Can’t we even throw out Lynne Featherstone?

I gave a talk to the Hornsey and Wood Green Labour Party last night. If you don’t know the area, the constituency covers Highgate, Muswell Hill and Crouch End: leafy north London villages, where the metropolitan middle class go, if not to die, then at least to produce babies. There are pockets of high unemployment and council housing, but the seat is generally prosperous and in places very prosperous. Its fortunes illustrate how the political parties have attended to the needs of the urban bourgeoisie.

The Conservatives are nowhere now. As late as 1992, Hornsey and Wood Green was a Tory seat. This year they closed their local office and gave up, as they have given up in so many British cities. I don’t want to go on about Conservative failings in the Spectator of all places, but if you people got out more you would realise that few care about EU, gay marriage and those other bugbears, which make you seem as strange as Scientologists or 9/11 truthers.