‘Get Boris back’: True blue Bakewell weighs up Johnson return

Every day, Kevin Crowder has people talking to him about politics. He’s a barber in the Derbyshire town of Bakewell. Often, he says, his clients will sit and put the world to rights as he clips their tops.

“Do you know what I say back to them?” he asks today. “I agree. Whatever they’re saying, I smile and nod. That’s the secret to this job. You always sit on the fence.”

What has he been ‘agreeing’ with for the last 24 hours?

“Well,” comes the reply. “People want Boris back.”

Barely a full day after Liz Truss resigned as prime minister and talk everywhere is already of who will replace her.

And here in Bakewell – a true blue Tory patch of the Peak District – the feeling among voters appears to be one which at the start of this strange week would have seemed unthinkable: give Mr Johnson another crack at the whip.

“I don’t think any of them have the skills, intellect and broad base of support to do a good job frankly,” declares retired businessman and lifelong Conservative voter Peter Wiseman, as he has his hair cut at KC’s Barbershop.

“The last good prime minister was Margaret Thatcher and before that it was Winston Churchill. None of them are anywhere near that level [but] Boris may be the least worst option. Or Jacob Rees-Mogg, who I think is very clever. But he won’t stand anyway.”

Behind him, Mr Crowder considered all this as he works his clippers. He smiles and nods.

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Bakewell is a town most famous for its tarts – or, strictly speaking, its puddings. The tart was, in fact, a 20th-century commercial creation that, as residents here will make vociferously clear, does no justice to the original Victorian dessert invented in here the White Horse Inn.

Today, however, The Independent is here amid its higgle-piggle alleyways and hidden courtyards to discuss what one wit notes, are “puddings” of another kind: “those in Westminster”.

The town – population 3,600 – is exactly the sort of place any Tory prime minister needs (and would expect) the support of.

It is through-and-through blue: the local MP is Conservative (Sarah Dines voted for Kemi Badenoch then Ms Truss in this summer’s leadership race) and so are both local councils (Derbyshire County and Derbyshire Dales District). All three ward councillors – all of who declined to speak today – are Tories.

Which means, if the race to be the new PM is put to the wider party, the good people of Bakewell may well offer a clue as to who will be in 10 Downing Street this time next week.

“I’d like to see Boris have another chance,” says shopkeeper Sally-Anne Swindell, as she sits and has a coffee while out walking her Chihuahua. “He made his mistakes but look at what he did right: he got the vaccine out, got people on furlough, supported Ukraine. That’s a good job if you ask me.”

But all this instability, all this chaos, all this mess – doesn’t it entirely stem back to him dividing his party and government through a stream of mistruths and mistakes? “Well, perhaps,” the 55-year-old replies. “So, now it’s his responsibility to put it right.”

She is, she admits, the very essence of that well-worn truism that political choice is often as much about feeling as fact.

She doesn’t think much to Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer because he comes across like a “posh boy”. She thinks Mr Johnson does too – “but in a way I like”.

Does she think there should be a general election? No! “We voted in 2019,” she says. “Now they [Tory MPs] need to get their heads together and work this out.”

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Not everyone - even in this blue heartland - agrees with such a viewpoint.

While few think the Conservatives will go to the country (“it would be like the captain of the Titanic voting to hit an iceberg,” says NHS worker Tony Harris), there are certainly some who think they should.

“Everyone can see people should now have a say,” says Steve Free, owner of Music On The Green record shop. “What’s the alternative? Leave it to Tory party members again? They did a bloody good job of it last time, didn’t they?”

He reflects for a moment on his astonishment that Ms Truss was ever made PM.

“I renegotiated my mortgage a week or two before she got in,” the 59-year-old says. “Thank God, I did. I have palpitations just thinking about if that had been a couple of weeks later. I’d be looking at a repossessed house now. And there’ll be people going through that as we speak. I think they deserve a say in if the Tories should be allowed to pick another leader.”

A customer browsing the vinyl looks up.

“Nonsense,” he says, and walks out. It is not good-natured. It has echoes of the Brexit debate all over again.

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Sharron Thorpe has noticed this too.

In the fragrance shop where she works, she is worried that the country is more divided than ever following the disastrous last month and half. “We’re going from one crisis to another,” she says. “Instead of fighting, why don’t they - Labour and Tory - work together for the good of the country?”

It is a question so utterly reasonable that one suspects that there is no satisfactory answer.

Nor may there be one to cabinet maker Chris Low’s scathing assessment of the situation.

The 72-year-old is, he says, no Conservative but the “sensible thing” for the party would be to put Rishi Sunak in charge. Why? “Because he knows the figures,” the grandfather-of-one says. “And [as chancellor] he has shown he can deal with them.”

But, he adds, he does not expect that to answer.

“When was the last time,” he asks, “that something sensible happened in British politics?”