Boris Johnson marks new Tory territory with maiden speech in Sedgefield

There was only going to be one first stop on Boris Johnson’s marking out of new Tory territory. Sedgefield represents his electoral triumph over not only Old Labour but also New.

There could have been one or two more symbolic options for his maiden speech – by rights he should have delivered his new lines about the “people’s government” on Trimdon Green, where Tony Blair had coined the phrase “People’s princess”, in the first weeks of his own premiership, on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. As it was, the prime minister pitched up at the more security friendly Sedgefield cricket club a couple of miles up the road.

An invited audience of local Conservatives drove in from all across the north-east to toast to an unlikely triumph, while the local rugby team was getting changed next door.

Johnson wore an ironic red tie for the occasion, and came close to quoting some of Blair’s most famous lines verbatim. “We are not the masters, we are the servants, and our job is to serve the people of this country,” he said. Even when he is making gestures of One Nation humility, he can’t help himself from trolling. He pulled a pint to prove he had also laid to rest mages of that other recent Tory nemesis, Nigel Farage, and offered all the familiar half-truths about nurses and hospitals and investment. The audience believed him just as much now as they had when they had gone to the ballot box on Thursday.

After Johnson sped off through the terraced streets in his motorcade, still apparently hardly able to believe he was here, the four new Tory MPs of this and neighbouring constituencies were left blinking in the pre-Christmas sunshine, telling TV microphones when they last held power here – 1935 in the case of Sedgefield – and spouting all the sanctioned lines.

The new Tory MP for Sedgefield, Paul Howell, a retired accountant, is the unlikely latest heir to Blair. He had watched hope harden into expectation a week into the campaign. He had walked down a street in the former mining village of Cornforth, north of Trimdon, knocking on doors. He went through a dozen without finding a Labour voter; the 13th was an ex-Labour councillor who also pledged him a vote. “There were so many following winds here: but the Brexit factor and the Corbyn factor were the big ones, while Boris was seen as someone who can deliver. Personally, I think people only ever lend you their votes. It’s up to you to make them trust you again to give it again.”

The talk in the air is of a new Thatcherism, but “without the tribal connotations”. Oliver Peeke, who works for the council, admits his grandparents would be spinning in their grave to see him wearing a Tory rosette. “A lot of our family were Labour, but I’m desperate that this time it will stick. I don’t want to go back to the dark old days when people would just scream Thatcher at you when you walk up the drive with a Tory leaflet. There has to be more to politics than that.”

Defeated Labour candidate Phil Wilson said “if Johnson was going to park his tanks on any lawn this morning it’s going to be here. He wants to say to the world that New Labour is history”.

Wilson puts his defeat squarely at the door of Jeremy Corbyn leadership. He is angry that his party has proved itself “unable to connect with people who are not in London,” and presented a manifesto “that was an essay about the past” with “nothing to say about the future”.