The great Tory Red Wall betrayal

Boris Johnson may well have to go. His own proximity to a party in his private flat in Downing Street on 13 November 2020 – the very day he fired Dominic Cummings – could be the thing that does for him. Were the police to decide that this event was a criminal breach and hand out a fixed penalty notice to the Prime Minister, it is inconceivable that Tory MPs would fail to remove him from office.

But we do not have to await a police report to spot that the Tory party as a whole, Johnson included, has committed a far bigger crime: the political sin of neglecting and disrespecting the Red Wall voters who gave it a landslide majority in 2019. A seemingly epoch-making political realignment that could have kept the Tories in power for several elections ahead is now close to being altogether squandered.

Johnson himself has failed, time and again, to prioritise sorting out the Channel migration shambles – the issue that culturally conservative Leave voters tell pollsters they care about more than any other.