Before I Was So Rudely Interrupted

I never left the ceremonial county, but to return to the administrative county of Durham after Super Thursday has been to return to Narnia after the fall of the White Witch. It is no longer always winter but never Christmas. Still in Durham itself at the time, I bewildered my cellmate by cheering, and punching the air, while watching Look North. The only election of any kind in my adult lifetime at which I had not voted turned out to be the one that gave me by far the most pleasure.

The Liberal Democrats were such stalwarts of the County Durham Teaching Assistants' campaign, which the results on Super Thursday may reasonably be said to have reactivated, that even I voted in 2017 for Owen Temple rather than for the lukewarm Laura Pidcock. And I have nothing but goodwill towards any administration that has overthrown the corrupt and brutal right-wing Labour machine in County Durham after more than 100 years.

But it was the Conservatives who were the moderating party in the Coalition. However slowly or slightly, austerity did begin to be eased once the Cabinet no longer contained the most direct and explicit heirs of the Whigs, of the Gladstonians, and of the Callaghan Government, including the Lib-Lab Pact.

Ever since the 2016 referendum, it has been obvious that there was a natural party of the well heeled, NIMBYish, Thatcherite, socially ultraliberal, and ferociously pro-EU section of the electorate. Had the 2015 Parliament run its course, then the Lib Dems would have taken scores of seats from the Conservatives in the South outside London, where such voters did and do predominate and even dominate. In 2024, they finally will.

Not that Boris Johnson needs to worry. The Conservatives will remain in office, not only by holding their gains from 2019, but by offsetting their losses to the Lib Dems with seats that had voted twice for Jeremy Corbyn's economic programme, as the 2019 seats would also have done if Corbyn had held the Bennite line against Keir Starmer on Brexit.

The people and places that had long ago voted three times for Margaret Thatcher will be Lib Dem, and the Conservative Government will owe them nothing. It will owe us instead. It already does. Let's fill our boots.