Non-Tories-For-The-Tories
Why non-Tories like me across Britain are determined to vote for Boris Johnson https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/11/28/non-tories-like-across-britain-determined-vote-boris-johnson

I've just discovered I am part of the fastest-growing political tribe that I’m calling “Non-Tories For The Tories”.
We have not considered ourselves habitual Conservative in the past but now find ourselves desperately willing Boris Johnson to secure a Commons majority on Dec 12.

We are a diverse lot, ranging from a former ‘Kipper and now pro-Brexit Social Democrat Party member like me, right through to longstanding former Labour voters who now wouldn’t touch Jeremy Corbyn’s party with a barge pole.

After expressing on social media how odd it felt to be so fervently hoping for a party other than my own to win the election, I received a private reply from a former Labour politician: “I feel exactly the same way. Like you I have my heart in my mouth every day of this election”

Most of us are passionate Brexiteers who realise that if the Tories don’t get a majority then our dream of departing from the EU is all but dead. Others are simply decent democrats who understand how dangerous it is not to implement the act of voting.

Others get that if the political class is able to continue to block Brexit, it won’t “bring the country together” – as Labour absurdly and opportunistically contends – but will rip it further apart, leaving a horrible cloud of uncertainty hovering over the economy to boot.

My own party, the small SDP, is standing in just 20 seats – mainly with giant Labour majorities so we don’t get in the way of pro-Brexit Tories well-placed to win target seats. It is not standing in my own constituency – a former Tory-Labour marginal in London

In “Remainia” where I live it is difficult to envisage a Tory gain – though I will still be at the polling station on Dec 12 to put my cross for Boris. But in Labour’s long-neglected “red wall” across the North, the Midlands and North Wales, something remarkable is happening.

Whole families in Bolsover and other former-mining constituencies, men in Grimsby who’d hoped to follow their fathers onto the trawlers and common-sensical Lancastrians whose votes could at one time have been weighed for Labour rather than counted are swinging behind the Tories.

Many of them feel Labour might indeed have been weighing their votes rather than engaging with them as individuals, so comprehensively have they been taken for granted by a party that refuses to accept their votes to leave the EU count for anything at all.

One friend from Grimsby told me after a recent visit: “It’s not just about Brexit. It’s more than that. Folk actually like Boris. They like his optimism and his patriotism and the way he has refused to buckle when the Remain media has thrown the kitchen sink at him personally”.

I do not suffer from any illusions about the Tory Party. I think its conduct of negotiations with the EU under the pro-Remain PM it installed straight after the referendum is more fishy than the docks at Grimsby used to be.

I even get that its failure to win a majority in 2017, which at the time felt like a body-blow to Brexit, could well in fact have been Brexit’s saving grace (May had already hatched her secret plot to rip all point and meaning from it: a majority would have allowed her to do so).

But this time it simply has to win. I lie awake at night thinking of the ten years of my own working life that has been spent trying to advance the Brexit cause and how they will all count for nought should the Tories not win this election.

I find myself thinking, as Tory ministers face television interrogators determined to trip them up, “please don’t say anything stupid, please don’t drop the ball now”. With two weeks to go, I am living every twist and turn of this election. It is indeed heart-in-mouth time.

I know there are many thousands of people like me – perhaps millions – across the country for whom the arrival of Boris in N10 has changed everything. He has rescued a meaningful departure from the EU and seems on course to do a Mr Muscle job on the Brexit-blockers of London SW1.

My tribe won’t be complacent on election day just because of a heartening poll published two weeks out. Do not fear, my dear Tory friends, our shoulders are firmly to the wheel. We just need yours to be as well.