a younger, more popular Parliament, now in favor of Brexit

Pro-Brexit banner in front of the Westminster House of Commons, October 17.
Pro-Brexit banner in front of the Westminster House of Commons, October 17. TOLGA AKMEN / AFP

Photography has turned a lot on social networks. On Sunday, December 15, five freshly elected Conservative MPs, royal blue scarves (their party colors), stroll around the station platform somewhere in the north of England. They are about to take the train from London for their first parliamentary term on December 17. Four boys and a girl: we recognize Dehenna Davison, 26, a pom-pom hat pressed over the skull. In Bishop Auckland, a Labor riding since 1935, the new darling of the media and the Tory training has bluntly swept outgoing MP Helen Goodman, 61.

This simple snapshot says a lot about the British landscape that emerged after the December 12 general election. Led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, driven by an effective election campaign, on the thousand-fold promise of a "Get Brexit done!" " on January 31, 2020, the Conservatives won an historic majority in the House of Commons: 365 seats out of 650. No less than 109 new Tory elected representatives will take their places in the venerable enclosure (out of a total of 140 novice deputies, all parties combined).

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The "Boris’s Babies" symbol of renewal

Above all, they managed to break down the "red wall", a labor stronghold in the Midlands and the north of England. Thanks in particular to these five elected officials, and to around twenty others, from the same regions. Young, modern, and often of modest extraction, these "Boris’s Babies", as the conservative press already calls them, would be the symbol and the ferment of the renewal at work within the British right: 100% for Brexit, and more geared towards the working classes.

They grew up in the constituency that elected them, went through a public school and a regional university. We are very far from the typical conservative MP: a white male, studying in a posh college (of the Eton or Harrow type), having completed his political training in Oxford. Boris Johnson for example, David Cameron or Jacob Rees-Mogg, the latter (current secretary of state for relations with the Parliament), sticking to stereotype to the point of caricature.

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Stuart Anderson, who left school at age 16 for the military. Seriously injured in the foot, he converted to safety, did not join the Tories until 2016. He was elected on December 12 in Wolverhampton South West, in the former mining lung of the Midlands. Dehenna Davison was born in Sheffield; her mother is a nurse, her father was a stonemason, he was killed in a pub when she was a teenager. She worked in a video game company, but was nevertheless parliamentary attaché to Mr. Rees Mogg for a year.

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