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When it comes to levelling up, people want changes to be “hyperlocal”, says Luke Tryl, UK director of More in Common, who has been canvassing red wall voters for the past three years. “It certainly isn’t about big infrastructure to make it easier for people to get to London, but it’s also not even about redoing up the big park in the centre of town, which most people don’t use on a regular basis.

Luke Tryl, a former Tory special adviser and now director of More in Common, an organisation that has conducted regular focus groups on the candidates, said people warmed to Truss’s apparent straightforwardness – her ordinariness as a person and politician. They were qualities that had more appeal in the country than in the Westminster bubble.

The context of the pandemic — a time of extraordinary personal sacrifice — heightened the reaction, according to Luke Tryl, UK director of the More in Common think tank. “It was such a blatant contrast between what they’d been asked to do and what they’d been doing in Downing Street.” He detected a similar reaction in focus groups after the lockdown trip to Barnard Castle by Johnson’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings.

A sense of being abandoned by the police is spreading. When the More in Common foundation spoke to 4,500 people this summer they found 69 per cent felt police had given up investigating theft, vandalism or even burglary. Many had stories of police taking hours to come, if at all, and believed categorising offences as “low-level” underplayed the fear, distress and sense of violation they caused.

The findings, in a poll by think tank More In Common, lay bare the scale of anger at police. Some 52 per cent think anti-social behaviour is not being treated seriously enough. Just five per cent think it is taken too seriously.

Focus groups staged by More in Common had Sunak pinned as the next prime minister eight months ago, its director Luke Tryl suggested. They pointed to the furlough scheme as proof of a serious politician and said he seemed “more prime ministerial than the prime minister”. But his approval ratings dived after it emerged that his wife, Akshata Murty, was non-domiciled for tax purposes, which may have saved her millions, and that Sunak retained a United States green card.