How Theresa can wrest the North from Labour

THIS general election presents a unique opportunity to reshape our political landscape. There is a real chance that the Conservatives will not only cement our independence from Brussels misrule, but could also establish themselves as the truly national party of Britain, with representation in every region and in every class.

Remarkable as it may seem, the Tories may well emerge from the contest as the authentic voice of most people in the North and the Midlands.

Until very recently, such a prospect wouldhave appeared unthinkable, even laughable. Large swathes of urban Britain have long been seen as political nogo zones for the Tory party. And in Labour’s fiefdoms throughout the North, the Conservatives had come to be regarded as an alien people in a land of tribal socialism.

But outside London, Labour’s citadels may be crumbling. Years of Leftwing neglect, combined with repugnance at Jeremy Corbyn’s ideological extremism andspectacular ineptitude, are sounding the death knell for the Labour cause in the face of Theresa May’s resurgent Conservatism.

No longer can the Left take victories in northern constituencies for granted. This was spectacularly demonstrated by the recent Copeland byelection in Cumbria, in which a seat that had been in Labour’s hands since 1935 was taken easily by the Tories. And in another extraordinary result last month, the Tories snatched a rocksolidsafe seat from Labour in Salford on a 21 per cent swing, as support for Mr Corbyn’s party collapsed. Only last week, Labour lost a safe council seat to the Conservatives in its Middlesbrough heartland on a swing of 8.3 per cent (the first time that had happened there since at least the midNineties).

Little wonder that some northern Leftists are already jumping ship. Yesterday, the sitting Labour MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland – archmoderate andCorbyn critic Tom Blenkinsop – announcedhe is not going to stand at the election.

The threat to Labour from the Tories in the North and Midlands could be deadly in this election because Mrs May is so much more in tune with the mainstream values of the public than Mr Corbyn ever can be. In her instinctive patriotism, work ethic, moral decency and dislike of privilege, the PM embodies the true, timeless spirit of provincial England. Mr Corbyn, in all his infantile posturing, encapsulates the ethos of the progressive metropolitan elite that is such anathema to most northern voters.

The Labour leader, whose political base is in Islington but whose spiritual home is in Cuba, is utterly unable to connect with workingclass voters. They despise his obsession with divisive identity politics, his support for untrammelled immigration andhis backing for terrorist movements.

With blinkeredcondescension, his cult followers think his profligate faith in ever more welfare spending will go down well in the ‘deprived’ North. In reality, most voters prefer selfreliance to benefits dependency.

And what of Ukip? For a while, having won the European elections here in 2014, they saw themselves as the chief potential challengers to Labour in the North and Mid lands. But the hopes of Ukip’s new leader Paul Nuttall have been dashed with a string of poor parliamentary and council byelection performances – most notably in Stoke, which should have been winnable given that the city had one of the highest proBrexit votes in the country.

INSTEAd, Labour held on and Ukip barely increased its vote share. The party is also beset by dwindling membership, troubled finances and endless internal feuding. And now we are leaving Europe, its raison d’etre has been achieved.

Ukip’s decline is Mrs May’s opportunity. The Tories would always have struggled to win back the North under david Cameron and George Osborne, both of whom oozedwealth and entitlement. But Mrs May has no such problems. She is not only the antithesis of Mr Corbyn, but also of the selfregarding Notting Hill set. When she speaks of ‘One Nation’ Toryism, she is not using the phrase as a code for trendy modernisation. Rather, she is expressing her sincere belief that her party must not be governed by special interests. When she declares that ‘Brexit means Brexit’, she is simply reflecting the wishes of the majority of voters, especially in the North.

Tellingly, her great hero is the cricketer Geoff Boycott, the ultimate symbol of northern grit. A coalminer’s son from Yorkshire and born in a small terraced house, he drove himself to the top of his sport through ironwilled determination, using an approach very similar to Mrs May’s: cautious, solid, unflashy but relentlessly productive. Equally revealing is the fact that one of the PM’s closest aides, Nick Timothy, is a profoundadmirer of the Victorian politician Joseph Chamberlain, a great Midlands industrialist who started his political life as a radical Liberal but later became a Tory imperialist. But despite his changes in allegiance, Chamberlain was always dedicated to improving the lot of the working class through social reform and economic opportunities: exactly the goals that Mrs May espouses today.

In a sense, if the Tory party can recapture the North, it would be returning to its roots: it is only in modern politics that the Conservatives have been stereotyped as the party of the southern rich. In the past, there were vast numbers of workingclass andnorthern Tory voters. In fact, from the 1880s until the 1920s, the Conservatives styledthemselves the ‘Unionist party’ – not just because of their belief in the union of all parts of the United Kingdom, but also because of faith in the unity of all peoples in the country.

Churchill was first elected as a Tory MP for the northern industrial seat of Oldham in 1900, just as another Tory prime minister, Harold Macmillan, sat initially for Stockton in the North East. It is amazing now to think one of the safest Labour seats in the country, Liverpool Walton, with a majority of 28,000, was in Conservative hands from 1950 to 1964, represented by local businessman and city councillor Kenneth Thompson.

With Mr Corbyn and Labour so rightly despised, this election can mark the start of a great Tory revival in every part of Britain. Little more than a decade ago, after their third landslide defeat, the Tories looked permanently doomed. Now they are on the verge of becoming once again the natural party of government for all the United Kingdom.