A week ago the headline on our editorial said ‘Almost everyone in this country has better things to worry about than Boris and Carrie’s wallpaper’.
And so it has proved, as the election results come in and Boris Johnson‘s Tories seize territory they have not held for more than half a century.
The Conservative victory in Hartlepool – a political earthquake unthinkable even two years ago – is absolute proof that we were right when we said Wallpapergate was a metropolitan obsession, of little interest to normal human beings.
And we are also correct when we stated that the real divide in this country no longer runs between Labour and Tory, but between the metropolitan elite and the men and women who live and work in the real Britain – hard-working, patriotic, close to the ground.
Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour has less and less to offer to that Britain.
Under Jeremy Corbyn and under Sir Keir himself, it offers only two different faces of the same airy, impractical, dogma-driven ideas, beloved only by activists who have never really grown up, and by urban snobs who think they know what is best for those who live in less exalted circumstances.
