IT’S MAYDRIAN’S WALL!
From coast to coast: Tories build a wall of blue that Hadrian would be proud of
THE TORY victory over Labour in the Copeland byelection means Theresa May has now built her own ‘Hadrian’s Wall’ in the far North of England – an unbroken coast-to-coast chain of Tory seats running West to East from Copeland, through Penrith & Border to Hexham and Berwick-upon-Tweed.
Here, Britain’s top pollster, John Curtice, analyses the extent to which Mrs May could build on this symbolic feat at the next General Election to make further inroads into Labour’s Northern heartlands. NOT SO long ago, Conservatives never dared look north.
After the 1997 General Election the party held just two seats north of Richmond in North Yorkshire, held at the time by the party’s leader, William Hague.
However, the party’s capture of Copeland in the far North West – a seat it has not won since 1931 – has rattled Jeremy Corbyn’s MPs.
With the Labour leader’s ratings at rock-bottom, Theresa May has as good a chance as any recent predecessor to become a ‘one nation’ Tory Prime Minister.
The Conservatives won 44 of the 158 seats in the North of England at the 2015 Election. If the party’s remarkable 6.8 per cent swing from Labour in Copeland were to be replicated everywhere in Britain, a total of 56 seats nationally would change hands from Labour to Conservatives. Of those, 23 are in the North of England, suggesting that many a northern Labour plum could now fall into Mrs May’s lap.
Most of these are in the more rural and suburban areas that surround our great northern cities, such as Wirral West and Bury South. But not all: Wakefield and Workington are also vulnerable. If Mrs May won those, she could no longer be accused of leading a ‘Southern party’.
However, it is still too early to talk of Labour’s complete annihilation. Even the Copeland swing, which would hand Mrs May a 96-seat majority, would leave 173 Labour MPs in place.
Well over half of Labour MPs were more than 20 points ahead of their nearest opponent in 2015, and it will take an electoral tsunami to defeat those.
But in the North, they would be an increasingly encircled rump.