The last time a Conservative leader stood on Blackpool beach in conference season was when David Cameron posed for a windswept photo op with New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, back in 2007. That was more than two decades on from Thatcher’s 1985 Blackpool speech at the Winter Gardens, announcing that Britain was no longer the “sick man of Europe”. When I visited the venue recently, a dog show was taking place, and the hall now has a dusty plaque – written in the past tense – which serves as an epitaph of a bygone political era: “This venue has witnessed keynote speeches from prime ministers and world leaders”. Meanwhile, the old fish and chip restaurants and bars along the seafront, where hacks used to booze with ministers, are now boarded up, and empty guest rooms are advertised at under £20 per night. No wonder Conservative ministers and their army of 90 or so Spads (less than 100 actual MPs attended last year’s Tory conference in Birmingham) were - before Covid - heading off (again) to the suites of the Hyatt Hotel in Birmingham, a symbol of HS2 and “high-growth” future. Labour, meanwhile, had booked out the Liverpool Exhibition Centre. But this anti-seaside politico discrimination needs to change. Next year, it might help if the PM was to holiday on the English coast, Mr Whippy in hand, rather than pitching a tent in a Scottish field. Why not support English Heritage by renting (sleeps six) the Coastguard House on Lindisfarne ?  Or take one of The Landmark Trust’s 72 coastal properties ? Our seaside communities have a unique set of socio-economic problems that have only been heightened by the pandemic.  Instead of “levelling-up”, the divisions between rich and poor seaside communities have only got worse since 2020’s staycation summer. In August, I found myself on the north Norfolk coast. As I parked in the “overfill” field car-park along Lady Anne’s Drive to walk along Holkham beach, there were more Kensington and Chelsea 4x4 parking permits – and £100,000 horseboxes – on display than at a royal polo match. An eager parking attendant in Holkham estate uniform was on hand with a wireless credit card machine to take my £10 card payment for a beach stroll. All this was a far cry from the beach donkey rides I remember as a child, holidaying in Weymouth. At The Hero, a swanky pub named after Nelson in the former fishing village of Burnham Overy Staithe, my three-year-old son emerged from a trip to the loo carrying a shiny beach football and a smart new pair of kids’ trainers. “They said I could have them,” he announced.  When I checked this improbable idea, and that he hadn’t just grabbed them, the maître d’ confirmed that, yes, the shoes and beach ball had just been “left behind”, and nobody had been back to collect them. Finders keepers.   Out of balance But it’s a very different story in coastal communities not on the so-called Norfolk Champagne Coast, or Cornwall (where David Cameron has bought a nice house).  In areas such as Blackpool or Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire, the fishing villages have not been gentrified – caravan parks don’t count – and quality of life has spiralled down, rather than levelled-up. Back in 2007, a parliamentary select committee concluded that “seaside towns are the least understood of Britain’s ‘problem’ areas”. Today, these issues have begun to be addressed thanks to two reports that have dug into the long entrenched issues which have allowed coastal towns to decline. The first Report of the Inquiry into Coastal Communities was published in 2017 by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Visitor Economy, followed this year in March by the House of Lords Report, The Future of Seaside Towns. Boris Johnson needs to appoint a dedicated team to implement the recommendations of these two reports, plus findings in a pioneering research paper, Creating Coastal Powerhouses, published in 2016 – just weeks after Theresa May became PM – by the British Hospitality Association. Action point number one was that “The government should appoint a 
powerful seaside tsar to oversee the delivery of a Coastal Investment Strategy”. And yet to date, nothing has been done. Covid-19 has created an obvious need for such a role. Many seaside communities – especially 
in Red Wall voter areas – are now on life support. For too long, politicians have preferred to stick their heads in the sand and do little. The 
cynical truth is that many politicians are reluctant to wade into the mess that 
successive governments have made of the welfare and housing benefit system, which is being so lucratively exploited by unscrupulous coastal town private landlords. The reason that landlords have no incentive to upgrade their “multi-occupation” houses is that the government have allowed a property system to flourish in which being a landlord in Blackpool will yield a higher return on your investment than in Belgravia. The Blackpool housing market is now driven by housing benefit, with an average gross yield of 40 per...