Music hall grew out of pubs in the mid-19th century and reached its peak in the 1890s, the most popular form of entertainment in the country. It provided a full evening’s show of short unrelated acts, including singers, comics, acrobats, jugglers, dancers, eccentric dancers, trick cyclists, drag performers, animal acts, and any permutations of the above. It was like Britain’s Got Talent. With talent.

Older viewers may also remember The Good Old Days, a stalwart of BBC television for 30 years, up to 1983, with contemporary TV stars reviving old material in front of an audience dressed up in Edwardian outfits. That was a heavily sanitised version. The original halls were raucous, boozy venues, with crowds who weren’t reticent in expressing their opinion of the performers verbally and even physically. These stages were no place for the faint-hearted. Nor for the understated: there was no amplification to help in projecting across the pit-band, through a dense fog of pipe and cigar smoke, to a couple of thousand drunken patrons. Towards the back of the hall, prostitutes plied — and sometimes practised — their trade. And then, right at the back, was the bar, from where the waiters emerged to provide table service, sometimes with the bottles chained to the trays, to prevent them being seized and used as weapons. If you could make it here, you could make it anywhere.

Unsurprisingly, all this met with extreme disfavour in polite society. It was coarse, vulgar and degrading. First, the entertainment onstage was disgraceful. When the can-can arrived from Paris in the late 1860s, it was so scandalous that the Alhambra in Leicester Square and the Highbury Barn in North London both had their licences suspended for staging what The Times called “this daring outrage on public decency”.

The behaviour offstage was equally reprehensible. In 1894 the London County Council (LCC) insisted that screens be erected at the back of the hall in the Empire in Leicester Square so that decent-minded punters might be shielded from the prostitution. That didn’t work, though; on the first night, the screens were torn down by a group of young hearties, led by a Sandhurst cadet. “Ladies of the Empire, I stand for Liberty!” declared Winston Churchill (for it was he), in what he described as his “maiden speech”.

The fact that it was the Empire that was being targeted by moral campaigners was revealing. There were working-class halls in the East End of London where immorality, and even obscenity, was far more prevalent, but the great fear was that the corruption was seeping out, infecting those places frequented by wealthy young men — in the same way that, a century later, the moral panic over gangsta rap was prompted by its spread beyond the black ghettos where it had originated.

It wasn’t just the Right-wing moralists who objected to the music hall. In 1907 the LCC voted to ban from London stages the tableau vivant. This was an act in which a woman wearing a sheer, close-fit bodystocking (“so nearly naked that you can’t tell the difference”, according to the papers) struck poses based on classical statues. And it was noticeable that most of those voting for the ban were sober-minded Liberals, while all but two of the 43 who voted against were fun-loving Conservatives.

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Liberals objected to music hall partly on moral grounds and partly on cultural: all that drinking didn’t go down well with the nonconformist rank and file, who had a leaning towards teetotalism. But there were also political problems. Particularly suspect was the intense patriotism of the halls, shading into jingoism. Indeed the word “jingoism” itself came from music hall, from a bellicose song performed by the Great MacDermott in 1878, when conflict with Russia seemed imminent: “We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do / We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too!”

The Boer War brought that tendency to the fore. The message coming from the stage was encapsulated in the song “Stand by Your Country, Stand by Your Queen”, while the Boers were promised there’d be “A Hot Time in the Transvaal Tonight”. Decent-minded folk were quick to condemn politicians who exploited such “music-hall jingoism”, and chief among the alleged offenders was the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. Formerly on the radical wing of the Liberal Party, now serving under a Conservative prime minister, he was a populist figure for whom politics was a question of drawing dividing lines. “A seat lost to the government is a seat won by the Boers,” he declared during the Khaki Election of 1900.

Three years later, Chamberlain left the Cabinet to campaign for the policy of imposing tariffs on goods imported into the Empire — imperial preference, as it was called, one of the regular occasions on which the Conservatives have torn themselves apart over the question of free trade. In that campaign, he allocated a substantial budget to getting the issue raised in music halls and related arenas. It was said that at the Christmas of 1903, more than 200 pantomimes featured a pro-tariff song such as “The John Bull Store” and “Good Old Joe”, the majority of them paid for by Chamberlain. He was the first British politician to recognise the power of popular culture, and his patriotic arguments — as broad-brush as any comic of the time — got a good reception. Possibly, though, he was too far ahead of the game: barely half of adult males had the vote, and the predominantly working-class audiences in the halls were disproportionately disenfranchised.

