Watch out for a political earthquake in central England as Liz Truss breaks a conservative cornerstone | Gabe Henslev

Deep in the steep hills of Sari’s commuter belt is a narrow, winding lane full of trees. Halfway to the bridge that leads her, Sarah Goodwin points out the barn that one of her farming neighbors has turned into a wedding venue. Brides and grooms use this pristine view, over sheep grazing and ancient woodland to the beauty spot of Hascombe Hill, as a backdrop for their wedding photos. But soon this view may include an oil well.

This summer, ministers granted permission to conduct exploratory drilling here, overriding objections from the Conservative-controlled county council and Conservative local MP Jeremy Hunt.

What’s being proposed outside the village of Dunsfold isn’t fracking, as it doesn’t involve fracturing rock by pumping water through high pressure, although breaches were still rising locally when Liz Truss lifted a national ban on fracking last week.

Already disturbed by plans to build 1,800 homes nearby, villagers now fear tankers will collapse on their narrow roads, pollution and potential impacts on home prices and landscaping. But they, too, have been puzzled by the logic of oil drilling in the climate crisis. “We need to find ways to cut back on fossil fuels, not spend time and money to get more land,” says Goodwin, a veteran of the Greenpeace protests in her native New Zealand and co-founder of Action Group Protect Dunsfold, who is now seeking judicial review of the excavation decision. The UK oil and gas company offered the village a cut of the profits if it hit the oil. But in affluent areas like this, does money trump peace of mind?

The thing that highlights the deal Dunsfold is offered – agonizing turmoil now, in exchange for vague promises of riches later – is that it is the deal that Truss is now effectively offering the entire country. In pursuit of growth that may never materialize, it has smashed the pound and imposed borrowing costs at a time when many are being stretched to the limit – especially in places like Surrey, where the post-lockdown exodus from London has swelled an already overheated market.

Some city commuters on Godalming’s morning trains may benefit from its top-tier tax cut, but the chaos in the process threatens the pensions, stock portfolios and real estate wealth on which Middle England was built. Boris Johnson’s behavior may have embarrassed Tory voters, but Truss is essentially scattering her vote, pushing deeper into the Tory base. YouGov pollsters have now given Labor a stunning 33-point lead over the Conservatives.

Hunt insists his voters did not take a stand against Truss as they ultimately did against Johnson, and he cautions against overthinking market volatility. But what his voters want to hear from next week’s Conservative Party conference, he says carefully, is that there is a long-term plan for growth, public services and low taxes they can trust. “I fully accept that this is a necessary condition for the election of a conservative government,” he says. “That’s why people vote for the Conservatives, because we are reliable in the economy.” It’s, he warns, the kind of constituency “where people will vote Conservatives if they think the Conservatives are working hard enough for their vote,” but it won’t be taken for granted. He was marginal when he inherited it in 2005, and Hunt expects to be very marginal in the next round.

In his seat in southwest Surrey and in the seat of Dominic Raab Escher Walton, plus neighboring Guilford and Woking, Lib Dems approaches Tory’s high-heeled shoes.

Seats like this really do swing into crisis, as happened in the mid-1970s after the economic turmoil under Ted Heath, and in the 1990s after the recent sterling crisis. The combination of economic chaos and threats to the green belt is theoretically a gift to them. But will it suffice the collapse of the “blue wall”, that small but strategically important group of Tory-controlled seats where Labor cannot win but the Liberal Democrats might?

Neil Sherlock, a former adviser to Nick Clegg, fought southwest of Surrey for the Liberal Democratic Party in 1992. He remembers stirring up feeling the tides coming his way, until the last few days when voters suddenly caught a cold. “They were saying, ‘I’d vote for you, but we don’t get Neil Kinnock,'” he recalls. “The Liberal Democrats thrive under opposition leaders who don’t intimidate their voters, a description that increasingly fits Keir Starmer. They got a few hundred votes to snatch South West Surrey in 2001, yet it always hovered well out of reach.

The New Liberal Democratic Party’s candidate for the constituency is Paul Tobbs, the active leader of Waverley County Council. He cites the biggest domestic issues such as oil exploitation (board challenges Dunsfold decision in court) and cost of living. People who’ve never needed help before turn up at the Goodalming Food Shop – not a food bank of what his local co-worker Richard Ashworth calls a “no-till supermarket” – while his Godalming Green board member Claire Whitman worries about the “ambitious” life. Built on cheap credit is suddenly not cheap. But the twist in the tale this time is in the way Follows, Ashworth, and Weightman come together to explain it.

Hunt’s majority shrank from more than 28,000 in 2015 to 8,817 in 2019 not because the Conservative vote collapsed – just barely dwindled – but because the anti-Conservative vote held him together. Neither the Green Party nor any former popular independent person stood against followers in the last general election. Under a popular agreement brokered by the local chapter of the Compass Research Center, which encourages progressive alliances, Labor, Liberal Democrats, and the Greens sided with each other in the seats of Waverley County Council where the progressive vote would be divided; Followers now head the Rainbow Alliance, from which seemingly real friendships have blossomed. (Follows keeps a box of Lego in his office to entertain three-year-old Whitman, Ashworth jokes that the main disagreement between them is that he’s a pacifist, and Follows works in the defense industry.)

Increasingly, local activists are helping each other — yellow-pink volunteers handing out green leaflets is not unusual — and Whitman says voters appreciate the lack of squabbling. The alliance they describe, which is built bottom-up rather than top-down, and usefully under the radar you can make calls for a formal Lib-Lab agreement almost seems old-fashioned.

This, of course, does not guarantee that it will provide general election seats. In theory, Truss still has time to change the economic trajectory, it is difficult to see it abandon the concept on which its leadership was founded. Floating voters may lose their nerve about Labor. But could something seismic form under central England? If not now, it is hard to know when.

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