but doesn’t do a deep dive with the voters themselves. Mattinson does, organizing focus groups in February-March 2020 in Accrington, Darlington and Stoke. (Stoke had to be virtual as the pandemic kicked in while she pursued the project.) But some of her conclusions are strikingly similar.

For her “deep dive” in Hyndburn (Accrington), Stoke-on-Trent and Darlington, Mattinson specifically recruits people who have historically voted Labour but voted Tory this time. There is an obvious danger here of getting people who felt more strongly than the average. But she did the selection indirectly, using an attitudinal questionnaire to select those who fitted her profile, rather than asking outright for those who had switched parties. She restricts her choice somewhat by looking for people from the C2DE social grades – manual workers, carers, drivers, construction workers and factory workers. But she does go for a representative spread of age and ethnic identity.

The key messages Mattinson gets are not so different from Payne’s. Labour had stopped listening. Early in the book she makes a startling admission: “Other than the occasional by-election, at no point in the decades that I spent advising Labour did we ever consider running focus groups or polling in any of the Red Wall seats. Their reliability was seen as a given.” This is revealing, as is a later passage when she records that she did once do such an exercise in Scotland and found clear disaffection with Labour; she then spent what she says was an uncomfortable afternoon briefing the then Scottish Labour leader, Johann Walton, who she says “pushed back” on all her findings. The party lost most of its Scottish seats to the SNP very soon afterwards. For decades, Labour didn’t listen to its core supporters – and Mattinson knows it.

Again, Corbyn was loathed. Mattinson finds a very strong feeling among her participants that Labour represents London middle-class people and students, not them. This is also reflected in priorities that seem sometimes to obsess Labour activists, but are of no interest to the voters. An example is Trans rights, which were “dominating the leadership contest when I was up in Accrington in March 2020….’How many trans people are there?’ one asked the others in the focus group. ...’There’s thousands of kids here with no work and no hope. Why don’t they think about them instead?’” Mattinson at no point suggests that Trans rights do not matter. But as she says, this looks to many voters like a politically correct, morally superior Labour, fixated on priorities irrelevant to most people, antagonistic to northern voters and tied up with Corbyn, who they deeply dislike.

This cultural divide is also reflected in attitudes to patriotism. Mattinson finds that the latter is very strong amongst Red Wall voters, more so than down south. (She backs this up, quoting a 2018 survey that found folks in the northeast, Yorkshire and the Midlands were more than 10 per cent more likely to be ‘proud to be British’ than people living in London.) A perception amongst Northerners that Corbynites and the like were not patriotic like them clearly hurt Labour. Mattinson is thoughtful about this, connecting it to the participants’ feeling that their towns have declined, leaving them less to identify with. “If they… feel little sense of belonging either to nearby cities or the capital, it is perhaps not surprising that they look to the country as a source of pride,” she writes. She also detects a deep sense that the industrial heritage of which many were proud has disappeared; while there may be new jobs in some places, they can’t replace that. It fits with Payne’s finding that the loss of mining, steel and fishing brought a sense of lost identity.

But while both writers pick up on this, neither seems to see its long-term dangers. People who feel they do not belong will look for something to which they feel they do. The search for identity – for belonging to a group, nation, race, what have you – is a key element in authoritarian politics, a phenomenon described (in rather different ways) in Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (1951), in Jan-Werner Müller’s more recent What Is Populism? (2016), and in Peter Ftizsche’s intriguing dissection of the rise of Nazism, Germans Into Nazis (1998). There is a potential hellscape here and the Brexit vote may have been an early warning.

Lisa Nandy thinks the approach to Leave voters was
"deeply offensive and completely wrong"
(Kevin Walsh/Wikimedia Commons)

Unlike Payne, Mattinson isn’t uncritical of the attitudes or statements she hears. She makes one comment that I found very striking: While Red Wall voters have some genuine grievances (she doesn’t deny that for a minute), they need to take more responsibility for the decisions that affect their lives, rather than expecting solutions to be delivered to them. If democracy is to work, she says, then voters must not just expect government to deliver solutions and then be “furious” when they fail. I was also struck that her participants seem to have real hatred for the south of England and its people, although some have never really been there. This isn’t reasonable. It’s true the south has had a lot more spent on it. But as a southerner, I wondered how many of her focus-group members had ever struggled to breathe on a Central Line train at rush hour, or despaired at house prices that mean they will never own their own home. (It should be said that none of Payne’s interviewees expressed this hatred for the south, and a northern friend of mine strongly questions that it exists – rather, he says, there is hatred for a distant Westminster etstablishment. He also points out that many Londoners have never been to the north of England and still think everyone there wears clogs.)

Mattinson gives a short list of measures that Labour need to take if they are to recover these seats. Voters, she says, need to know what Starmer believes in. This is surely important. In his own book, Payne says that almost none of his Labour interviewees could tell him what the Labour “big idea” should be. The only exception is Kinnock, who tells Payne that the source of individual liberty is collective provision. If Labour can be the “security party” in terms of personal security, employment, national security and everything else, he says, they can appeal across the divisions in British society. “It was the first convincing thought I’d heard about how Labour can reconnect to its lost voters,” writes Payne. Mattinson offers nothing like this, but clearly sees the need for Starmer to offer a clear statement of belief. It may be that, as the new head of strategy, she has discussed it with Starmer in private. If she hasn’t, she needs to; it is sorely lacking.

Mattinson also thinks Labour needs to convince people that it can be trusted with the economy, and talk to them more about their real concerns, like immigration and crime. She also says Labour must address the north-south divide. Lastly, she says Labour must be positive about Britain. As one person says to her, “I want to see them really stand up for the country. Show they believe our history is great, not evil.” She does not point out an inconvenient fact: that unfortunately, some (not all!) of our history actually is evil. And as I suggested above, a search for identity can lead to some horrible places. Labour may want to be a bit cautious about this one.

