Working class voters won Boris Johnson the general election – but can he keep them after coronavirus?

Sean O'Grady asks, will the pandemic, looming recession and unfinished Brexit business dash his hopes of keeping their votes?

Boris Johnson with the newly elected MP for Sedgefield, Paul Howell, after the election victory (Getty)

The Conservatives are no longer the party of the rich, while Labour is no longer the party of the poor. Such is the revolutionary conclusion of the latest research on the last general election.

After a century when the worst-off looked to Labour, they are increasingly likely to trust the Tories. One wonders what Keir Hardie, Clement Attlee or Harold Wilson would make of such a state of affairs. Yet now the Covid crisis puts the government’s “levelling up” programme in some jeopardy.

“For the many not the few” was Labour’s familiar slogan at the last two general elections. Despite being first deployed in the Blair years, it was supposed to betoken a coming socialist revolution, one where obscene disparities in wealth and income were to be abolished, and where the poorest in society would at last get their fair share.