Wednesday 10 April 2013

True North

Blair will probably get Thatcher's Garter, but it would be better going to Prince Harry. His brother already has it, and he himself is a veteran of one of Blair's Wars, making such an award a far more appropriate monument to the Blair years than any honouring of the leather-faced old monster himself.

But there are now two vacancies in the Order of Merit, the second having been created by the death of Thatcher. One, then, for someone from the Hillsborough Justice Campaign, and the other for someone from the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign.

Anyone who really believes that it is "purely in the gift of the Sovereign" in the way that the pure words of that phrase would suggest, needs to read over the current list of members and ask themselves, in the nicest possible way, of how many of them Her Majesty had ever heard before they were recommended to her. The Royal Victorian Order, which really is purely in the gift of the Sovereign, mostly goes to members of the Royal Family or of the Royal Households.

In any case, the Queen and Lady Thatcher, born within six months of each other, were more or less public in their mutual loathing. Old ladies often attend their rivals' and adversaries' funerals as an act of victory. We are about to witness just such an occurrence in a week's time.

So, Hillsborough OM and Orgreave OM it is, then. Ed Miliband, a South Yorkshire MP, wait for the sun to set on the day of That Funeral, and then get on the case. Or make way for someone who will make these things happen. But we trust that that will not be necessary.

In any case, we all know that people from Yorkshire and the Duchy of Lancaster are only affecting to be Northern. I am told that, while I was otherwise engaged, Channel 4 News last night broadcast from Consett. Well, Consett North is a hugely interesting County Council election for those who follow these matters, featuring two of my political godfathers, although they have rather fallen out with each other, among the seven candidates to fill two seats.

Including a neat little example of how some things never change. Certain people never used to contest someone's ward, in return for two Scrutiny Chairs and the general provision of his majority against his own nutters. The nutters thought that they were the Left, despite rallying to the banner of as perfect a product as one could possibly imagine of both the industrial and the municipal machines.

That person is likely to be in the Cabinet in or soon after 2015, in the ultimate right-wing sinecure whichever party's Right is being discussed. For in truth, they were only the nutters. Everybody has them. And even now, those who shielded the Great Man from them, thereby making possible effective and responsible local government, are only standing one candidate in the two-member ward that he is contesting.

Meanwhile, let us meander down the hill to leafy Lanchester, darling. Until 1995, the Conservative Party massively dominated the Parish Council from the Dawn of Time, while the place returned two Tories out of three to the old District Council. Think of a smaller version of Hexham, or Altincham, or Harrogate. Think of the North depicted on Last Tango in Halifax.

Yet Lanchester has not elected a Conservative above Parish level since 1991. That party has not had a significant presence on the Parish Council since the elections in 1995. It returned only one, a sound Tory farmer, to the Parish Council in 2009, our term of office being then extended by two years in line with that of the new unitary County Council.

The sole Conservative candidate for this two-member County Ward comes from as far away as Gateshead, which is not even in County Durham, never mind here in the middle of it. One of the two UKIP candidates lives in the Ward, although not in Lanchester as one would expect; the other does not even live here. There is no Lib Dem.

For the Parish, following the withdrawal of a Labour candidate who is standing for the County elsewhere, there are now 15 nominations for 15 seats, and therefore no election. The only Tory is the one who was already on. In Lanchester. (A farmer, not someone from the commuting, middle-class, once ardently Thatcherite village, where they always saw Labour as integral to everything that they had gone up in the world in order to escape.)

One of the Independents was first elected for Labour and is a millionaire businessman to whom the Conservative Party is clearly of no interest even after his having broken with Labour, while another was at least a Labour voter until the Iraq War. In Lanchester. There is a third Independent. Plus 11 Labour. Eleven. More than two thirds. Elected unopposed. In Lanchester.

The minimum age having been lowered, my record as the youngest ever member has been beaten by a full two years. It had stood since the last century. But a 19-year-old who works in the office of the local Labour MP, who herself lives here and whose husband has also just got back on, has now been elected. Unopposed. In Lanchester. This time last year, he was a schoolboy. Good for him, say I. But this would have been unimaginable in the very recent past.

I cannot believe for one second that Lanchester is an isolated, or even a terribly unusual, example. Across the rural and the middle-class North, including among people who even throughout the Blair Era loathed Labour as they loathed their own former accents or the people whom they had felt obliged to invite to their children's weddings, the Conservative Party has become only the faintest shadow of a shade, while UKIP is not really getting anywhere, either.

In each case, if it cannot take or even fight the likes of Lanchester, then it has no constituency in the North. Without which, it simply cannot win a General Election.

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