Theresa’s set to out-do Maggie!

Shock ‘mega-poll’ reveals true scale of Labour rout in North of England, with May set for 172-seat landslide

A DRAMATIC collapse in Labour support in the North of England could hand Theresa May a greater Election triumph than even Margaret Thatcher at her peak.

And it could lead to the Tories gaining seats they never dreamed of winning – including Tony Blair’s former constituency of Sedgefield in County Durham.

The latest sign that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour faces being swept away by a blue tidal wave on June 8 comes from an unusually detailed ‘mega-poll’ of 40,000 voters.

Britain’s leading election expert, Professor John Curtice, from Strathclyde University, said last night that the survey pointed to a majority for Mrs May as large as 172 seats because of disproportionately large swings to the Tories across Labour heartlands in the North of England and the Midlands.

By contrast, Labour’s vote is holding up better in the south, where it has relatively few seats.

Professor Curtice said that nearly one in three Labour MPs could lose their seats because support for the party was ‘falling most heavily where Labour has most to lose’.

The survey, published this weekend by pollster Lord Ashcroft, suggests that Mrs May’s majority will rocket from the 17 she inherited from David Cameron last summer – and could even dwarf the 144 majority won by Mrs Thatcher in 1983, when she was buoyed by a surge of support after the Falklands War.

It would be the largest majority achieved by the Conservatives since the 1930s, with the number of Labour MPs plummetting from 230 to 161. Other Northern Labour seats at risk if the Ashcroft poll is correct include several held by Labour since the Second World War, including:

Stalybridge and Hyde in Greater Manchester – which was held by the Blairite Cabinet Minister, and current BBC director of radio, James Purnell, until 2010

Bradford South, where Labour whip Judith Cummins had a 6,450 majority in 2015

Great Grimsby, held by Melanie Onn on a majority of 4,540 – formerly the seat of 1970s Foreign Secretary Tony Crosland

Workington, where Shadow Envi- ronment Secretary Sue Hayman had a 4,686 majority.

To add insult to injury, according to the Ashcroft poll, Labour could also lose Cardiff South, the former seat of Labour PM James Callaghan, which was won by Labour in 2015 by 7,453 votes.

Labour’s growing polling day panic was reflected in a bizarre plea by Trotskyist former BBC journalist Paul Mason for party supporters to use booze to get young Labour supporters to vote on June 8.

Lancashire-born Mr Mason, a member of Mr Corbyn’s inner circle, called for pub ‘drinking sessions’ to boost the anti-Tory turnout. In a video message, he urged them: ‘Have a house party the night before… have a drinking session in the pub on Election day. But drag your friends to that polling station.’

Young voters should back Mr Corbyn or ‘anti-Brexit Lib Dems’ to stop Mrs May’s Conservatives ‘who want to crash the country,’ said Mr Mason.

At their manifesto launch this week, the Tories are expected to pledge no VAT rises, while dropping their 2015 vow not to hike income tax and national insurance and re-affirm the target of cutting UK net migration below 100,000.

They are also set to announce plans to recruit 10,000 more NHS mental health staff; maintain the vow to spend 0.7 per cent of national income on overseas aid; impose a cap on household fuel bills; leave the EU Single Market as part of Brexit; and set up new grammar schools south of the Border.

Other pledges will give young people the right to erase embarrassing internet posts and MPs a new vote on fox hunting.

IT IS easy to claim manifestos don’t matter – particularly in this General Election. If it were a boxing match, the referee would have stopped the fight in the first round. Jeremy Corbyn is a political lightweight unable to contend with the punishment meted out by a heavyweight Conservative machine.

Some of his MPs have already thrown in the towel – openly telling their constituents they can vote Labour, safe in the knowledge there is no chance Corbyn will be Prime Minister.

While this has been going on, Theresa May and her team rightly believe the two key questions of any General Election campaign have been asked and answered: who is the best leader and which party is best suited to deal with the key issue of the day?

