Long Reads

Boris Johnson has used the Brexit divide to create a winning coalition of voters. The biggest new part of that coalition is working-class Leave voters who used to vote Labour, and who switched to the Conservatives in last year’s election. They gave Johnson a string of Tory gains in the north of England, the Midlands and north Wales, an uneven strip of seats known as the Red Wall.The big question of post-Brexit politics is what will happen to the voters in those seats. It is a question that Deborah Mattinson tries to answer in a new book called Beyond the Red Wall. It is the first substantial attempt to understand this important group of voters, and it is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the next election.Mattinson is well placed to carry out this study. I should declare an interest, as she helped me brilliantly with focus group research for a book about the attitudes of voters in 1989, called Me and Mine, in which I tried to find out if Margaret Thatcher had converted the British people to the virtues of Tory individualism (an early Question To Which The Answer Was No). More