‘Our children are horrified’

Wrexham, North Wales

  To window cleaner Andrew Atkinson, Theresa May’s ‘blue-collar Conservatism’ is not just a slogan. It’s what he is. For the duration of the general election, gap-toothed, 32-year-old Atkinson has hung up his chamois leathers and water-fed poles and taken to campaigning on doorsteps in a bid to become Wrexham’s first Conservative MP. The campaign is costing him a fortune in lost jobs. Atkinson is a broad-shouldered lad who left home at 17 to earn a living as a self-employed squeegee wallah (‘glass hygiene technician, please,’ he jokes). He has the square jawline of Buzz Lightyear and an unaffected way with housewives. You half expect them to say: ‘Give us a squirt of Windolene and a quick rub-down while you’re here, love.’ Atkinson beetles around Wrexham in a battered old Ford Ka, borrowed from his wife. He was a Leave supporter but his politics are moderate, small-state, sceptical of welfare. His campaign is resolutely local: how to sort out Wrexham town centre and its drugs problem, and how to get Westminster to pay attention to this part of Wales. The small Tory team is pretty well organised, with volunteers ranging from the ages of 17 to 80, working under the command of a briskly efficient lady from Chester. Touring the town’s Gwersyllt area with Atkinson for a couple of hours one morning this week, we did not come across a single out-and-proud Labour voter. Gwersyllt is a lower middle-class area, tidy, mixed Labour-Plaid-Tory-Lib Dem in local elections. A couple of people hummed and hawed a bit, possibly too polite to tell Atkinson that they were not keen on him. But by far the more common reaction was a spontaneous, almost blurted-out phrase: ‘I’ve never voted Conservative in my life but this time I intend to.’ Here, in the flesh, was the Tory swing suggested by opinion polls.