Sajid Javid and Boris Johnson at Conservative Campaign Headquarters, which at present is five minutes from parliament

Conservative Campaign Headquarters is to be relocated from London to the Midlands or the north as Boris Johnson seeks to entrench the party in Labour’s former heartlands.

The Conservative Home website reported this morning that a senior source in Downing Street had asked it to canvas activists’ views on the new location.

The venue should be “somewhere reasonably close to a university with good maths/physics departments (we should get a data team up there), good train links, well placed in political terms,” the source told the site. Dominic Cummings, Mr Johnson’s chief adviser, is a strong advocate of greater use of data in political campaigning and government.

The No 10 source added that Conservatives would maintain only a limited presence in the capital. “There