Next tours (2012): Mon 30 Jan, Sun 1 Apr

Meet: Visitor Centre, Piccadilly Plaza, 2.30pm.

New Manchester Walks’s decision to create that unlikeliest of tours – Tory Manchester – has caused a bit of a stir. The Manchester Evening News ran a piece http://menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/news/s/1461308_local-historian-launches-tour-of-conservative-manchester and Radio Manchester invited NMW’s Ed Glinert to go live on air with a few words about the tour. Publicity to die for; well to vote X in an unlikely place for.

Some people have objected to this on the grounds that Manchester has only a left-wing, radical history and has never had any connections with anything remotely reactionary.

Not so comrade!

It wasn’t so long ago that the city council was Conservative run. Hard to believe now that there are no Tory councillors in the Town Hall. Not one. But let’s remember; this is a historical tour. Our guides are historians, not politicians, even though politics is one of the subjects they indulge in.

By the way, why does Manchester have no Tories? Is it because the population to a man and woman is so vehemently anti-capitalist or because the Tory Party itself has plumbed such depths of incompetence locally even its most ardent supporters have hidden themselves away? Capitalism thrives here. This is the city of free trade, after all. Just check out all those small businesses in the Northern Quarter.

There is something odd about a second city so determinedly anti-Tory; a second city of a country that mostly votes right. (That’s right. It’s the Scottish and Welsh votes that bolster Labour). And something even odder about the way the Tories enthusiastically arrive here every other year now to hold their conference.

So ignore Manchester’s undeniable radical history for two hours and peer over the other side of the fence to hear about Churchill, Disraeli, Wellington, Peel, Thatch and Dave.