Boris’s Red Wall is crumbling before his eyes

What is the North? Where is the North? Does it start at Stoke-on-Trent and Derby or at Chesterfield and Runcorn? Even when you get into the unquestionable north, it is full of divisions between Liverpool and Manchester, Lancashire and Yorkshire, Newcastle and Sunderland. It’s no more packed with men in cloth caps than the south is packed with merchant bankers.

If you put your mind to it, you can analyse northernness out of existence. And yet it exists, as surely as the short ‘a’ in bath. You hear northern defiance, and the perennial suspicion that the south barely thinks the north worth condescending to, everywhere now. You heard it when Andy Burnham said the government was treating the north with ‘contempt…and it’s my job to stand up to it’. Burnham is not only the mayor of Manchester; he was secretary of state for health in 2010. You need only glance at the current incumbent to know it would be better for us if Burnham were secretary of state for health today.