Getting It

Alan Johnson was not only one of the very many potential Prime Ministers, actual or rumoured, whose ambitions were killed off in the Blair years by Gordon Brown. He was also the first of the two Education Secretaries, to date, to see his hopes of the Premiership crushed by means of a public humiliation at the hands of Archbishop Vincent Nichols, a truly terrifying political operator even compared to Brown. And I mean that as a compliment.

However, Johnson was on this week's Politics Show in these parts, and he had the wit to point out that the BNP's support comes from those who used to indicate their desire to be considered a cut above their neighbours by voting Tory. Fascist movements have always been the vehicles of people like that, and they always will be. The lazy assumption that Labour could otherwise have expected every vote cast in the East Ends of London and Glasgow, or in some amorphous place called "the North", is precisely that: bone idle. As Johnson, a Cockney who is now a Hull MP, understands perfectly.

The voice of the white working class would not have failed to win a Strasbourg seat in the North East last year, it would not contest every ward in Sunderland unsuccessfully every year, it would not have failed to win a single seat on the Stanley Town Council for which it campaigned in alliance with a man who is now a Minister of the Crown, and numerous other examples. By no means only in the North East. In Glasgow North East, the Labour vote held up. The BNP vote went up dramatically. And only just ahead of the BNP was the thing that collapsed. The Tory vote.