They remained, though, stubbornly patriotic. And stubbornly attached to the Tory cause. There were songs that grudgingly gave Asquith and Lloyd George credit for introducing pensions, but the latter’s supposed weakening of ale during the First World War couldn’t be countenanced. “At the brewery, there’s nothing doing; all the water works are brewing Lloyd George’s Beer,” sang Ernie Mayne mournfully, and he concluded: “The worst thing that ever happened in this war is Lloyd George’s Beer.” Come the National Government of the early Thirties, when ex-Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald fronted a Tory-led coalition, it was Stanley Holloway, king of the music-hall monologue, who provided the most vocal endorsement: “No government ever was perfect, but the National’s the best in the land, so let them as thinks they’d do better, stop grousing and lend them a hand.”

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By then, though, the music hall was on its last legs. The rise of cinema, radio and paperback fiction had already dismantled its cultural dominance, and television and rock ‘n’ roll were shortly to deliver the final blow. Though it survived in the working men’s clubs, those were far from the centres of media power and consequently attracted little attention.

Beyond that, the cultural memory began to fragment. Yet there were occasional sightings, even in the world of politics, and especially in the Labour Party. When James Callaghan, born in 1912, wanted to address media speculation about an early election in the autumn of 1978, he choose to do so by singing Vesta Victoria’s music-hall classic “Waiting at the Church” to the TUC Congress. (He misattributed it to Marie Lloyd, whose song “A Little of What You Fancy” had been used by Harold Macmillan 20 years earlier to sell the introduction of Premium Bonds.)

And when Michael Foot, born in 1913, wanted to mock the Conservative government in 1980, he told a long, rambling story about visiting the Palace Theatre of Varieties in Plymouth as a child. One of his favourite acts, he said, was a stage magician, who would take a watch from an audience member, “enfold it in a beautiful red handkerchief, place it on the table in front of us, take out his mallet, hit the watch and smash it to smithereens”. Then a look of utter bewilderment would descend on his face, as he was obliged to admit: “I am very sorry. I have forgotten the rest of the trick.” And this, Foot suggested, was precisely the same look that could be seen on the face of Keith Joseph, the Industry Secretary, as he surveyed the wreckage of the British economy in the midst of the first Thatcherite recession.

Then the Labour Party decided to skip a generation, and elected as leader Neil Kinnock, an honorary member, and sometime Vice President, of the Gene Vincent Appreciation Society. As in real life, rock ‘n’ roll seemed to have displaced music hall. In both cases, though, that wasn’t the whole story. “Bryan [Ferry] and I always joked about the fact that rock and roll was basically music hall,” said Andy Mackay of glam-rock group Roxy Music, and that trio of figures with whom we started suggest that the same is true of politics.

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The ability to play a crowd at a rally, or in the bearpit that used to be the Labour conference, has become much less important, but the House of Commons remains a tough gig. “Prime Minister’s Questions often resembled my father’s description of a raucous night at the Glasgow Empire,” observed John Major. And even though he himself wasn’t particularly good at PMQs, nor at delivering big speeches, it was striking that his finest moment came in the 1992 general election; standing on a soapbox in town squares and market-places, facing down hostile crowds and demonstrators, he looked surprisingly at home. “I often reflected that my chosen career was akin to show business,” he wrote in his (rather good) history of the music hall.

His successor, Tony Blair — born more than four decades after the previous Labour Prime Minister — was the grandson of Charles Parsons, better known as Jimmy Lynton and described in the press as a “comedian, illusionist, conjuror, thought-reader, lightning cartoonist, paper-tearer and anything else common to the music hall”. Blair’s middle names, Charles Lynton, honour his memory, though his own performing career was less impressive, singing in a band named Ugly Rumours while a student at Oxford. “We were rather tragic, and had precisely zero presence on stage,” remembered the future music journalist Mark Ellen, who played bass. As a politician, on the other hand, Blair could play the role of entertainer better than any of his contemporaries, especially in the pre-Iraq years, when he could deliver jokes and put-downs like a pro. And no one was better at wrapping himself in the Union Jack.

