May’s away day folly to north east T

WANTED: a home for a 10ft-high statue of Maggie Thatcher, currently housed in a shed somewhere.

Westminster City Council – Tory-controlled – refused permission for the £300,000 monument to be sited in Parliament Square, fearing vandalism and disorder.

It has now been offered to the city fathers of Grantham, Lincs, where she grew up. Having failed to raise the money for one of their own, they’ll presumably snap it up.

Atop a vandal-proof 10ft-high plinth, the Iron Lady will no doubt be thinking to herself: “I knew some day my plinth would come.” HERESA May’s away day with her Cabinet to Tyneside was an imaginative public relations stunt.

But nothing more, and it didn’t quite come off.

Knockin’ ‘em dead in Gateshead with her Brexit music-hall turn was never going to work. It was embarrassing.

Ministers tumbled off the train at Newcastle station like public schoolkids on an outing to the sticks, bewildered by unfamiliar surroundings.

Most comical was lighthousesized Chris “Failing” Grayling, just about keeping pace with his beer belly.

None of these politicians know a thing about the north, and they care less. They were just going through the motions, like swimming off a polluted beach.

I go back as far as the appointment of Tory peer Lord Hailsham, aka Quintin Hogg MP, as Minister for Unemployment in the North East in 1963.

He made himself popular with photographers by wearing a flat cap and ringing a big handbell, but the decline of Geordieland accelerated.

The latest Conservative foray into the region convinced nobody. The blank faces on Mrs May’s handpicked audience in an engineering factory must have told her that,

Tyneside voted massively Leave in the referendum, and they obviously wanted her to leave on the next renationalised train to Kings Cross.

And this is just the first leg of a nationwide tour to sell a Brexit deal that some of her own Cabinet don’t like, much less the other 27 members of the EU.

Full marks to the lass for trying, but I think she’s going to be disappointed with her reception in the provinces.

Far better to stick to the capitals of Europe, where her message of compromise and free trade is what they want to hear.

Bringing home that deal to a sceptical Parliament and a governing party mired in civil war will test her to the limit come the autumn.