Will the Conservatives ever be loved in the North?

David Cameron and Boris Johnson are leading a new drive to win friends outside the Tory heartlands. Will northern lights ever shine on them?

The proud little town of Farsley isn’t the first place you’d expect to find Boris Johnson. Six miles outside Leeds, Farsley is a long way from the London Mayor’s metropolitan domain. And while it may be part of a Conservative-held constituency, this is hardly natural Tory territory.

That’s why Mr Johnson is here on what aides call a “splash-and-dash” election tour across Yorkshire and Lancashire, a helter-skelter attempt to demonstrate his “Heineken” ability to reach voters other Tories cannot, voters who will decide this year’s general election. A lot of them live in what many pollsters and analysts call “the north”, a term that really covers three English regions.

The north-west has 7.2 million people and 75 MPs, of whom 22 are Conservative. Yorkshire and Humber, has 5.6 million people and 54 constituencies, 18 of them Conservatives. And the north-east, with 2.6 million people and 29 seats, two of them Tory.

To the people who live there, there is no such thing as “the north.” The north-west is very distinct from Yorkshire, and the north-east is different again. “The instant you talk about the north, you show you’re not from there,” says one non-southern Conservative. “That’s the start of our problem.”

THE PROBLEM

After the last election. Danny Dorling, a Labour-leaning geographer at Sheffield University, calculated that of 10.6 million votes for the Conservatives in 2010, 1.7 million were “surplus”, simply increasing the party’s majority in its own seats without delivering more MPs. At 16 per cent of the party’s vote, it was the biggest surplus since 1918, he estimated, suggesting that Tory support is becoming increasingly concentrated in party strongholds like the south-east, but dwindling in the northern regions.

Mr Johnson’s northern tour is only the start of a concerted Tory attempt to redress the balance. David Cameron and George Osborne will be in Manchester on Thursday to promise “jobs, investment, prosperity and bright futures” for the “cities and towns of the north of England”.

The Conservatives have a northern problem, but it is not a uniform one.

In 1951, the Conservatives took 51 per cent of seats in the north west. In 2010, that share was down to 29 per cent. In the north-east, the figures went from 16 per cent to 7 per cent.

By contrast, the Conservatives today actually do a little better in Yorkshire than they did in 1951, holding 35 per cent of the seats there, up from 30 per cent.

There’s another important nuance too. In a highly influential 2012 report entitled “Northern Lights”, the Policy Exchange think-tank argued convincingly that the real Conservative weakness was not in rural seats in the north, where the party does respectably. Indeed, Tories are confident of gaining seats in the rural north like Berwick upon Tweed in Northumberland this year.

Instead, Northern Lights showed the Conservatives’ problem is in towns and cities. There are 80 broadly rural seats in the North and Midlands. The Conservatives took 57 of them in 2010. But of the 124 parliamentary seats in cities in the North and Midlands, the Conservatives took just 20.

At the local level, the problem is starker still. There are no Conservative councillors in Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool or Sheffield. None. There are two in Oldham, two in Rotherham, two in Wigan. There is one in South Tyneside.

DIFFERENT ECONOMICS

Why do the Conservatives do so badly in northern towns?

Much of the problem is rooted in the northern regions’ economic difference.

Calculations in the Northern Lights report by the pollster Anthony Wells found that unemployment is a major political problem for the Conservatives. Where local unemployment is 1 per cent higher,people are 8 per cent more likely to vote Labour rather than Conservative.

And historically, unemployment is higher in the north than elsewhere. Around a decade ago, the north’s rate of joblessness was close to the national average of about 5 per cent. But the recession that followed the financial crisis opened the gap again, and northern unemployment is around 2 percentage points higher than the national average.

There are also important differences in employment. More northern workers work for the State. Public sector employment is close to 20 per cent in the north, compared to barely 15 per cent for the rest of England. Conservative promises to reduce public sector employment sound rather different to many northern voters than in the private-sector south.

Finally, the north is poorer. Calculations from the ONS last year showed that only three of 32 statistical areas in the North of England show three areas --Cheshire East, Cheshire West and Chester, and North Yorkshire – report household incomes above the English average. The rest are poorer than average.

DIFFERENT POLITICS

A different economy inevitably leads to different politics. In a sign that geography has replaced social class as the defining division in British politics, many polls show that working class voters in Southern seats are more likely to vote Conservative than middle class voters in Northern ones

That’s partly caused by the perception that the Conservatives are a southern party, unable or unwilling to understand northern people and priorities. .

As Mr Johnson tours Farsely, one man boos loudly at him and another yells "w****r".

Asked why he was booing, Joe Evans, 36, says: "Because he is a t**t and I don't like his politics. I am not political but I don't like the Tories at all and what they are doing to this country. Have his policies helped northern businesses in general? No they haven't. They sit there and concentrate on the south east."

POWERHOUSE

The lead author of Northern Lights was Neil O’Brien, a Huddersfield Tory who has since become an adviser to Mr Osborne. The Chancellor, who represents a Cheshire seat, has subsequently, been the driving force behind Coalition plans to devolve more power and spending to big northern cities like Manchester. His “northern powerhouse” plans have won cross-party praise in the north-west, and left some Tories cautiously optimistic of election gains there.

On his tour, Mr Johnson repeatedly highlights the “powerhouse” agenda as the key to electoral gains . "We are going to see plenty of Conservatives returned in northern seats,” he tells the Telegraph.

Mr Cameron will be telling a similar story in Manchester on Thursday, promising measures to “rebalance” the UK economy and close the gap between north and south: “We can only have a strong British economy if no part of the country is left behind.”

PEOPLE LIKE US

Still, others believe the answer is about personnel as much as policy.

Polling data and anecdote alike suggest that people are more inclined to vote for candidates who look and sound like they do. Hence all the parties’ strenuous efforts to recruit more women and more people from ethnic minorities. The Conservatives are rightly proud of their achievements here, selecting women and non-white candidates in several of their most winnable seats.

When it comes to class and region, however, the record is less impressive. The Conservatives are still short of candidates from working-class homes with northern accents And that matters. For as long as Conservatives are people who pronounce Newcastle with the stress on the first syllable and a long A, saying “New-carsel” instead of “Nyukassel”, like the locals do then the party will struggle on Tyneside, for instance.

“Too many people in the party still look and sound like posh chaps up from the south,” says one north-east Conservative.

Others take heart from the thought that resentment at posh chaps from the south hurts other parties too. “A lot of this is about people not liking privileged metropolitans.. To my voters, Ed Miliband is just as much a privileged metropolitan as David Cameron,” says a Conservative in the north-west.

Nigel Tate, 49, who runs a jewellery shop in Farsley, says Mr Johnson is a welcome break from that political norm. "He is flamboyant - politicians are a bit dull these days. He has got a bit of charisma to him. He is nearer to connecting with common people like us than other politicians like David Cameron and George Osborne.”

That’s Mr Johnson’s Heineken effect in action. But ominously for the Conservatives, Mr Tate quickly adds: “Nigel Farage is a similar type of character who connects with people as well.”