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But the one who really seemed in touch with his roots was Ken Livingstone, whose mother had been a dancer with a trio called the Kenleigh Sisters (maybe his name pays tribute, as well). When Livingstone became leader of the Greater London Council in 1981, he was cast as the pantomime villain of politics. “The IRA-loving, poof-loving, Marxist leader of the GLC” (to use the words of the Sunday Express) was, said The Sun, “the most odious man in Britain”. But he rode out the barracking like a trouper and re-emerged with a new act as cheeky cockney chappie, thumbing his nose at the government. In this role, he became, said the Daily Mail, through gritted teeth: “The man running rings round Maggie.”

Much of his new-found popularity in the mid-Eighties was achieved through a use of popular culture that echoed Joe Chamberlain. Livingstone’s GLC staged a long string of concerts, festivals and comedy gigs, attracting huge crowds, and then slipping in the political messages amid the entertainment. This time, it wasn’t even his campaign funds footing the bill, but the public purse.

And, like Joe, he found himself feted in song. “I know one thing,” declared Kevin Rowland on a Dexys Midnight Runners track; “Ken Livingstone’s a folk hero.” Or, as Kate Bush sang: “Ken is the man we all need, Ken is the leader of the GLC.” Admittedly, that was tongue-in-cheek, recorded for an episode of The Comic Strip, but still: he got namechecked by Kate Bush. When The Smiths played a GLC show, he posed for a publicity photo with Morrissey, an artist greatly indebted to music hall. And when Billy Bragg and Paul Weller toured under the banner of Red Wedge to campaign for Labour, the only politician allowed to travel on the musicians’ coach was Livingstone. His mum would’ve been proud. Not of his politics, though: she was a Tory, like so much of the music hall.

And yet it is in Birmingham that the two contenders for the Conservative leadership will face each other tomorrow, and it is there again that the winner will address the party at its annual conference in October. So, what makes the current Conservative Party so keen to court the city?

Part of the answer to this question lies in the very incongruity of the association between Birmingham and the party. At a time when the competition for Tory leadership pits a woman who began her career at Shell against a man who began his at Goldman Sachs, Conservative spin doctors want to create some distance from the global capitalist elite. Birmingham is a good place to start. Shell had a small back-office there once but most of its back-office work is now done out of Chennai or Manila. As for Goldman Sachs, I suspect that most of its employees have never set foot in Birmingham — though some of the more erudite ones may recall that there was once a Birmingham stock exchange, which closed in 1986, just as the London exchange took off.

More generally, in the aftermath of Brexit, Conservatives like to see themselves as representatives of “deep England”. Birmingham, an unglamorous city in the centre of the nation, looks like the capital of this fantasyland from the Home Counties. When people, Tories especially, imagine the “real England”, it is almost invariably rural and, to a surprising extent, rural imagery often comes from Birmingham. Think of Tolkien’s “Middle Earth”, a place that seems to derive from the — then semi-rural — suburb of Birmingham in which the author grew up. Radio 4, keen to demonstrate its non-metropolitan credentials, sometimes ships its presenters to Birmingham for a few hours of Today or Start the Week, but practically the only BBC programme that is still produced in the city is The Archers. It was in here that Theresa May delivered her speech of 2016 in which she remarked that “citizens of the world” were “citizens of nowhere”.

Birmingham is also a perfect case study for the current Conservative fascination with “levelling up” the provinces. Joseph Chamberlain, much admired by May’s advisor Nick Timothy, is often presented as having been the incarnation of municipal activism when he was mayor of Birmingham in the 1870s. Later, after he moved to national politics and left the Gladstonian Liberals to join forces with the Tories, he became the incarnation of Right-wing populism.

