“I’ve always been a big Rishi fan,” declared Linda Goff, landlady for the last 17 years of the Mason’s Arms, a small pub in Northallerton High Street.
Northallerton, on the main line 30 miles north of York and the largest town in Rishi Sunak’s vast constituency of Richmond and Northallerton, was once a Roman staging post, and is today situated only a few miles from Sunak’s country home.
“He does spend a lot of time talking to people in Northallerton,” Linda went on. “He just comes over as a genuinely nice person.”
This was an encouraging start, for I confess I was hoping, in the sixth and last Vox pub of this campaign, to report that Sunak’s constituents are standing by him because they know him to be a decent man.
Unfortunately for that hope, Linda continued: “I’m a big Rishi supporter because he’s local, but we’ve had 14 years, so I’m actually dithering who I’m going to choose.
“I don’t think he’s the kind of guy who likes to bad-mouth other people, but he’s been forced to do so for the election.
“So I don’t know. It’ll be on Thursday morning I’ll decide. It probably will still be Conservative, but it won’t be as easy a decision as last time.
“I’m not keen on Keir Starmer. He just seems, I won’t say the word soft, I think he just says things that the majority want to hear. We don’t know how these things are going to be completed.
“But Nigel Farage talks a lot of sense. I think most people are just disillusioned with it all.”
She urged me to speak to Jack and Susan Cummings, who were visiting the Mason’s Arms from their home in Chester-le-Street, County Durham.
When asked if he is related to Dominic Cummings, the Durham man famous for driving to Barnard Castle to test his eyesight, Jack replied: “I’m glad to say he was nothing to do with me. He was a card and a half, wasn’t he.
“I think immigration is a vast problem which no one has addressed.”
His wife, Susan, agreed: “We’re just a small island.”
Linda: “There’s no houses.”
Jack: “There’s an old saying you look after your own first. And it’s the cost, how much does it cost?
“Rishi’s not my type of fellow. I didn’t vote for him. I voted for Boris. Nobody in the country voted for Rishi.
“In a high-profile position like that they shouldn’t just pick someone. It might sound crazy, but there should have been another vote [i.e. another election].”
Jack continued: “I’d still vote for Boris. He took us out of the EU.”
Susan: “I still think it’s the best thing we did.”
Jack: “I’ve always voted Labour until Boris.”
Susan: “I liked Boris.”
Linda: “Everything was like water off a duck’s back to Boris.”
Jack: “He didn’t have much of a chance. Covid. People where we live, they don’t like Starmer for some reason.”
Susan: “I don’t dislike him. He’s what I call a puppet. He’s not his own man.”
Jack: “When you see them on the TV all they’re saying is fighting against each other.”
Susan: “Like children.”
Jack: “Just tell the truth. Tell us how it is and how it’s going to be.”
ConHome: “But what if the truth is we need to spend less money on pensions and more on defence?”
Jack: “I think people would come round to it eventually if you tell the truth.”
Jack, 68, spent 14 years as a miner in Eppleton Colliery, County Durham: “I was on strike for 12 months solid. Hard times.”
He blamed Margaret Thatcher for closing the pit soon after the miners’ strike ended: “I’ve never worked anywhere with comradeship like the miners had. They were like a band of brothers, and that’s a true statement.
“You’ve got to do something about the immigration. I’ve voted Reform.”
Susan: “So have I. Nigel Farage, he talks well in my opinion.”
Linda: “Down to earth. I never thought I’d say I like Nigel Farage. The other two are just bickering on at each other.”
Jack: “The House of Lords should be scrapped completely. I watched a lot of it during Covid. You’d get more sense out of monkeys at the zoo.”
Susan: “Absolutely. They’re just getting money after money for nothing.”
Jack: “They stopped Rwanda, the Lords.”
Linda: “I loved Maggie Thatcher, me.”
Jack: “Linda! She killed all the heavy industry. The less said about her the better.”
He offered me a piece of homemade corned beef, potato and onion pie, made by Susan and brought by him to the pub for his lunch. “It’s what we call ‘put hairs on your chest’,” he said. It was delicious.
Two less ebullient men in the Mason’s Arms said they would not be voting. One said he never votes. The other said: “I voted last time to get out of Europe and that’s the worst thing I ever did.”
At the other end of the High Street, a retired prison governor was standing at the bar of the Nag’s Head. “I’ve met Sunak twice,” he said. “Clear beliefs. A good CEO. A very clever bloke.
“I don’t think he’s got any political nous, he doesn’t know how sometimes to go for the jugular, and the Conservative Party, I think they’ve lost their way. I think any other politician would be in the same boat. You can’t go on giving money out.
“Do you vote for the party or for the MP according to what he’s done for the constituency?
“Honour’s gone out of politics. Look at the other politicians. Farage came on the scene, there’s not a cart he won’t jump on. He’s a good operator, he got a good political antenna.
“I would find it very difficult to vote for Reform. A lot of what they’re doing we should have been doing as Tories.
“I’m inclined to think I’ll give Sunak a cross. Does he stand out as a politician? I don’t think so. It’s a shame, but I’ll probably end up voting Conservative.
“In this seat, I think Sunak’s got a slim chance – he might get in by a slim majority.”
Linda Williams, who was born in Northallerton and moved back there after she was widowed, said of Sunak: “He’s great. Everybody says he’s got so much money he can’t relate to us. So what? He’s impressed me.
“He does a lot round here. He was there on Sunday for the fete, the Northallerton Homegrown Food Festival, I looked at him and I said, ‘There’s Rishi!’
“I’m quite frightened about Keir Starmer getting in. I just feel as though it’s shaky ground.”
But her sister, Greta Ward, retorted: “It’s been very shaky ground for the last four years.
“I haven’t liked how Rishi is speaking. He comes across as quite a bully when he’s speaking over the top of the interviewer.”
A young woman who spent a year as a volunteer in an advice centre for refugees, not in Northallerton, said with deep emotion: “I’ve experienced first hand the plight of refugees coming to this country, and I just think it’s disgusting how they’re treated, people who were working for the British Government in Afghanistan, and their families have been murdered.
“It upsets me because I’ve heard some really terrible stories. We should do more for refugees than we do. You do not send people to a a country [Rwanda] that’s had a terrible human rights record. It’s absolutely appalling. I mean come on, all these people want to do is work and pay their taxes and they’re not allowed to do that.”
No other candidate in Richmond and Northallerton was named, but it would be idle to pretend that a great wave of support for Sunak could be detected on his home turf.
He may manage to hold on – his majority last time was 27,210 – but while his excellence as a constituency MP is recognised, no one acclaimed his performance as Prime Minister.
Nor did anyone speak in praise of Starmer. Farage has stepped into the gap for an insurgent leader left by Johnson’s departure from the scene, and appeals to many voters who despair of the Conservative record on immigration.
The post Vox pub: Sunak’s constituents praise him as their local MP, but not as PM appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Andrew Gimson
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