Money

Last week, having whiled away two joyous days at the Tories’ conference in Birmingham, I spent a long afternoon an hour’s drive away, in the cathedral city of Worcester. The plan was to sample the mood of the kind of place once considered to hold the key to British elections: remember “Worcester woman”, the swing-voting stereotype talked up in the New Labour years? But I was also there to gather more evidence of how much the UK’s current woes are affecting the kind of average-to-affluent places that might once have...