There are, however, some odd things about Birmingham’s current place in the Tory imagination. The notion that its population is deeply rooted would not survive the briefest glance at the census. If anything characterises the city, it is migration. Work has always drawn people there — from surrounding counties in the 19th century, from Wales in the Thirties (3% of the entire employed population of the principality moved to the Midlands) and from overseas in the period since 1945. Go back a generation or two and the “somewhere” from which Birmingham people come is likely to be Galway, St Kitts or the Punjab. Birmingham Conservatives, by the way, did not always have easy relations with the city’s immigrant population — though were more discreet in the expression of their opinions than their counterparts in neighbouring Smethwick, who became notorious for using a racist slogan in the 1964 general election.

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As for “levelling up”, the city’s history shows how vacuous the concept is. Joseph Chamberlain was a powerful local figure who had great resources at his disposal. Birmingham’s rise was engineered by its own local elites, particularly the network of intermarried Unitarian families who gathered around Chamberlain. He did not depend on favours from national government. The current Conservative mayor of the West Midlands — Andy Street — is an amiable and well-meaning man but hardly in the Chamberlain mould. He won his position by a narrow majority: the proportion who voted against having a regional mayor at all, in a 2012 referendum, was larger than the proportion who voted in favour of having a Tory one in the 2017 election. He also has little money to spend: Conservatives in the Eighties stripped local government of much of its financial power. And while Chamberlain ran a small empire of municipal enterprises, the initiatives that come from Andy Street are less tangible — I suspect that most people living in the band that extends from the university to the site of the old Longbridge factory (my mother among them) would be surprised to hear that they inhabit the “Central Technology Corridor”.

In any case, Birmingham people with long memories may suspect that central government attempts to level up are more likely to be a source of problems than a solution. Many of the city’s economic problems in the Eighties sprang from the fact that the Board of Trade, keen to move industry to the “Development Areas” of the North, refused to grant permission for the establishment of new factories in Birmingham. As a result, the city was frozen into an economy that revolved around motor manufacture.

The relations between Conservatism and Birmingham are, in fact, so odd that it is worth dwelling on their history — a history that might raise awkward questions. In political terms, Birmingham was born in opposition to Toryism. It first attained parliamentary representation as a result of the 1832 Reform Bill, but not as a passive beneficiary of largesse from London. The Birmingham Political Union had been one of the most important instruments in bringing the Reform Bill about, and it had done so in opposition to the most famous Tory of the early 19th century: the Duke of Wellington. For slightly more than the first half-century of its parliamentary representation, Birmingham only once, and briefly, returned a Tory MP.

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In some ways, the city was an anti-Conservative place even before there was much in the way of formal political activity there. The ancien régime institutions that Toryism existed to defend were all weak in Birmingham. There was no real aristocracy in the town. It is true that the aristocratic Calthorpes owned the Edgbaston estate — which became the suburb in which much of the local bourgeoisie lived. But the Calthorpes were not really great figures in the city, and a member of the family was trounced when he was foolish enough to stand as a Conservative in opposition to the Chamberlainite Liberal machine.

Meanwhile, in statistical terms, Birmingham was an Anglican town (unlike the industrial towns of the North). Still, it had no Cathedral until the 20th century. The only real centre of Anglican and Tory power, until the City council managed to bring it to heel, was King Edward’s grammar school, which had been run since the 16th century by a self-selecting oligarchy of governors. King Edward’s has indeed produced some significant Tories but the intellectual self-confidence that the school imparts does not always fit easily with the party. One sees this in David Willetts, so intelligent that he sometimes doubts that he is really a Tory, and Enoch Powell, so intelligent that he made the rest of his party doubt that they were really Tories.

No one incarnated Birmingham’s natural anti-Tory bent better than Joseph Chamberlain. At a time when the Conservatives stood for Church and crown, he began his career as a republican and ended it as an atheist. He regarded the aristocracy with open contempt. However, he broke with Gladstone over Home Rule in 1886 and, thereafter, worked in alliance with the Conservatives. Birmingham became a Conservative, or, strictly speaking, a Unionist city, and this was seen most strikingly after Joseph’s death. Between the wars, there were times when Conservative cabinets contained three Birmingham MPs, including Joseph’s sons, Austen and Neville.

