A Conservative council leader said once that if he pinned a blue rosette on a dog it would win in Royal Tunbridge Wells. For a century, until Friday afternoon, this was true. Conservatives were defending 11 of the 16 seats put to a vote in Tunbridge Wells at this week’s local elections. They only held two of them.
The town’s borough council had been in Conservative hands for decades. When this brick-solid hegemony was (briefly) interrupted by the Liberal Democrats in the mid-Nineties, the splash in the Daily Telegraph read: “Even Tunbridge Wells Falls.” One hack there said the shock was only marginally less seismic than the fall of Rome.
Few places occupy such a central place in the imaginative landscape of English conservatism. Tunbridge Wells sits in the middle of Kent, and the middle of Middle England. A water colourist would paint its rhododendrons, its Georgian shopping parade, and its three immaculate bowls clubs. A visiting anthropologist might wonder why a town this lovely has a hardened reputation for the barely repressed spleen of its populace.
There is a particular strain of the English petit-bourgeois character that expresses a powerful desire to stop things. Litter-dropping, dog muck, and taxes — bad. They do like some things though: bridge, sherry, and commemorative china plates with pictures of the Queen’s face on them — good.
If this character lived anywhere, it was Tunbridge Wells. The decades old joke — “Disgusted, of Tunbridge Wells” — is that even there, surrounded by green spaces and good grammar schools, they were still twitchy, still anxious about slipping standards, still vaguely threatened. Living in a town that 99% of humanity would be happy to dwell in made its residents grumblingly resentful. They wrote gone to the dogs letters to newspapers.
But they were not really political; they just felt in their bones, as Roger Scruton did, that “the old courtesies and decencies are disappearing.” They wondered why men no longer wear hats and were treated as a national joke for it.
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