Politics: It’s grim up North for Tories

It is perhaps inevitable that, after two years in government, the Tories settled on a local election strategy of holding on to as much as they can. It is rare for a governing party to try to expand its political reach in mid-term elections. But this defensive approach means that Conservatives are no closer to tackling one of the biggest obstacles to a majority: their absence from England’s northern cities.

Take Newcastle. There are — at the time of writing and, almost certainly, of reading — no Tories on Newcastle City Council. The Newcastle Conservative Federation website is reduced to holding up its chairman, a parish councillor in the village of Woolsington, as ‘the first elected Conservative in New-castle for nearly 20 years’.

It hasn’t always been like this. During the Suez crisis, the Home Secretary in a Tory government sat for Newcastle North. Gwilym Lloyd George, the younger son of David Lloyd George and a National Liberal and Conservative, won the seat in 1951 with more than half of the vote. In 1955, he received 64 per cent. Today, no ambitious Tory would ever think about trying to scramble up the greasy pole from Newcastle North.

Newcastle isn’t the only major northern city without Tory councillors. There is not a single Tory councillor in Manchester, Liverpool or Sheffield. The party has long known this is a problem. In 1997, soon after he was elected leader, William Hague declared that there must be ‘no no-go areas’ for Conservatism. Iain Duncan Smith and David Cameron each made the same commitment when they took up the reins. But the party is still no closer to gaining even a toehold in these places, and doesn’t expect to make much progress.

Any party that aspires to govern the country needs to understand the whole country.