Jack Straw still uses an oldfashioned soapbox to deliver his pearls of wisdom to passing shoppers outside Blackburn Town Hall.

Party activists held up their red balloons without conviction. The questions came thick and fast from sceptical voters on the theme of “You’ve been in power for 11 years, why haven’t you done more on this or that?”

I remember another North West by-election in Wirral South early in 1997. A whole vacant supermarket was taken over to house the Mandelson machine of New Labour as the party swept to victory. Ben Chapman, the new MP, was John The Baptist to Tony Blair who demolished the Tories in the general election a few months later.

The question is, have we passed a turning point like 1945, 1963, 1976 and September 1992, where the incumbent government loses the faith of voters who mentally write them off and prepare for a change?

I have to say it looks like it. The obvious symptoms are there. Panicking backbenchers looking at their majorities, many smaller than Crewe and Nantwich. Ministers casting around for any initiative that will assuage the anger of the voters; abandoning if necessary the coherence of the New Labour message in a rush of expediency.

Less conspicuous are the activities of that vast army of people running quangos and boards administering the North West. I see increasing evidence of meaningful conversations with Conservative frontbenchers on what policies they might have to work with post 2010.

If these trends continue, the whole thing becomes a sort of selffulfilling prophecy. Gordon Brown has an uphill task, particularly set against the world economic background.

But David Cameron also faces a major challenge. The Conservatives did well in Crewe and Nantwich. They had a good candidate in Edward Timpson, were positive in the face of a ludicrous “Tory toff” smear campaign and even had some young people out campaigning for them!

However, it was a by-election. To win the General Election the Conservatives need a 6.9 per cent swing from Labour across the whole country. That’s only been done once since the war: by Tony Blair in 1997.

Nowhere has the Tory revival had greater impact than in Cheshire. The two new all-purpose councils that come into operation next April, Cheshire East, and Cheshire West and Chester, both have thumping Conservative majorities.

Edward Timpson, for whom I predict a bright future, has completed the arc of parliamentary seats stretching from Macclesfield to Eddisbury. Remaining Labour constituencies like Chester and Weaver Vale look vulnerable.

Elsewhere in the region cabinet ministers like John Hutton in Barrow and Ruth Kelly in Bolton West would fall on smaller swings than occurred in Crewe.

In local government Labour is reduced to controlling just half a dozen councils in the North West. That said, there are still areas of concern for the Tories. These do not include the absence of elected members in Manchester and Liverpool.

I wonder if you are as weary as I am over this irrelevant taunt that’s thrown at Conservative politicians. The Tories don’t need a single councillor in those two cities to win a General Election, because they aren’t going to win any parliamentary seats there anyway.

One real worry has emerged for David Cameron though. David Davis wants to have a duel with the Government over detaining terror suspects for 42 days without trial. But I have this image of him walking out on a moor in his East Yorkshire constituency one misty morning, finding no opponent and having to shoot himself in the foot.

He must have realised Labour would refuse to fight. He rightly calls this gutless, but then what?

Davis is likely to return to the Commons backbenches, having been almost unopposed.

Meanwhile the government, with the public behind it, will invoke the Parliament Act to overrule the Lords. Then, if the Tories win the General Election, we will see how swiftly they repeal the measure; especially (God forbid) if we’ve had more mass terrorism on our streets.

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