Given all of this, it would be easy to say that this week’s manifesto launch doesn’t matter a hoot – little more than a punctuation mark in a story that ends only one way: Theresa May is returned as Prime Minister with a substantially increased majority. But that is to miss the point. She will have agonised about her manifesto with good reason – knowing it should not just be a shopping list of ideas, spread across every Government department. Done right, it should crystallise her vision for the country – who she stands for and what she is against.

Most of all, Theresa May wants to prove her claims about being on the side of people who are ‘just about managing’ are more than windy rhetoric.

In that sense, she knows a manifesto is not simply a marketing exercise – it’s a contract with the electorate. There – in black and white – will be what the Government she leads says it will and won’t do.

True, most people will never read it, but journalists will interpret it for them – and political editors cherish their copies, ready for the day they can hold it up and say: ‘But you said…’

A politician breaks a promise in a manifesto at their peril. If you doubt it, then wind back a couple of months and remember the pain Philip Hammond and Theresa May felt when they broke the pledge not to raise National Insurance rates. No amount of political sleight of hand could get them off the hook – a promise was a promise and they were forced to back down.

When David Cameron was Prime Minister, several people trooped into his office to tell him he should break his pledge on foreign aid. He was genuinely angry and told them: ‘I made a promise to the poorest people in the world. What sort of person would I be if I broke it just because it was convenient?’

BECAUSE there is much at stake, there will have been endless tortured sessions going through each section line by line. Bizarrely, one of the biggest rows during the writing of the 2015 manifesto was over whether to include a commitment to put polar bears on the endangered species list.

The group responsible for the section on the environment said it was a major issue for a key group of voters. Others felt it left us open to parody – utterly out of touch with the concerns of people who are struggling.

One of the main reasons Theresa May called a snap election was the fact that she didn’t have a personal mandate, detailed in her own manifesto, to deliver some of her most treasured policies.

As she made the decision on a walking holiday in Wales, the sky must have seemed an almost uninterrupted Tory blue – with an incompetent opposition and many cheerleaders in the press. But one of the few black clouds on the horizon was the threat that she would be stymied at every turn by continuing with a majority of just 17.

Not calling an election meant that the Prime Minister could kiss goodbye to her controversial hope of restoring grammar schools, or experimenting with policies like an energy price cap which her predecessor – and some of the current Cabinet – argued was the stuff of Marx.

Winning a mandate on a manifesto where the Prime Minister’s promises are clear means her whips can hold any rebel’s feet to the fire with the question, ‘Which part of the manifesto don’t you understand?’

So, expect some defining policy initiatives – but not too many. Brexit will dominate the next few years, taking up almost the entire bandwidth of the next Government.

A big majority will ease things, virtually guaranteeing Theresa May will be able to get any outcome through the House of Commons – but the sheer amount of energy she will have to devote to it means the Prime Minister will have to be selective on the domestic policy front. Her huge lead gives her more leeway in considering difficult decisions like whether to drop the pension triple lock. In 2015, we could not begin to consider alienating such a key section of the electorate. I understand this time there have been ferocious debates behind the scenes between those who think you alienate pensioners at your peril, and those who say a signal needs to be sent now that times are going to be tough.

WE ARE, after all, still running a chunky deficit, which means public services will be under sustained pressure. More to the point, tax rises are almost certain at a time when people are feeling the pain of inflation outstripping wage increases.

I was in the room in Portcullis House just two short years ago when the photograph was taken for the front cover of the 2015 manifesto.

Everyone in that picture was soon to discover politics is a fickle game. All but one saw their careers spin into turmoil not long after the manifesto was published. Esther McVey lost her seat. The timebomb of the EU referendum pledge contained in the manifesto ended David Cameron’s tenure at No 10. George Osborne left politics. Nicky Morgan was fired. And Sajid Javid was given at best a sideways move.

Of those in the picture, Theresa May is the last one truly standing – and will be master of all she surveys on June 9. Her manifesto could be the route map to being seen by many as a great Prime Minister, or a bland document that puts safety first.

Whichever, it will tell an important story about how the future of this country is likely to pan out under the people who will be calling the shots.

It’s not a marketing exercise ...but a contract with voters