LAST year, a local lad from Lowton had a long-term election strategy for Leigh as he campaigned to be the first Tory MP in the town. The Conservative councillor’s realistic targets included narrowing Labour’s margin of victory, holding the MP’s feet to the fire, forcing her to vote for Boris’s Brexit deal; all aims to set the groundwork in place so that in 10 or 20 years’ time a ‘young go-getting’ Conservative candidate could finally win. But at around 2am on election night, candidates were shown the provisional results – and the Conservative Party’s James Grundy was around 2,000 votes ahead of Labour’s Jo Platt.