The blue sheep of the family

DAVID SKELTON is the bright young political brain helping to set out fresh ideas at what is normally described as David Cameron’s “favourite think-tank”, in London.

But, intriguingly, the 33-year-old – a Conservative candidate at the last General Election and, he hopes, the next – is also a comprehensive schoolboy from the Labour heartland of County Durham. The only Con from Consett, perhaps?

Now the deputy director of Policy Exchange has issued a wake-up call to the Prime Minister that his message is not being heard in the North-East – and that an election victory will elude him while Northerners shut their ears.

But Mr Skelton is also challenging the region of his birth to accept radical change if it is to finally break out of its depressing economic cycle of low growth and high unemployment.

Meanwhile, the story of why he rejected Labour – an act he admits was “countercultural”, a term used by hippy revolutionaries of the 1960s – should be heard by the party’s leadership, as it loses working-class support.

A fan of Sunderland AFC, Mr Skelton was a pupil at Consett Moorside Comprehensive School in the last years that Margaret Thatcher was in Downing Street and at the start of the John Major era.

He remembered: “I’m certainly not from a Tory family – my mother’s side of the family, in particular, is very Labour – but, for me, there were two points.

“The first is that Labour took the North-East for granted. I was at university when Tony Blair came to power and there was so much hope and expectation, particularly in the North-East and in my house in Consett.

“Yet, for all that hope and expectation, I don’t think Labour delivered on what they promised and what they could have done for the North- East.

“I also will never forget what happened in Consett when I was growing up, after the steelworks closed. You could see the devastating impact on the town and I didn’t think measures were taken to regenerate the town, to let it succeed and make it a dynamic economy.

“To an extent, that was proven when the last recession hit. Before any public sector cuts were heard of, unemployment in the North-East was already the highest in the country and growth was the lowest.”

NOW, of course, many in Consett never forgave Mrs Thatcher for that 1980 closure of the steelworks – with the loss of 3,700 jobs, plus many more in connected industries.

The “Murder of a Town”, it was called.

But, for Mr Skelton, blame for the failure to recover lies, not with the distant Conservative government, but with local “bureaucrats” who held the town back.

This is the first challenge to the North-East, to accept dramatic changes to the planning rules that will put business leaders – rather than those “bureaucrats” – in the boss seat.

Policy Exchange wants the region to be a trial area for allowing any planning application to go ahead, unless it is actively opposed by more than 50 per cent of local people.

Mr Skelton explains: “In Consett, when the steelworks closed down, you had bureaucrats in district councils saying ‘this is where you should build, this is what should be done and this is how you are going to do it’.

“It was very much a top-down, rather than a business-driven approach – and that clearly has not worked.

“At the moment, it’s not up to local people – it’s up to local authority bureaucrats.”

I can already feel the “bureaucrat” backlash brewing, but Mr Skelton quickly moved on to his second key challenge for the region – to accept “local pay” in the public services.

This is really lighting the blue touchpaper of course, given the likelihood that it would mean many years of painful pay freezes for teachers, nurses and civil servants in low-cost areas, such as the North-East.

But, for Mr Skelton, it would be a “brave decision” by the Coalition, that would reap economic rewards – and would not necessarily mean lower pay in the North-East.

He said: “Setting out a national pay level almost certainly crowds out the private sector in areas like the North-East, that need private-sector regeneration – and we don’t want to remain a high unemployment region.

“We don’t know what it would mean in the North-East, but having exactly same the same pay scale in the South-East as in Newcastle is an antiquated and bizarre way of running a pay bargaining system.”

But the deputy director also has strong words for the Prime Minister, having been among defeated Tory candidates two years ago, losing to Labour’s Kevan Jones in Durham North.

He said: “I think the Conservative Party failed to show a compelling vision for the North-East at the last election.

“Part of the problem was that they thought good organisation on the ground could be enough to put them over the line in a few sets, but it wasn’t.”

That begs the question of whether Mr Cameron is any closer to the magic formula for winning anywhere in the North – or whether he even understands the problem?

Asked if there was a “Cameron problem”, Mr Skelton said: “You can’t get away from the fact that the Tory party looks pretty public school, pretty Southern and quite gilded.

“The fact is that the Tories can’t win an election if they can’t appeal to aspirational working- class voters in the North and the Midlands.

All the battlegrounds seats are in the North and the Midlands – particularly the North.

“If the Tories can’t find a way to get across the fact that voting Tory has become countercultural in the North then it will be very difficult to win a majority.”

MEANWHILE, Mr Skelton returns regularly to visit friends and family in the North-East and insists a Conservative is less out of step politically than most Labour diehards would believe – or hope.

He said: “It’s a generational thing. My parents’ generation are more wedded to the idea that being from the North-East means you have to vote Labour than people I went to school with.

“They are apathetic about politics, more than anything else. I certainly haven’t lost any friends because of it – and I think I have changed a few minds after discussions in the pub.”