September means Strictly. It’s a fixture in our family calendar, and one of the last bastions of a genre in which the twentieth-century BBC once excelled: “light entertainment”. This sugary, glittery TV descendant of music-hall and seaside pier shows mixes music, dance, and comedy with sofa chat, in a format designed to be talked over by the family. But has light entertainment now eaten politics? At the recent Reform Party conference, ex-Tory Dame Andrea Jenkyns channelled a Strictly vibe as she swished onstage in a sparkly jumpsuit to belt out a musical number for the cheering crowd.
The chattering-class reaction was swift and withering. The Guardian sneered that “No one should have been made to endure this”, and “Once seen it can never be unseen.” But this misunderstands the true import of Jenkyns’ jumpsuit, as an escalation in Middle England’s mutiny against the Everywhere political class. This has been simmering since before Brexit — but now, the mutiny is aesthetic as well as political. And most significantly, Reform’s ebullient, spangly new vibe signals the party’s blossoming relation to a demographic for whom commentators long assumed Farage was radioactive: women.
Contra received opinion on the internet Right, Reform has understood one of Britain’s deep truths: the ladies of this land are not, in fact, “naturally” Left-wing. Stats nerds may point to women’s overall 2024 electoral preference for Left-wing parties, and to the increasingly gendered political polarisation of the young, in which young women veer Left while their male peers sidle Right. But more women than men voted Tory in 2024, and the British daily newspaper with the largest female audience has long been the Mail. Ordinary British women, especially mothers, are not precisely conservative, if by this you mean abstract stuff about markets or Edmund Burke. But they are fiercely so, if by this you mean animated by a desire to protect their own. The confusion arises because if you view politics from this angle, it’s less about ideology than embracing whichever political offer seems best calibrated to help you do so.
For much of recent history, this was plausibly the Labour Party. Under Blair, New Labour both turbocharged funding for public goods, such as Sure Start and the NHS, and cracked down on public ills such as street crime: in aggregate, a decent offer from the perspective of looking after your own. But it doesn’t follow from this that more than a minority of mums are ideologically “left-wing”, where such an ideology runs counter to this aim.
Especially since the Boriswave, the sheer level and ubiquity of demographic churn has now transformed this calculus. For one of the crucial background factors that makes the difference between life as a mum being pleasant or stressful is the safeness and familiarity of your everyday environment: for example, how likely you feel to be physically threatened or robbed, or encounter random hostility, or worry about your children going out alone. This sense of safety is both intangible and immeasurably valuable.
Rapid demographic change disrupts this sense of safety, for reasons that have less to do with prejudice than simple familiarity. As big cities demonstrate, it’s possible to live almost entirely without these goods, in an environment that’s both crowded and high-turnover. But most mothers don’t want to. Families that leave London to raise kids will usually gesture at house prices, but scratch the surface and you’ll find most are also looking for a safer and more stable atmosphere. For while one can manage without, doing so is both stressful and expensive. The costly burglar alarms, gated compounds, and private security patrols that compensate for eroded public trust and safety in effect transform an intangible common good into a luxury for the rich.
This makes the loss of an existing atmosphere of safety a far graver threat to those of modest means — not to mention one that, for reasons that should be obvious, lands especially heavily on women. So we shouldn’t be surprised if women are beginning to protest, especially as the side-effects of recent, rapid immigration extend palpably beyond big cities into provincial Britain, while the ongoing small boats crisis brings matters to a head. Of course some population turnover is normal, and plenty of newcomers just want to fit in; in the ordinary course of things, such individuals tend to be absorbed in short order. But this is not always the case, and becomes more noticeable as the volume increases.
As things stand, my own small town feels tranquil and familiar enough that primary-age children of both sexes play outdoors unaccompanied. But Reform’s swelling membership stands as testament to the radicalisation of Middle England, which is happening in no small part as mothers in similar towns up and down the country fear, or as in Epping simply experience, the rapid erosion of their treasured safety and familiarity. Some women might deride this as “bigoted”, especially if sufficiently rich or inured to big-city social norms to be puzzled by such distress. But far more are motivated not by ideology so much as looking after their own. And these women are on the warpath.
In her sparkly jumpsuit, Jenkyns has offered herself as their warrior queen. No wonder the Mail, house journal of Middle England’s women, hailed her conference appearance as a “ROCKSTAR ENTRANCE”. The same outlet reports sympathetically on this group’s loss of felt safety, recently quoting Carly, 38, on the asylum hotel opened near her tiny Somerset village: “I don’t go out running any more because some of the men hang around in groups and they used to shout things out when I ran past them,” she said. “I found it very intimidating.” Why, such women might be forgiven for asking, should we give up our freedom to exercise outdoors alone? What, indeed, gives the Home Office the right to take away our teenage daughters’ confidence-building freedom to go out un-chaperoned? Accordingly, women now feature front and centre in asylum protests. And those in towns that still feel safe think: “This could be me next”. As they face this prospect, Middle England’s middle-aged mums are growing increasingly militant.