*

These are both interesting books, by two people who have gone out, met people, asked the right questions and really listened to the answers. They are also both well written, Payne’s in particular. I came away with a clear, credible explanation as to why Labour lost its “safe” seats in 2019. To be sure, the authors are less clear on what Labour should do about it. But they could argue that that wasn’t their purpose.

However, as I suggested earlier, I felt that both books ignored two huge elephants in the room. They’re as follows.

First, there’s the electoral system. I’ve written about the UK’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) system before (see link) so won’t do so at length here, but it’s worth noting its relevance to Brexit and the Red Wall. Mattinson notes that the EU referendum was the first time these northern voters’ voices had been heard. I am sure this is true, and that it intensified their anger when some politicians seemed to want to overturn the result. However, Mattinson and Payne both ignore the role of FPTP in this; basically, it means parties need not listen to most voters. This is because the system delivers victory on the basis of wafer-thin margins, as there are usually only two serious candidates in each race. The House of Commons Library states that, in 2019, 67 out of 650 seats – more than one in 10 – were won by a margin of 5% or less of votes cast. (In 2017 it was worse, with 97 such seats.) This means that even in the few marginal seats that decide the election, the parties have to appeal only to the very small percentage of voters who might change their minds; under FPTP, they have no need of second preferences. So elections are usually fought on narrow ground, and reflect the concerns only of those voters who might change sides. In short, a party only need listen to a minority of voters, and the rest can sod off.

Not everyday wear: Clog dancers in Skipton, 2014
(Tim Green/Wikimedia Commons)

In their 2017 book Brexit and British Politics, Geoffrey Evans and Anand Menon argue that in recent years all debate has been concentrated in the ideological centre; as Labour chased Basildon Man, a broader polity disappeared. One might call this centrification (my phrase, not theirs). They refer to it as an elite consensus, within which globalization and values on matters such as gay marriage and capital punishment were not open to question. So the Brexit vote actually was the first time people felt they had been asked about anything. They saw a chance to rebel against this elite consensus. Oddly, Evans and Menon, too, ignore the influence of the electoral system in this, but it surely helped drive the phenomenon they describe. Candidates need appeal only to those who may give them their first vote; they have no need of second preferences, so will not bother with anyone else. In a safe seat they need not bother with anyone at all, as the voters have nowhere else to go. This is why Labour had felt able to neglect the Red Wall seats for so long, and why the voters took a rare chance in the referendum to kick them in the teeth. Three years later, their patience with Labour snapped altogether.

The second elephant in the room was political morality. I was frustrated by both authors’ tendency to quote interviewees as saying “Labour ignored its voters over Brexit” and present this as a failing, at least by inference. Are they saying that Labour MPs should have got wholeheartedly behind Brexit? Some did, but others (and some Tory MPs) made a moral decision that a “hard Brexit’” was bad for the country and they could not vote for it. Are Mattinson and Payne saying those MPs should have voted for something they knew was wrong? What are the moral implications of that?

Mary Creagh, the prominent Labour MP who lost Wakefield in 2019, tells Payne: “I can’t bring myself to do something that I know will cause hardship to people who are already struggling. I can’t pretend that something bad is somehow going to be good.” In Grimsby, former MP Melanie Onn also tells Payne of the anguish she felt deciding whether or not to vote for a withdrawal deal that she really did not believe in (she eventually did). This is a tricky moral area for MPs; if your constituents want something bad, should you vote for it anyway? If you push that to its ultimate conclusion, Hitler could have said he was simply following the will of the people. I didn’t feel Payne confonted this question – and Mattinson doesn’t either; given that she’s now Starmer’s Director of Strategy, that worries me.

*

Mattinson’s fieldwork was nearly two years ago, Payne’s 18 months. Mattinson admits that there is never a good time to end a book like this because things can change so quickly – especially now. “In years of monitoring public opinion, I have never known it to be so volatile,” she says. Moreover the autumn of 2021, after both she and Payne had gone to press, saw a series of missteps and outright blunders by the Johnson government, starting with the release of sewage into British waterways and followed by empty shelves and dry petrol stations because of the driver shortage. Then came the botched attempt to shield Owen Paterson, a Tory MP and former minister facing corruption allegations. Finally it transpired that Johnson had permitted wholesale breaches of lockdown in No 10 itself, with multiple parties and gatherings in the garden, the Cabinet Room and even in the PM’s flat. On January 19 2022 a poll by J.L. Partners for Channel 4 News suggested that, if an election were held then, the Tories would lose all but three of their Red Wall seats.

This should not make Labour too optimistic about the next election. It could be nearly another three years before it comes around, and once again, a week is a long time in politics. Moreover, as Mattinson warned, Labour will need a gain of 124 seats to secure a majority of just one. Even if the Tories are wiped out in the Red Wall and its seats there all revert to Labour, it’ll need big wins elsewhere as well; it must remember that as well as a Leaver north of England, there is a Remainer south, where much of its support now lies. It needs to retain it, and so far liberal Remain voters I know are not very impressed with Starmer’s leadership. There is a risk that the party could lose the support it still has without really regaining its traditional voters.

Labour should also remember that it must believe in something if it is to govern, rather than cut its cloth to focus groups. For all their importance, these books are not instruction manuals.

Sebastian Payne, Broken Heartlands: A Journey Through Labour's Lost England (Macmillan, September 2021)
Deborah Mattinson, Beyond the Red Wall: Why Labour Lost, How the Conservatives Won and What Will Happen Next? (Biteback, September 2020)

I would like to thank Kevin Wilson for his very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this piece.

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or Amazon and other online retailers as paperbacks or e-books. Follow Mike on Twitter and Facebook.