I’m calling it: the Tories will win a majority

It’s time to stick my neck out. What follows is anecdotal and my hunches have often been wrong. But I think that though Boris Johnson will get his overall majority, Tory strategists’ hopes of surfing a tidal wave of new support from ‘tribal’ Labour voters in the English Midlands and the North will not be fulfilled. Mr Johnson will win this time, but there will be no substantial and enduring shift northwards of Tory support.

I live in the north Midlands. The two closest constituencies to that (safe) Conservative seat of Derbyshire Dales neatly fit the description political pundits offer of the sometimes struggling Midlands and northern seats where Johnson’s Tories hope to make huge, game-changing advances on 12 December.

These are not wastelands, and they include some lovely English countryside, winding lanes and picturesque villages, so why do I say ‘sometimes struggling’? Because before the 1980s, in much of the eastern part of Derby-shire and across into Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire, coal mining and its associated industries were very important, not only as employers but as the shapers of community. Hundreds of thousands of jobs depended directly or indirectly on those coalfields. Pit villages abounded in the two constituencies I know best, Bolsover and North East Derbyshire, and people were tribal in their party loyalties. It was Labour, always Labour, Labour till we die.

Such villages still feel like pit villages, but without the pit. Local economies were hit very hard by the death of coal mining in England. In places there lingers some sense of not just economic but spiritual and cultural loss. Patchily, prosperity is returning, but there remains in many communities the sense of a lost world.

And that world was Labour. By 2017 North East Derbyshire had not returned a Tory since 1931.