“In her sparkly jumpsuit, Jenkyns has offered herself as their warrior queen.”
In honour of Jenkyns’ conference outfit, if not of her comparatively drab speech, we might describe the resulting mood as less the semi-ironic Right-wing meme of “pantsuit deportations” than its glammed-up provincial cousin, Sparkly Jumpsuit Deportations. It’s a far cry from the performatively macho sensibility that’s come to be associated with the e-Right, which often owes more to the thrusting Top Gun vibe of American conservatism than the England that made smash hits of Terry Wogan’s Floral Dance and the Military Wives’ Choir. The London-based e-Right policy channel Pimlico Journal was duly sniffy, describing Reform’s conference atmosphere as “generally cringe”, and “like I was spending time with an elderly relative and being forced to watch their favourite daytime television programme”.
But while the sequins might put off the boys who lift and post Lee Kuan Yew memes, winning votes is about numbers and these boys aren’t, numerically speaking, a lot of people. By contrast, the normie mums of Middle England really are. This group is also the country’s cultural backbone; and they are, not unreasonably, growing tired not just of having their sense of street safety eroded by “human rights” and government paralysis, but also of being told that this isn’t happening because their culture either does not exist, or — if it does — is “too white” and in need of more halal cafes.
For, just like the sense of small-town safety that allows my primary-age daughter a degree of outdoor freedom now unthinkable in (say) Epping, that culture does exist. It’s just not what the artisan-cheese classes (or indeed anonymous contributors to Pimlico Journal) would like it to be. As a gestalt it resists easy encapsulation, least of all in something as reductive as a foodstuff or institution; but its overall sensibility is, like Strictly, participatory, sentimental and sometimes a bit naff. It is also, despite the Hollywood stereotype of Brits as effete, ironic poshos, upbeat, demotic, and welcoming to whoever shows up and pitches in. Its modern-day avatar is perhaps the barrow-boy turned entrepreneur and influencer Thomas Skinner, a ruddy-faced giant who produces social media motivational messages at the crack of dawn every weekday, while devouring enormous helpings of hearty food. Fittingly, Skinner was recently announced as Strictly’s tenth celebrity contestant; in a sign of the turning political tides, he is also increasingly Reform-adjacent.
In this he reflects those ordinary Britons, men and women, for whom he has become a kind of living emblem. Luke Tryl of More In Common observed recently that, in sharp contrast to Starmer’s Labour Party, polling suggests that demographically speaking Reform voters simply “look like the average Briton”. The New Statesman concurs, describing this group’s “straight, numbing, cheddar cheese normality”. Reform now lead “among people who, this summer, were looking forward to holidaying abroad, watching the women’s rugby, having a barbecue and sitting in a pub garden.”
When city-dwellers haughtily inform provincial fellow-Britons of this kind that there’s no such thing as English culture, because St George was Turkish or whatever, what they actually mean is that this culture – the culture of Middle England – doesn’t contain anything they value. In more prosperous times, having their “cheddar cheese normality” erased or condescended to in this way didn’t bother Middle Englanders much: this group is generally more interested in local life than the national kind, and takes a “live-and-let-live” approach to those outside their orbit. But it’s grown clear in recent years that the “English culture doesn’t exist” crowd are not going to return the favour, perhaps because Middle England provides too robust a body of sparkly, sentimental, small-c conservative counter-argument to this claim.
In this context, what one commentator described as Reform’s “glorious naffness” is a mutiny that began politically, but has now signalled its burgeoning confidence by rebelling aesthetically too. The mutiny is directed straight at the lanyard class, in their Farrow and Balled period homes in safe and still-homogeneous neighbourhoods, self-righteously bestowing asylum hotels on the Mail-reading denizens of provincial towns and chiding their inferiors for worrying about the effect on street safety and their tax bill. For the locally-minded, family-oriented mums of Middle England, this is a bridge too far. It would be a mistake to imagine that the resulting political shift is a testament to Farage personally, except insofar as he now represents, for a growing proportion of Middle England, the last best hope of looking after their own. The resulting mood may be channelled through him, but it does not originate there, and will find a more effective figurehead if he fails.
For now, though, it’s Sparkly Jumpsuit Deportations. This vibe may horrify the cultural and political mainstream, and make the e-Right wince, but Jenkyns’ weaponisation of light entertainment should serve as a reminder to our feckless, faltering regime that Middle England’s public-spiritedness is the engine of grassroots social organising. And the flip-side of sugary sentimentalism is a vengeful mob. So Starmer and Farage alike should be grateful that the country’s normie mums are still just about willing to trust the political process. Should that trust be disappointed, as it has been so often before, the sequins may be swapped for something more steely.
