What I learnt about northern voters from five weeks on the campaign trail

Labour’s red wall may fall on the Brexit altar – but progressivism remains in the blood, writes Colin Drury

Boris Johnson campaigns in Grimsby. Many lifelong Labour voters are threatening to vote Tory ‘just this once’ (AP)

In a Tweet posted last Friday, the journalist Hannah Al-Othman noted she had been all across the north of England speaking to voters during the general election campaign.

“And let me tell you,” she wrote. “It is absolutely neck-and-neck between Don’t Know and Can’t Trust Any Of Them.”

It is an observation that resonates entirely with my own findings. For five weeks, I too have travelled the north spending time in a range of different constituencies and bothering a range of different voters: business owners, community leaders, party activists, shoppers, students and – often most knowledgeable of all – smokers stood outside pubs.

And, for five weeks, one sentiment has not just been repeated consistently but become ever more entrenched as the campaign has progressed: none of ’em.

Time and again, people have said they will vote – because previous generations died for their right to do so – but they will do it without enthusiasm.

“We’re a country of 65 million people,” an exasperated teacher said in Wakefield as she wondered how such a large population could produce what she felt was such an unpalatable set of ballot box options. “What a miserable choice.”

Received wisdom currently suggests we are living in a divided country, a splintered isle, a kingdom scythed alive by the twin horsemen of Brexit and austerity.

But, from what I could make out, there is a great deal of unity. Namely, there is a great deal of unity around the idea that neither Boris nor Jeremy could be trusted to run a decent car-boot sale, let alone a country in existential crisis. All of which is perhaps a convoluted way of saying: I don’t know.

I don’t know the answer to the central question I was supposed to be interrogating these past five weeks: will Labour’s so-called great northern red wall fall on Thursday? Will these party heartlands – almost all with Leaver hearts – go blue on the back of the Tories’ promise to Get Brexit Done?

The polls – as well as oracle-like-analyst John Curtice – suggest they will. One-time Labour safe seats such as Grimsby, Wakefield, Bolsover and Bishop Auckland all appear up for grabs. Marginals, too, like Crewe and Nantwich and Broxtowe seem to be swinging away from Corbyn and behind the Conservatives. Workington Man, for what it’s worth, looks like he’ll go blue.

Yet huge swathes of people across the north have no love for Johnson. They are angry about austerity and tend not to trust the party with the NHS. Plenty here still talk of Margaret Thatcher killing communities. For many, if they do decide to vote Conservative, it will be a decision made, with proverbial nose held, at the proverbial last minute.

“I’ll make up my mind in the booth,” a student told me in the marginal Sheffield Hallam seat. “It’s basically a case of choosing who’s the least worst option; who’ll do least damage.”

It is, in short, unpredictable up here – and don’t trust anyone who says it isn’t.

All the same, what is clear is that huge numbers certainly do still want Brexit (or, at least, the first stage of Brexit) concluding.

To be clear, the 2016 referendum was not lost for Remainers because of a lie painted on a bus for a few weeks that summer. Rather, it was lost during decades of underinvestment, deindustrialisation and economic alienation in the regions. It was lost because successive governments did not see – or, at least, did not address – the fact that the expansion of the EU had become entwined in the minds of millions of voters with the decline of their own villages and towns.

Whatever the merits of such opinions, they have not changed three years on. If anything, they have hardened. Polls show it but you don’t need polls. You just need to speak to people. As a mass, the red wall still wants out of the Europe. It decidedly does not want a second referendum. It is angry at the thought of one.

“Three years on,” a refuse worker told me over a game of pool in a Grimsby pub, “we’re still being ignored.”

He was a lifelong Labour voter who had decided he would go Tory. But just this once, he emphasised; just this once to get Brexit done.

This, several weeks on, strikes me as important. The “just this once”, I mean. His gist was that, when the UK finally exits the EU, he will return to his left-leaning, Labour-voting roots, a line of thought which, I suspect, is shared by countless others with a similar world view. Progressivism is in the blood up here. That remains as true now as it ever was.

Which may, in the end, mean Boris Johnson is – despite all those Don’t Knows and Can’t Trust Any Of Them’s – returned as prime minister.

But it may also mean the Tory leader, who famously believes himself to be a Churchillian figure, could yet come to have more in common with the wartime supremo than he would probably like.

For after Churchill had beaten Hitler – that is to say, after he had done the job the British public required him to do – he was unsentimentally voted down as prime minister in favour of Labour’s Clement Attlee.

Likewise, if Johnson does indeed get Brexit done, it may well be his thanks from the north is a swift unceremonious boot from office at the next available opportunity.