Two weeks ago there was a small earthquake on the southern edge of Greater Manchester. The Tories lost control of the borough of Trafford, the “island of blue in a sea of red”, whose supposedly ingrained Conservatism has long been highlighted by its selective school system. Labour gained four seats – but in the detailed Trafford results, there was something arguably even more seismic. In the affluent suburb of Altrincham, where the senior Tory backbencher Graham Brady has his constituency home, two victorious Green party candidates ended a Conservative dominance that used to seem as natural as the weather. This means that, having already watched Trafford vote 58% for remain, this most Eurosceptic, Thatcherite, grammar-school supporting of MPs now shares the local air with representatives of a politics that sits at the opposite end of just about every political spectrum you could think of.

David Cameron, George Osborne and their circle bigged up diversity and liberal values. Then came the referendum result

I grew up eight miles away in the almost comically Tory town of Wilmslow – and in the 1980s, Altrincham seemed to be another byword for the kind of arriviste ostentation that was a big part of the Thatcher era. It was the first place I ever visited a wine bar (younger readers should maybe look that one up), dressed in a pastel-coloured shirt I had bought in the town’s House of Fraser department store. The latter is still there, but after a period of town-centre decline, so is a new vinyl record shop, a smattering of “artisan” bakers and at least one vegan food outlet, all of which have the distinct whiff of the kind of liberal, hipster-ish values embraced by a rising share of the modern middle class. This is not, of course, to suggest that we are talking about some hotbed of sourdough socialism – just that its culture is different now, and these things tend to have political consequences.

All over England, suburbs and commuter towns are changing. Whereas plenty of these places were once monolithically white, many are now displaying a new diversity – a change tangled up with the fact that overheated property markets in our bigger cities are pushing both families with children and cash-strapped young renters towards their fringes and beyond (a massive story in London, obviously). At the same time, the fact that most suburbs are now well connected to nearby cities that have been revived and regenerated means they now soak up metropolitan mores in ways that didn’t happen 30 years ago.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Iain Duncan Smith (centre) on the campaign trail in Chingford and Woodford Green, where his majority has crashed. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

What all this means is shot through with caveats and complications. But you do not have to look hard for proof of political shifts, some of which have been evident for years. With the exception of Southport, the more affluent towns and suburbs of Merseyside are all now Labour-held. In Birmingham, leafy Edgbaston was a Tory target seat in 2010, but is still held by Labour, with a bigger majority than the one it got in 1997. The Tories recently lost Bristol North West, as the Labour vote jumped up by 16 points. In this month’s local elections, the Liberal Democrats trounced the Conservatives in Kingston upon Thames and Richmond (where, thanks to an alliance with the Lib Dems, the Greens also took four seats). Indeed, across the endless commuter belt of the south-east of England, something very big is afoot: since June last year, the Tories have lost 29% of the council seats they were defending in byelections, and Labour canvassers are working hard, even in such places as Chingford and Woodford Green, the suburban parliamentary seat where Iain Duncan Smith’s majority has crashed from 13,000 in 2010 to 2,400.

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The main factor in all this is probably bound up with levels of voters’ education, as I was reminded when I had a long conversation last week with a political sociologist from Bristol University, Paula Surridge. Some of her recent work is built around a striking fact: that “where there were high levels of degree-educated people, the Conservative party lost support between 2010 and 2017”.

Higher education, she says, has always been a means of socialising people into liberal, progressive values – something also shown by the relevance of degree-level qualifications to whether or not people voted for Brexit, and changes that began to materialise long before Jeremy Corbyn took control of his party, when some hitherto Tory areas began to lean towards the Lib Dems and Greens. In most of what Surridge said, one implication was clear: that if Margaret Thatcher’s greatest masterstroke was the way she redrew the electoral map by selling off council houses, Tony Blair’s acceleration of the expansion of higher education may soon prove to have been even more transformational.

Obviously, there are still plenty of suburbs and towns where vegan food outlets would prove about as popular as typhoid, and people of many ages and backgrounds continue to vote Tory. Shifts among educated, affluent voters and the problems they represent for the Conservatives are counterbalanced by post-referendum rises in support for the Tories in many post-industrial, more working-class areas – as evidenced by the local election results in such places as Nuneaton, Derby, Dudley and Walsall. But still: it should surely give Tories pause for thought that a party that still thinks of itself as the natural representative of the middle class seems to be risking a split with such a visible chunk of that demographic.

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Until 2016, Conservative politicians seemed to understand this, at least in theory: David Cameron, George Osborne and their circle were still fond of styling themselves as “modernisers”, bigging up diversity, and at least paying lip service to liberal values. Then came the referendum result, whereupon Theresa May surveyed a deeply divided England, and launched her leadership by choosing to speak for only one side – and pursuing exactly the kind of hard Brexit that would threaten the Tories’ appeal to liberal-inclined voters, possibly for decades. The Conservatism she chose was – and remains – parochial, self-consciously nostalgic, and brimming with the illiberalism that has been so revealed by the Windrush scandal: ballot-box poison in the places the Tories are losing, though there are few signs of enough senior Conservatives realising it.

Still, at some point in the future, if the economic clouds darken and such old-school middle-class concerns as mortgage rates and higher taxes return to the agenda, the suburbs and commuter belts where the Tories have lost ground could once again go thoroughly blue. But if this were to stand any chance of happening, the party would have to be led by people who represented a clean break from May’s monochrome retro-politics and Brexit’s serial lunacies, and who understood the new liberal middle class as a matter of instinct.

I can think of only one current Conservative big-hitter who might just about tick that box: the Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, who is not an MP, and whose reputation among her party’s shrinking membership is presumably sullied by the fact she loudly opposed Brexit. It is perhaps some sign of the Tory malaise that the party’s activists are still in love with Jacob Rees-Mogg, which invites an obvious question. How would he play among spelt loaves, artisan coffees and cans of IPA, with voters who would like a politics at least vaguely in line with the 21st century?

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist