The north is like Narnia: you know when you’re there

I left the north, I travelled south (ardent Smiths fans can fill in the rest), at a time when Thatcherite Conservatism was something of a swearword in most of England’s northern territories. So as David Cameron’s ascent has switched a Tory victory from possibility to likelihood, I’ve been itching to find out how Brand Dave is faring – and have been making a Radio 4 documentary to find out. Teasing Rebecca Stratford, the producer, and William Hague’s amanuensis Will Littlejohn (London-bred son of Daily Mail scourge Richard) for being soft southerners, I’m suddenly aware that I don’t know where the north starts. On the motorway, once you leave the capital’s sprawl, that evocative blue sign to “the north” looms, but it never tells you when you’ve arrived.

Maybe it’s like Narnia: you just know when you get there. It’s not at the Watford Gap: that’s what southerners think. Nick Clegg provides exemplary, if rather arbitrary, clarity by announcing it starts at “the service station of Exit 24 on the M1”. Hague tells me it doesn’t include Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, but asserts that his pal George Osborne’s Cheshire constituency is “definitely in the north”. Hmm – it may be en principe, but it is not quite with the grain of the rest of the north-west. As one Labour strategist puts it, “It’s the south in the north”. Any final word on this matter would be gratefully received.

At my nostalgic insistence, we started the first programme with an extract from the late Alex Glasgow’s “Little Cloth Cap”, a satire on Lord Hailsham’s visit to the north-east in 1963, complete with headgear to woo the locals. Hearing his voice again connected me straight back to my eight-year-old self, receiving my first lesson on the political cycle from his lyrics:

Harold Wilson’s put in charge
Half a million get their cards
And he told us what his party had was soul!
Then along comes Grocer Heath
With piano keyboard teeth
And he doubles up production at the dole . . .

On my desert island, I’d like “As soon as this pub closes, the Revolution starts”. A sentiment most of us have shared, regardless of our politics.

Alan Duncan says he loves Newcastle and keeps meeting lots of Conservatives there, which sounds a tad optimistic. Alas, he has never had a night out in the Bigg market, so can’t really claim to have been acquainted with the city’s full hen-night charms. We make a date to go Tory-spotting, though perhaps not on a match day.

Hazel Blears, reticent after her cabinet walkout, agrees to be interviewed. She doesn’t think Cameron readily connects with the north. But then again, he doesn’t have to: he just needs to connect more than Labour, in the right parts, to win. Her posse chased Dave out of town when he tried to have his picture taken on the doorstep of Salford Lads Club, setting for that iconic Smiths album cover. There’s a culture war on here to go with the political one.

One in four of the Tories’ marginal seats is in the north-west, so I go door-knocking with Hague in South Ribble, the seat that will tip them towards Downing Street if it changes hands. Mr Hague gets a warm reception. “I wish you were leader of the Tory party,” says one woman. Her neighbour issues more ambiguous praise: “You’re my husband’s hero.” As we negotiate labyrinthine garden paths, a terrible smell wafts around us. “Is that dog poo?” I ask. The Tories’ northern tsar regards me with a Yorkshireman’s scorn. “It would have to be a bloody big dog – it’s the smell of the countryside,” he replies.

Having had a little local difficulty with her expenses and her Artex ceiling, Labour MP Kitty Ussher writes a heartfelt piece for the Standard complaining about Commons working hours: 2.30pm to 10pm on Mondays and Tuesdays, 11.30am to 7pm on Wednesdays, and 10.30am to 6pm on Thursdays (Fridays being at the MPs’ disposal). She wants “a system that allows us to leave the building at five o’clock like normal human beings”. Now, I don’t know how to break this gently to Kitty, but I don’t know any professionally dedicated women in senior jobs who always get home in time for the children’s bedtimes, let alone any who stop work at 5pm. Of course, she is free to adjust her work-life balance. But if she finds parliament hard work, it’s nothing compared with what a lot of other working women do, without quite so much fuss.

Back in London, I collide with the death of Michael Jackson, which seems to bring out the nonsense in people. Yes, mega-talented. Yes, tragic. Yes, compellingly weird. But by the time we’d got through a whole Newsnight on him (like nothing else happened that day?), even the doughty Kirsty Wark was struggling to wring any more significance from his passing. Best misunderstanding: the Blairs’ preening holiday host, Robin Gibb, claiming that what the Bee Gees had in common with MJ was “having the two top-selling albums”. “Were you rivals?” asked Kirsty. “Yes, it was on vinyl,” replied Mr Gibb.

Most improbable Jackson comparison: Germaine Greer insisting Nureyev “pales in the light of Jackson’s blazing star”. No, Germaine, he really doesn’t.

Anne McElvoy is political columnist of the London Evening Standard
Part two of “Dave’s Friends in the North” is broadcast on Radio 4 on 5 July (10.45 pm)

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