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Neville, though, was both the epitome of Conservative success in Birmingham and the instrument of its downfall. When he became prime minister in 1937, every single Birmingham MP was a Conservative. In 1945, five years after his death, the Labour Party won ten out of the 13 Birmingham seats. This was partly because appeasement so discredited the Chamberlain tradition (though several Birmingham Conservative MPs had, in fact, opposed it) and partly because the war economy had created a more self-conscious and unionised working class. Factories associated with the motor industry had been centres of Tory power between the wars. Herbert Austin, owner of the Longbridge car factory, was a Conservative MP who often sacked trade unionists and kept his men working late to stop them voting in municipal elections. Austin, like Chamberlain, died early in the war; by its end, Longbridge was heavily unionised.

Birmingham was a boom town after 1945. School leavers could find jobs in days. Conservatives were not always comfortable with full employment. Walter Higgs, a motor manufacturer who had been Conservative MP for West Birmingham, remarked, just after the 1945 election, that “the only way to get Birmingham people to work is have ten men after every nine jobs and empty bellies”. Another notable wrote in a private report that Conservatism in Birmingham was suffering from “over full employment”. But, though prosperity broke the Conservative monopoly of the Thirties, it did not create a new monopoly for Labour. Birmingham voters were what sociologists labelled “affluent workers”. Their support for Labour was an instrumental one based on what they took to be their interests rather than a product of ancestral loyalties. It may be because loyalty to Labour was never particularly deep that the city never turned against the party with the bitterness seen in some Northern constituencies in recent years.

In retrospect, it is obvious that the turning point for Birmingham came in 1979. “Thatcherism” was made in Birmingham — in the sense that Stuart Hall’s article on “The Great Moving Right Show” (published in Marxism Today in January 1979), which first used the term “Thatcherism” in a systematic way, was written while he was at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. It was made in Birmingham too in that Thatcher’s Conservative Party came to define itself against two displays of working-class power — that seen in 1972 when striking miners and their allies from Birmingham blockaded the Saltley coke depot and that seen in strikes at the Longridge car factory, which was, by now, part-nationalised.

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There was, though, something strange in all this. Significant numbers of Birmingham people voted Conservative in 1979. It was no surprise that Sutton Coldfield (a leafy suburb that had only been annexed to the city in 1974) should have the largest Conservative majority in the country. It was odder that Northfield and Selly Oak — the two constituencies closest to the Longbridge car plant — both went Tory in 1979. Partly, this was the last hurrah of the post-war “affluent worker” — a vote against the pay restraint of the Callaghan government. Sections of the white working class perhaps expected the Thatcher government to be more radical on social and cultural issues (particularly immigration) than it turned out to be. Birmingham people certainly did not expect the Tories to be so radical on economic issues and the city’s economy dived in the early Eighties — this was the era when UB40 were in the charts and when the Kenrick and Jefferson stationery company were said to be almost the only thriving local business because they had the contract to print UB40 forms.

Birmingham has regained much of its prosperity in recent years but the vestiges of the Thatcher years are still visible. The city includes areas with some of the highest unemployment rates in the country. The Longbridge factory finally closed in the early part of this century and the area around it is the one area that resembles the “Red Wall” Tory seats of the North — it voted for Brexit and voted Conservative in 2019. However, the prosperous commuters of Sutton Coldfield and the white ex-car workers (or their widows) of Northfield are now the only people in Birmingham to vote Conservative. All the other eight Birmingham constituencies returned Labour MPs at the last election.

The oddest thing about Tory evocations of Birmingham is the very idea that the city ought to stand for something. It is a big, heterogeneous place and, partly because of its catastrophic development around busy roads in the Sixties and Seventies, different parts of the city can feel utterly separate from each other. The notion that this is “deep England” is a myth — but then, so is the notion that there is a “deep England”. The Tory fantasy implies something permanent and natural — rural, even (one thinks of Churchill addressing the population “in your cottages”). Yet Birmingham is above all a man-made place. It manufactured an image of rural England as much as it once manufactured the Spitfire. Any local asked to identify a landmark would talk about Spaghetti Junction or the Sentinel towers, rather than a hill or river. Joseph Chamberlain, meanwhile, would have despised all the talk of “heritage”, “ancestry” and “roots” that goes with deep England; he knew that the Tory party he helped create was no more “natural” than the orchids he grew in his hothouse. For him and his associates, Birmingham went, above all, with the phrase “self-made”.