SEVEN days after May’s surprise outright Conservative victory, buoyant, grinning and slapping his new Northern Powerhouse minister on the back in giddy glee, David Cameron’s first post election visit was to the Tetley tea factory in Eaglescliffe.

It was there, sipping tea from a paper cup, a far cry from the crates of Moet which were photographed as they were loaded into Downing Street, he announced his vision for the Northern Powerhouse. In charge of this new ministry, the up-and-coming young MP for Stockton South, James Wharton, collecting a nice little – if strangely named - portfolio as a reward for swinging a marginal Conservative seat into a 5,000-plus majority.

The details, however, were sketchy. Cameron talked about the Powerhouse being a “mandate to devolve power to Northern cities to create jobs and growth”.

Enter, stage right, Chancellor George Osborne. He popped up to Middlesbrough a few weeks later to flesh out the details – except he didn’t, really. Perfect that Wharton, a North-East MP, was in charge of the scheme, to deflect previous criticism that investment to pay lip service to “Up North” were centred on Greater Manchester.

Osbourne and Wharton, in matching high-viz waistcoats, talked about local government and enterprise partnerships achieving greater success through the powerhouse by uniting and working together.

Underpinning the powerhouse was the idea of elected mayors, delivering a “governing revolution”, according to Osborne. But the finer details of all of these proposals are hazy. Osborne’s July budget referred to Sheffield, Liverpool and Leeds “working towards further devolution deals”, but he seemed to forget about the existence of the entire North-East, Cumbria and the York area.

The Government also came under fire a month earlier for putting on hold plans for the electrification of the Trans-Pennine rail route – currently a slow, rattling journey for those trying to travel from Newcastle to Manchester.

Recent Northern Powerhouse initiatives seem to be confined to a few overseas trade visits by the energy sector. Hardly a resounding vote of confidence on the Conservative’s pledge to balance the UK economy so it is not as reliant on the overcrowded, overpopulated, overpriced area of growth that is the South East.

No wonder, then, that researchers at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute said this week that the Northern Powerhouse was already failing. Business leaders complained the government had “fallen at the first hurdle” by pausing Trans Pennine electrification. Infrastructure spending per head in London is still ten times that of the worst-affected area - the North-East, where it stands at just £414. In London the figure is £5,305.

On the surface, the “Powerhouse” looks like a copy of the Northern Way the Labour Government introduced ten years previously, in an attempt to bridge the £29bn economic gap between north and south. The difference was that Labour pumped £100m in spending into the North through the now-abolished regional development agencies, which regularly gave grants to businesses to boost economic growth and attract overseas investment.

Devolving power by introducing elected Mayors enables the Government to blame this kind of imbalance on those elected in the north, strengthening its electoral stranglehold on the country.

So is the Northern Powerhouse just smoke and mirrors, a way of keeping a faithful electorate in the region? Let’s hope James Wharton can prove otherwise in the next five years.