Essex Man is 30 years old today, and about to start a new life somewhere else

When Simon Heffer, the Conservative historian and polemicist, coined the term “Essex Man” in an anonymous column in The Sunday Telegraph on 7 October 1990, everyone immediately knew who he meant. Margaret Thatcher, whom he admired inordinately, had built her dominance over the previous 11 years on the support of working-class, council-house-buying voters who thought life was getting better and didn’t want Labour to ruin it.  

The term became an instant staple of political analysis, reaching its peak moment at 11.22pm on Thursday 9 April 1992. That was when Basildon, the Essex new town that was top of Labour’s hopes that night, announced that David Amess, its Tory MP, had been re-elected with a swing against him of just 1.3 per cent – not enough to put Neil Kinnock in Downing Street.  

The socio-political phenomenon was well established before it gained its name. Essex Man and his family – even at the time there was a taste of old-fashioned sexism about the term – had previously been labelled “the C2s” by opinion pollsters. These were the skilled manual workers to whom Thatcher appealed, and who were a source of great pride on the Conservative side.  

Labour, on the other hand, had taken a long time to come to terms with the shifting of the class base of two-party competition. After each of Thatcher’s three election victories, in 1979, 1983 and 1987, some parts of the Labour Party railed against the false consciousness of aspiring manual workers, who were held to be voting against their class interest.  

This was the period when something big was changing, not just in British politics, but in politics across the world. In the US, the equivalent of Essex Man was known as a Reagan Democrat and lived in Macomb county near Detroit, having been identified in a study of working-class voters there by Stan Greenberg, the pollster who later worked for Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. 

In Britain, class had been the main determinant of voting behaviour since the rise of the Labour Party and the advent of the universal franchise. Now something started to change. Higher educational qualifications, as held by middle-class professionals, had tended to be associated with voting Conservative. But in the 1987 election in Britain, for the first time, the most highly educated tenth of the population was more likely to vote Labour than the least highly educated.  

Even as the Conservatives consolidated their growing appeal to a section of the working class, a section of the middle class was going the other way.  

Thomas Piketty, the French economist, detailed the same trend in the US and France. In the US, the crossover happened in 1972. That was when the most highly educated tenth of the electorate voted more Democrat than the tenth with the fewest educational qualifications. In France the crossover happened in 1973. (It is essential to qualify all this by reminding ourselves that years spent in educational institutions do not equal “high” education.)

In Britain, the shift provoked one of the great disputes of political science after the 1983 election, when Thatcher won a 144-seat majority and the Social Democratic Party, a breakaway from Labour, failed to break through. Was Labour’s failure evidence of “class dealignment” or was it simply “trendless fluctuation” prompted by the machinations of politicians?  

In the end, the answer was both. Class was becoming less important in shaping voting behaviour, but it didn’t mean that Labour was doomed. Because Essex Man became Mondeo Man, the man Blair mentioned in his 1996 party conference speech. Blair was talking about the 1992 election and the reasons for Labour’s defeat, and what he said in his speech was: “I met a man polishing his Ford Sierra.” We can tell it was the same man, even though Blair claimed to have met him in the Midlands, rather than in Essex, because he was male, and he was a self-employed electrician: “He used to vote Labour, he said. But he’d bought his own house now. He’d set up his own business. He was doing quite nicely.” So now he was voting Tory.  

By the 1997 election, Ford had replaced the Sierra with the Mondeo, and Blair had supplanted Thatcher in the dominant position in politics. Other sociological labels came and went. There was a brief flirtation with Worcester Woman, because on one calculation Worcester was the seat that Labour needed to win to form a majority government – but as Labour under Blair ended up winning seats such as Enfield Southgate in outer London, held by Michael Portillo, the defence secretary, she was soon left behind.  

Indeed, she was eclipsed by Basildon Woman, when Angela Smith – now Labour’s leader in the House of Lords – finally won the seat for Labour.  

Blair’s Labour did well among middle-class as well as working-class voters. It wasn’t until Jeremy Corbyn came along that class dealignment got going again. Despite Corbyn’s own idealisation of the working class, under him the de-class-ification of British politics was complete. The Labour vote became considerably more middle-class in 2017 and 2019. By last year’s election, there was no significant class difference between Labour and Conservative voters.  

And Essex Man had migrated further north, to the “red wall” of traditional Labour seats, some of them Labour for a century, that fell to the Tories in December.  

The interesting question is what the next key electoral demographic group will be. It could be that the battlefield at the next election will be the highly educated, liberal middle-class denizens of the Home Counties – the mirror image of Essex Man, if you like. Who knows what catchy shorthand will be devised, but they live in places such as Canterbury, which Labour won under Jeremy Corbyn and which Rosie Duffield held last year; and Kensington, which Labour won and lost. They could also live in other places that Labour nearly won in 2017, and which would be target seats next time. There is Chipping Barnet, now on the edge of Greater London but it used to be Hertfordshire; Chingford, ditto but which used to be in Essex (home of the modern Essex Person, perhaps); Cities of London and Westminster, the central London seat contested by Chuka Umunna for the Liberal Democrats last time; East Worthing and Shoreham in West Sussex; and Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, currently held by Steve Baker, the chair of the Eurosceptic ERG group of Tory backbenchers.    

Home Counties Woman doesn’t have the same ring to it, but it could be that female graduates in the south-east replace Essex Man and his successors as the deciders of elections in the future.