Do I smell? I shower every day, but am I one of those people whose stench still somehow lingers for a few minutes after I’ve gone? Is it my hair? Is my hair horrible, but I’ve spent so much time with it on my head – a whole life, in fact – that I can’t tell it’s unbearable to look at? Is it my breath, the way I speak, the way I look, a combination of all of the above?
I ask because I’m assuming there is something wrong with me. In fact, I’m pretty certain there’s something wrong with both me and most of my friends, but I just can’t put my finger on what it is. Clearly at some point we did something wrong – angered an ancient witch, picked up a cursed amulet – and now we’re having to live with the consequences, with no way out on the horizon. What did we do?
By “we”, here, I mean people who are very roughly my age – say, between around 25 and 50 – and who live in cities, and earn reasonable salaries in white collar professions. There are quite a lot of us around, actually. You may have seen us about. You may even be one of us! If so, have you been feeling it too, this sense that we’ve somehow done something awful but there’s no way for us to make amends?
I ask because I worry the end of my tether is now in sight. I did find it quite amusing at first, though. The Conservatives won in 2015, thanks to David Cameron’s effort to detoxify the party, then the Brexit vote happened and all these MPs forgot just who’d backed them in the first place. Suddenly they just didn’t care for their affluent, liberal voters any more.
What they wanted was people up north, older and in new builds, and on comparatively low salaries. Ideally they didn’t even go to university, and their jobs were firmly blue collar. Now, for the avoidance of doubt, it isn’t a crime to be any of those things. Political parties thrive when they broaden their electoral coalitions, and the Tories were right to try to appeal to people beyond their base.
It did feel odd, however, to watch them repudiate entire swathes of voters who’d once backed them, and could technically back them again. Suddenly, the right just didn’t want to be attractive to people who may, on occasion, attend dinner parties. All those pinkos could just go vote for the centre and the left, for all they cared. Their votes were icky and gross and the Conservative party just didn’t need them.
Well, except that it did, obviously. In 2024, those people announced that they’d heard the message loud and clear, and had no interest in trying to belong in spaces where they weren’t welcome. As a result, the Conservatives collapsed. The Labour party won a large majority instead, in part thanks to those people, but soon enough the curse struck again.
Starmer is yet to reach the first anniversary of his premiership but, already, he has repudiated us. To put it plainly: the government isn’t merely ignoring young or youngish middle-class metropolitan voters. It seems to actively loathe them. Their current, single-minded obsession is to win over Reform voters, many of whom are their ideological and demographic opposites.
It isn’t clear it will go well for them. The prime minister is currently haemorrhaging support from his own voters, while entirely failing to become more popular with the sections of the electorate he’s been trying to woo. In an ideal world, this ought to herald a gear change, and a decision to care about Labour’s electoral base again, but forgive me if I say I won’t be holding my breath.
It also goes without saying that hell may well freeze over before Kemi Badenoch decides to try and actually court us. Again, I must ask: what is it that we did? There is clearly some great, primordial crime we once committed, which has led to both main parties resenting our very existence, but I’m yet to find out what it is.
Once upon a time we were the belle of the ball, and now all we get is Ed Davey sometimes, if we’re lucky, making eye contact with us from the other side of the room. How the mighty have fallen! Then again, it seems likely that we will, in time, have the last laugh. There are many of us in Britain and we are fairly likely to vote and keep voting. We won’t all suddenly up sticks and decide to move to small northern towns and become tool makers either.
One day, a party leader will wake up and they will remember that, actually, trying to get votes from different segments of the population is quite a good idea, if winning elections happens to be the business you’re in. What a beautiful day it will be, when we finally rise again! In the meantime, I may go buy some stronger deodorant and get myself a haircut – try to cover all bases, just in case.
