There could be no clearer demonstration of the upending of everything we take for granted about British politics than Boris Johnson beginning his victory lap in Sedgefield on Saturday. Sedgefield! The former mining town was not just an iconic Labour stronghold – it was Tony Blair’s own constituency.
Now it symbolises the electoral revolution that took place on Thursday. Boris’s triumph – and it is his very personal triumph – means we must cast aside long-held assumptions about politics. The Conservative Party is the most successful election-winning machine in the Western world. Time after time it is written off.
When Blair was winning his three landslides, the received wisdom was that the Conservatives were finished.
And it was just a few months ago under Theresa May when people were suggesting the party would split permanently over Brexit and destroy itself.
Within months of taking office, Boris Johnson appears to have transformed the electoral map.
He stands up there with Disraeli, Campbell-Bannerman, Attlee, Thatcher and Blair in his electoral achievement.
Labour has spent over more than 10 years attacking two of the last three Conservative leaders as out-of-touch Old Etonians.
Boris’s landslide shows that it is Labour that has been out of touch, under Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and now Jeremy Corbyn.
The vast majority of us couldn’t care less where someone went to school.
We didn’t care that Tony Blair went to Fettes College, the Scottish equivalent of Eton.
We care about what people say, what they do – and what they want to do.
All that matters now is what the Tories do in government.
And with an 80-seat majority, there is no alibi for failure.
The omens are good.
Everything Boris Johnson has said since the election shows that he understands that people who have voted Labour for generations have only lent the Tories their vote – and that his job now is to prove that they were right to trust him.
The shadow of Lady Thatcher has loomed large over the Conservative Party ever since she was ousted in November 1990.
As one of our greatest ever prime ministers, that was understandable.
And her work laid the foundations for the success that even Labour accepted under Blair.
But we are no longer in the same place that we were in 1979 or even 1997.
The country needs different medicine now.
Boris Johnson is, though, the first Conservative leader since then fully to escape her shadow, with a manifesto shaped to the needs of this century rather than still with a nod to the last.
Because in truth the North has never really been given the same attention as the South.
Between 2008 and 2018, public spending on transport, for example, was £739 per head in London but only £305 in the North.
Boris Johnson’s promise to voters in those places was that his type of “one Nation” conservatism would focus on this.
It’s an appropriate phrase, having been coined by Disraeli – the Conservative leader who first created a party that attracted working-class voters in the mid-19th century.
Johnson intends to spend some £100billion on infrastructure projects in the North.
That includes £22billion already committed to projects such as flood defences and filling potholes.
But it still leaves £78billion to invest in key areas such as transport, including buses and bridges, which have fallen woefully behind in the North.
One example could be the £39billion plan already proposed for Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR), a train network linking Manchester and its airport, Leeds, Sheffield, Hull, Newcastle and Liverpool.
To be fair, it was George Osborne as Chancellor who set up the so-called Northern Powerhouse.
But Boris may turbocharge this.
It has always been said that Boris Johnson is a Marmite figure.
I’ve written before that I worried he was not the right man to defeat the hard Left and deliver prosperity.
I am relieved to say that I was clearly wrong on the first part of that.
Boris is able to connect with voters in a way that no politician has managed since Blair in his pomp.
Now comes the really hard part – delivering the goods.
He could not have got off to a better start.
He has the right ideas, expresses the right humility and offers the right degree of optimism.
Let’s all hope it works.
