Drowning Sorrows

And so the Conservative Party in the North of England finally dies.

By no means everyone here did badly in the 1980s. The party that was then, as now, in government continued to come a respectable second in terms of seats, and a very respectable one in terms of votes. It retained a significant municipal base.

But it convinced itself that it was universally hated above a line from the mouth of the Humber to that of the Mersey, and it relished that hatred. It continues to do so.

Therefore, it has consciously failed to protect the North from flooding. This time the North, as a whole, really does "hate the Tories", and it will do so for a very, very, very long time, indeed. There is something about floods. They have a folkloric power that nothing else quite matches. And at Christmas, too.

That party's 44 seats in the North of England, three in North Wales and one in the South of Scotland are doomed. In almost every case, with no more Lib Dems worth speaking of, and with no SNP, the beneficiary will be Labour, however improbable that would have seemed even only a week ago.

Here in the proposed seat of Consett and Barnard Castle, the Conservative Party had been expecting to do well, at least in the long term.

Hexham has only ever returned a Conservative MP, Bishop Auckland is a Labour-Conservative marginal, the town of Bishop Auckland will not be in Consett and Barnard Castle, the Conservatives have usually placed second in North West Durham (and a very close third otherwise, behind the Lib Dems in 2005 and 2010), Labour has rarely won over 50 per cent of the vote here, and the town of Crook will not be in the new seat.

Tynedale was never a Labour council, Wear Valley was not one continuously, elections to Derwentside in 2011 would have resulted in No Overall Control, and it is the less Labour part of Derwentside that is to be included in Consett and Barnard Castle. Almost every candidate who was ever elected to Teesdale District Council was an Independent.

All in all, this was clearly designed to be a seat that Labour would win in 2020, but which the Conservatives would hope, and even expect, to capture when next a Labour Government had been in office for two terms. After all, that cannot possibly happen before 2030, and the mines and the steelworks really will be very long gone by then.

But the Conservatives flooded the North instead, and they did so at Christmas. Here and in numerous other places, the memory of that will be as yesterday in 2030, or in 2040, or in 2050, or in 2060.