Could the Tories lose northern seats over Boris Johnson’s coal mines joke?

Boris Johnson may have hoped his comments about Margaret Thatcher and the closure of the coal mines would be seen as a harmless bit of on-brand buffoonery – the kind of jolly jape which creates a lot media fuss, but does no reputational damage with voters.

Remarkably, rather than being an off-the-cuff mistake, the prime minister appears to have planned his joke about the swift destruction of working-class communities.

During his visit to a Scottish wind farm, Mr Johnson told reporters: “Thanks to Margaret Thatcher – who closed so many coal mines across the country – we had a big early start and we’re now moving rapidly away from coal altogether.”

Apparently delighted by the tizzy sparked among assembled reporters, the prime minister chuckled and told them: “I thought that would get you going.”

The backlash has been far fiercer than the prime minister could have expected. Sharing his outrage, 56-year-old Mike Hawkins, whose father lost his job when Cumbria’s Haig Colliery shut in 1986, told The Independent: “He’s laughing at lives being destroyed. Very funny, isn’t it?”

Mr Johnson’s own MPs now fear the careless remarks will prove hugely damaging to the party’s plan to dismantle Labour’s so-called “red wall” and paint the north of England a permanent shade of blue.

They know the opposition will never let up about the time Mr Johnson laughed about the closure of the mines. It will be used as stick to beat them with ahead of the next general election – a significant vote-loser and, in some areas, possibly even the difference between some red wall Tories keeping or clinging onto their seats.

An unnamed Tory MP told The Times that Johnson had effectively “spat on” a key part of the culture in many communities across the north. “Boris had been regarded by many voters in the north as one of them; they thought he understood them, but the mask has slipped.”

The Northern Research Group (NRG) of Tory backbenchers are already deeply frustrated at the lack of progress on the prime minister’s promise to “level up” the country – a pledge to move more investment to the north and address England’s big regional divide.

Tory MPs fear that if former Labour voters who switched loyalties in 2019 don’t see any improvement in their communities over the next couple of years, they will decide it wasn’t worth ditching old loyalties after all.

The government still has a huge amount work to do in showing it actually cares about the north-south divide. In June, a study carried out for the all-party parliamentary group on “left-behind” neighbourhoods – a group of 225 of the poorest wards mostly concentrated in the north and the Midlands – showed they remain the least likely to get government funding.

Urging the government to reconsider the end of the £20-a-week universal credit uplift, Tory MP Stephen Crabb, a leading figure in the NRG, recently told The Independent: “I think the government has got to be very careful that we are not resurrecting old ghosts when it comes to perceptions of the Conservative Party, and our attitudes to poverty and poor people.”

The joke about Thatcher’s head start on the post-coal age may not seem hugely significant by the time summer recess ends and MPs get back to business, but unless ministers make sudden and unexpected strides when it comes to “levelling up”, Labour will be able to weave the laughing-at-miners story into a wider narrative of Tory neglect in the north.

In a bid to win back its heartland seats Keir Starmer’s party will ask former Labour voters: has life got better since you voted for the Tories? Mr Johnson’s ill-advised decision to tie himself to Thatcher has just made it that much easier to persuade northern voters that nothing has changed.