Boris needs more friends in the north

Replacing Islington’s Jeremy Corbyn with Camden’s Keir Starmer never seemed like the most obvious way for Labour to win back its lost northern heartlands.

True, Starmer was not such an extremist as Corbyn, but his classic leftie London lawyer mindset was surely destined to go down like a lead balloon out on the Blue Wall. That was the comforting story the Tories told themselves when he was elected Labour leader anyway. And things may still pan out that way.

But something unsettling for the Conservatives is certainly going on right now. As James Forsyth sets out in his latest Spectator piece, the fact that the rise in the incidence of Covid is concentrated across the north of England and the Midlands makes the Government’s newfound emphasis on using local measures to tackle the pandemic politically very tricky.

The deeply culturally embedded idea of the Tories being a snooty, southern-orientated party – which Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson hoped they had consigned to the past – could well be granted a second wind.