The Tories need to show that they still care about North Yorkshire ahead of the mayoral election - Andrew Vine

Party and people understood each other. In talking to a couple of generations of MPs and their constituents in North Yorkshire, I’ve often been struck by the ease of the relationships and the degree of mutual respect.

In return the county’s voters provided the launch-pad for some of the highest-flying Tory careers of modern times, notably those of the Prime Minister and his predecessor as MP for Richmond, William Hague.

It really was such a special relationship that when something came along to upset it – such as when Phil Willis won Harrogate for the Lib Dems in 1997, serving with such distinction until stepping down in 2010 – it created national shockwaves.

Given such close links over so many years, is it really possible that the Conservatives are mad enough to turn their backs on North Yorkshire? If so, that’s the clearest indication yet that the party really has lost the plot as it hurtles towards a general election in the grip of blind panic over a heavy defeat.

Yet turning their backs is what the Conservatives appear to be doing. That is the only conclusion to be drawn after The Yorkshire Post revealed on Saturday that the Conservative candidate in next year’s inaugural North Yorkshire mayoral election, Keane Duncan, will have to raise his own campaign funding.

In contrast, West Midlands mayor Andy Street has already received a hefty £200,000 towards his re-election campaign from central funds.

Polite though he is, when Rishi Sunak arrives back from his summer holiday in America, he really ought to be shouting at somebody over this and demanding to know what’s going on in his own backyard.

If the Conservatives are undermining their own mayoral campaign in North Yorkshire by failing to fund the candidate, what sort of message do they think that sends to voters?

It is impossible to read it as anything other than an indifferent shrug of the shoulders about the concerns and future of North Yorkshire and its people.

Voters are not fools. If they feel a party doesn’t care about them, they will use the ballot box to tell its candidates where to get off.

Whoever wins the mayoral election is going to be a hugely influential presence in the area and potentially a force for immense good, deploying devolved powers and funding to improve lives and the economy.

Rather than indifference, the Conservatives ought to be going all out to win, seeing the mayoral race as an opportunity to send an inspiring message to the faithful of North Yorkshire to come out and vote because the party still has their interests at heart.

The necessity of doing so should be at the forefront of Tory thinking about how the north will vote in the next general election after the thumping the party took in last month’s Selby and Ainsty by-election, when Labour’s Keir Mather overturned what should have been a rock-solid majority of more than 20,000 to become the seat’s MP.

But instead, it’s possible to detect a sense of Tory fatalism about North Yorkshire in the loss of Selby and Ainsty and – at least for now – a lack of funding for the mayoral race.

It could be that amid predictions the party could lose 10 seats in Yorkshire, a resignation has set in at central office about our county and efforts will go instead into shoring up support in the southern shires.

It’s also possible that somewhere at the heart of the party is the uncomfortable acknowledgement that too many promises to the north have been broken for Conservative arguments to be on its side to carry any conviction. North Yorkshire, in common with the rest of our county, has seen nothing come of all the promises to level up the economy. It was just a worthless slogan, and affluent though many parts of the area can appear, they remain at a financial disadvantage to counterparts in the south when funding is allocated.

Even in constituencies which are temperamentally blue through and through, people know nothing substantial has been done to address rural deprivation or increase opportunities for the young.

Far from turning their backs on North Yorkshire, the Conservatives need to redouble efforts to hang onto and motivate supporters they could once have taken for granted.