Hills Of The North, Rejoice

In the world of Fleet Street and the BBC, everyone grew up in the Home Counties, went to Oxbridge, moved to central London, and has lived there ever since. Just as they imagine Labour to have been hegemonic in Scotland and Wales for decades until recent days, so Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle are the only places in the North of which they have ever heard, and even those could not be identified on a map by them. (George Osborne even claimed this week that Birmingham was in the North, although he himself is nominally the MP for Tatton!)

In that world, it is axiomatic that General Elections are won and lost in the South East, since that world's inhabitants know absolutely nothing about any other part of Britain (the assumption that anyone with a Scottish, Welsh, Northern or Midland accent is working-class is a particularly jaw-dropping case in point). So Jon Sopel was barely able to contain himself on The Politics Show when Derek Simpson repeatedly suggested that Labour needed to reconnect with the North. There are, after all, still no Tory Councillors in any of the three Northern settlements whose names Sopel could dimly recall (nor are there any in Oxford, but no one ever mentions that). And anyway, who cares?

Well, in point of fact, the Labour gains in the South East in 1997 were just a bonus. Most of them went back to the Tories in 2005, doing the Tories absolutely no good whatever. For the Tories first nearly and then actually lost office by first nearly (in 1992) and then actually (in 1997) losing most or all of their seats in the real key electoral battlegrounds of Scotland, Wales, the North and the Midlands. The Tories' failure to recapture office has been precisely their failure to recapture those seats. Furthermore, the battle between the Tories and the Lib Dems in the West Country actually makes the difference between a majority Government and a hung Parliament at every Election, yet receives as good as no media attention.

By contrast, however important it might be economically, the media's beloved South East is an electoral irrelevance, as the last General Election proved conclusively.