Essex Man is alive and well and voting Tory

He was always Maggie’s favourite. She loved him. He adored her. But as in most hot romances, there was a cooling. And finally the embers died. Essex Man had found another. In slightly less than a decade a Tory majority of 17,000 in Braintree had turned, incredibly, into a 358 majority for Labour. Braintree, with an electorate of 82,000, is now the second most marginal majority in England and may well hold a clue to how the rest of the South votes.

Mrs Thatcher had a special place in Essex Man’s heart. She had given him a chance to buy his own council house plus the confidence and tax breaks to start his own business, instead of working under the union yoke.

To find out how Essex Man will vote this time, I spent the day canvassing with Brooks Newmark, the Tory candidate for Braintree, Britain’s fastest-growing town.

Brooks is an American-born Oxford graduate and fund manager who married the daughter of the Daily Telegraph defence correspondent Sir John Keegan. I first met him when I tried to borrow money from him to fund one of my ventures. He said no, but the way he said it impressed me. He simply put the phone down. He is bright, energetic and confident. There aren’t many like him in senior Tory ranks right now.

I caught up with Brooks and his agent, Rikki Williams, at their rather dowdy offices in Witham, home to most of the C2 Thatcherite voters in the constituency. Brooks hits the door-knockers 12 hours a day and at the last general election he lost 10lbs in weight (on that basis, John Prescott must be campaigning from an armchair). From my time on the doorstep, sorting the wheat from the chav, the following emerges: Tony Blair is widely disliked and disbelieved.