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.