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Gordon Brown paid another visit up ’ere a few days ago, certainly his third this year and quite possibly fourth or fifth. What’s going on? Ir’n Broon doesn’t even like Yorkshire pudding, as far as I know. No chocolate brownies in it. He must know something we don’t know, or, more precisely, fear something we ought to fear.

Perhaps he saw a recent YouGov opinion poll that had the Tories on a swing from Labour of 9.6 per cent if the general election was held now. This is 0.9 per cent improvement on a year ago, but it’s still bad news and many marginal seats are looking decidedly dodgy.

Brown desperately needs Yorkshire to stay loyal, because Lancashire is traditionally perfidious. But YouGov put the Conservatives on 40 points, Labour on 29 and Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats on 17 points in West Yorkshire– not far adrift from the national picture, but quite damning for the party’s Tyke heartland.

David Cameron’s cuties know the score. Tory Robert Goodwill, who ousted Lawrie Quinn in Scarborough in 2005, admits: “If you don’t pick up seats in West Yorkshire, we will certainly not win a majority.”

Strangulated English aside, on these figures, the Conservatives would not only win key target seats Colne Valley and Calder Valley, but also unseat communities minister Shahid Malik in Dewsbury and Government whip Mary Creagh in Wakefield. Bradford West, Batley and Spen, Halifax, Keighley, Leeds North East and Pudsey would also fall to the Cameron scythe, along with Cleethorpes, Brigg and Goole and Bassetlaw, the constituency of top-notch campaigner John Mann. Only the old mining and steel constituencies are still totally safe, which is presumably why the putative next generation of Labour leaders – Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper and Ed Miliband chose them in the first place.

And the Tories are all over this place like a rash. Shadow Chancellor George Osborne paid a private visit to the Yorkshire Post offices, reported in the business pages four days later. He insisted that Labour’s plan to halve the public deficit did not go far enough, but declined to say how far he would go.

Ominously, however, he had two threats for working people. On Europe, he promised that the Tories would fight to get back Britain’s opt-out clause from employment legislation. And he pledged that a Conservative government would look to reforming the employment tribunal system – particularly with regard to vexatious claims. I asked Osborne’s people to clarify what these menacing words meant and they promised to get back – but never did.

Of course, to employers, all claims for unfair dismissal are vexatious. They get in the way of the divine right to manage, even though only a small percentage of claims succeed. Clearly, the Tories intend to make it easier to sack people and harder for them to seek redress. His warning shot about employment law also signals that, behind the façade of caring Conservatism, the old atavistic instincts are at work. They will come for the trade unions.

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The trouble with going out on a limb, as I incautiously did in my previous column, is that the forces of gravity may be stronger than the forces of wishful thinking and you end up on the ground with a sore backside. So you find me shifting uncomfortably in my chair after the striking binmen of Leeds voted 92 per cent against the peace deal negotiated by their union officials.

The two sides are talking again, after a two-week gap in negotiations that took the dispute into its ninth week, making it longer than the miners’ strike of 1972 and the dirty jobs strike of 1978. It is still only in one city, and in one department of one metropolitan council, but I still think it bids fair to be a landmark industrial action of the century’s first decade.

On the evidence when I last wrote, I thought the men had, if not a famous victory, then a win on points. But they know better than me, maybe even better than their full-time union officials, and they threw the deal out on the grounds that it was unworkable. Or, at any rate, too much like hard work, compelling them to shift 220 bins an hour instead of 180 pre-dispute. It’s their strike and their jobs. I just hope they haven’t snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

There’s always a psychological point in any strike when you know (or think you know) that it’s time to snatch the employer’s hand off, declare a win and get everybody back on the bus. Perhaps the draft peace deal – ending the threat of 30 per cent pay cuts and plans to privatise the refuse service – was that point. Who knows?

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to get strikers back to work. The stoppage becomes a way of life, self-fulfilling. And more fun than emptying bins.

That’s when it becomes the unhappy duty of union officials to assert their authority and call a halt to the action. The ability to do that marks out the professionals from the amateurs.