The Conservatives fear green growth in leafy England

In the garden of England, a green revolution has begun. Amid the victories for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in local elections earlier this month, there were shoots of growth for the Green party.

Mark Hood, a 52-year-old gardener, is one of two Greens to oust Tory councillors in the Kentish market town of Tonbridge, ending an unbroken blue streak harking back to 1977. He attributes the success to old-fashioned campaigning. “We were visible, we litter-picked, we set up Covid support groups. We worked in the community,” he says.

The Greens papered the town with flyers and found favour as middle class insurgents. The Conservative share of the vote fell only slightly but the Greens benefited from a coalescing of the anti-Tory vote. Hood puts this down to residents fleeing London. “A lot of people have moved into Tonbridge from different backgrounds. In the past, it was true blue. We’ve managed to beat that tribalism.”

Tonbridge represents a slowly emerging trend across England. Gradually, the Greens are edging out of their longstanding status as a fringe single-issue party. In May, the party gained councillors and came third in the London mayoralty vote — beating the Liberal Democrats, the traditional third party that has long challenged the Tories in affluent parts of the south.

Environmentalists are making gains beyond southern England. Labour fears the growth in their support in the UK’s larger cities, and Nicola Sturgeon has suffered from a similar challenge in Scotland.

Jonathan Bartley, co-chair of the Green party, says half of its latest gains came from the right. He argues that the party’s values increasingly chime with ‘small-c’ conservatives. “We believe in small business and strong local economies. Greens are passionate about their communities and localism, where the Tories have been very patchy.”

One Conservative councillor in Kent, who is worried about losing his seat to the party, says: “The Greens are the new Liberal Democrats. They are formidable and without the coalition baggage. They spent a fortune on Facebook advertising.” He adds: “We urgently need a strategy to deal with them.”

The Greens are not the only threat. The Tories lost six seats on Oxfordshire county council, while the Lib Dems gained eight and the Greens won two. It was a similar tale in Hertfordshire, where the Conservatives lost five councillors to the Lib Dems and Greens. Such local footholds are critical for launching future local and national campaigns.

A parliamentary by-election in Chesham and Amersham in leafy Buckinghamshire next month will be a significant test of whether the Tories are facing real problems in the south. The Lib Dems are hopeful of an upset after gaining 13 percentage points in the seat at the last election. One activist believes the party could win or achieve a result “that will make journalists say, ‘Oh, the Lib Dems aren’t dead yet’.”

Local elections and a by-election that is at least two years away from the next general election may tell us little about the national mood. Also, the Tories are practised at squeezing the vote of smaller parties in national campaigns.

But the Greens and Liberal Democrats could take advantage of another issue that worries southern Tories. The Johnson government is overseeing the biggest shake-up of the planning system since the war. With smaller cities and towns in mind, the government plans to liberalise laws to help build 300,000 homes a year.

Traditional Conservatives fear that Johnson’s relentless focus on the north is harming their traditional heartlands and that peppering the Home Counties with more construction would provoke the ire of voters. Tom Tugendhat, the MP for Tonbridge in Kent, tells me: “People here are concerned that more houses will put more pressure on resources.”

One of his MP colleagues puts it more bluntly: “I don’t think Boris has any idea what’s about to hit him. An unholy alliance of rightwing Nimbys and leftwing environmentalists are coming to destroy these planning reforms. Whether they win or lose, the arguing will be brutal for us. We could soon be in real trouble.”

sebastian.payne@ft.com