North will be key battleground
at next election says Hague

The Foreign Secretary is, after all, no stranger to a decent conference speech, having made his teenaged entrance on the political stage with a famous address in Blackpool in 1977.

He also knows from painful experience just how far these showpiece occasions actually get you as Leader of the Opposition.

“A well-received party conference speech doesn’t mean you’re going to be Prime Minister,” the former Tory leader smiles ruefully, in his hotel suite in the centre of Birmingham. “Otherwise I would have been Prime Minister with a big majority in 2001. I always had well-received party conference speeches, and often gave as good as I got and more at Prime Minister’s Questions. It didn’t mean I won the general election.

“That on its own is not going to change the situation for Ed Miliband.”

Nonetheless, the polls paint a difficult picture for the Conservatives as they start to wonder where the extra votes are going to come from that will deliver them an outright majority in 2015.

Somehow, they must increase their vote share after five years of austerity and spending cuts. Somehow, they must become more popular in the North.

A growing number of Tories are suggesting the party now needs a specific strategy to win over northern voters.

But Mr Hague does not agree.

“I think it’s very important not to put the North in a box, as if it’s completely different from all other parts of the country and behaves in a completely different way,” the Richmondshire MP says. “The North of England is more complex than that. It’s important not to generalise.

“As is the case for the rest of the country, the most effective way for us to win support in the North is to show that what we’re doing works for the whole country. That the welfare reform, the education reform and so on, does lead to success.”

However, he accepts the next election will be fought in several dozen key marginal seats – many of them in Yorkshire and across the North West.

“We will treat the Northern marginals as a very important battleground in the next election,” he says. “It will be a narrower battleground. The last general election was really fought over 150 seats across the country. The next general election will be fought around 80 seats or so. That will include seats in the North West, West Yorkshire, and the West Midlands.”

Many core Conservative messages, he insists, have resonance in the North, citing welfare reform and the Government’s cap on immigration in particular.

Interestingly, however, he insists such positions are now “the centre ground” of British politics, and takes the opportunity to slap down calls from backbenchers for the Government to move decisively to the Right in the search for new votes.

“It’s very important to keep the centre ground of politics in this country,” he says. “That’s how we’ve come into government.

“Everybody’s quoting Disraeli these days,” he adds, in reference to Mr Miliband’s “One Nation” speech. “But one of Disraeli’s maxims was: ‘the Conservative Party is a national party or it is nothing.’ And that’s true both in terms of appealing to middle ground voters and appealing to voters all over the country. I always remind my Cabinet colleagues of that.”

The Richmondshire MP is dismissive of the threat his party faces from UKIP, amid fears the anti-EU party could pull voters away from the Tories in many key marginals.

“In general elections they’ve previously got quite derisory numbers of votes,” he says. “I think in a general election people know they are choosing a government.”