Tories secure historic Hartlepool by-election win over Labour

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Boris Johnson hailed an extraordinary Tory surge today as he visited Hartlepool to celebrate taking the rock-solid Labour seat for the first time in a by-election.

Flanked by his new MP, a jubilant PM said voters believe he can ‘deliver’ following the latest devastating hammer blow to the Red Wall. 

But as well as Hartlepool the council results are looking like a catastrophe for Labour, with a slew of losses and Conservatives taking control in former strongholds such as Northumberland, Nuneaton and Dudley. 

Sir Keir now faces a desperate battle for Labour’s soul with Corbynites threatening a coup unless he lurches to the left – but allies including Lord Mandelson warning that returning to Socialist ‘la la land’ will not help.

The ex-Cabinet minister said Jeremy Corbyn was ‘still casting a very dark cloud over Labour’, adding: ‘He still gets them going on the doorstep.’ 

Sir Keir stayed tight-lipped as he left his London home after the Conservatives piled up a majority of nearly 7,000 in Hartlepool – overturning the Opposition’s previous margin of 3,500.

The town’s new MP Jill Mortimer said her victory showed that ‘Labour have taken the people of Hartlepool for granted for too long’. ‘People have had enough,’ she added in a speech at the count.

The official announcement of the result was made just after 7am but Labour had already conceded defeat hours earlier, with shadow transport secretary Jim McMahon telling Sky News that ‘we are not close to winning this’.

The victory by 15,529 to 8,589 votes shows that Mr Johnson’s realignment of the British political landscape is continuing, with more of the so-called Red Wall collapsing. The 16 per cent swing is believed to be the biggest to a governing party in a by-election since the Second World War.

It heaps pressure on Sir Keir amid a growing revolt from hard-Left activists. A senior source admitted this morning that Labour had ‘not changed nearly enough’ to woo voters and insisted there will be no ‘excuses’.

The party is now bracing for further bad news as the votes are counted in England’s council and mayoral battles following ‘Super Thursday’ elections. 

Questions are being asked over the choice of a Remainer former MP as the Labour candidate in Brexit-voting Hartlepool. 

As brutal recriminations began, Corbyn allies Diane Abbott and John McDonnell were among those demanding a more left-wing approach.  

Brighton Kemptown MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle tweeted: ‘Good to see valueless flag waving and suit wearing working so well… or not?’

Corbynite MP Richard Burgon said: ‘We are going backwards in areas we need to be winning. Labour’s leadership needs to urgently change direction.’ 

Early declarations in council seats in the north east of England showed voters deserting Labour.

Meanwhile, the Tories won all nine of the seats being contested in Redditch, the first council result of the night, gaining seven from Labour. They took control of Nuneaton & Bedworth from Labour after winning 13 of the first 14 seats declared. The Conservatives also seized control of Harlow Council from Labour, and gained a seat to take overall control in Northumberland – as well as taking charge in Dudley.

Mayoral contests in the West Mids and Tees Valley are looking equally miserable for Labour, while sitting MP Tracy Brabin securing the West Yorkshire mayor job could leave Sir Keir facing another challenging by-election in Batley & Spen.    

Sir Keir has said he will ‘carry the can’ and is believed to be preparing a radical reshuffle of his shadow cabinet within days as he desperately tries to reset his leadership.

Shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds and shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth tipped for the axe.

He is sounding out high-profile figures including former work and pensions secretary Yvette Cooper about a possible return to the frontbench. 

On his visit to Severn Trent Academy in Coventry this afternoon, the PM said: ‘I know that the results have been coming in since this morning and there’s clearly a lot more to go, and it’s early days, but it’s a very encouraging set of results so far.

‘I think that’s really because we have been focusing, as a Government, on our priorities, the people’s priorities, and bouncing back from the pandemic as much as we can and getting through it.

‘It’s been very nice to be here at Severn Trent talking to them about the 500 Kickstarters they’re employing, which is I think what everybody wants to see as we go through towards the end of the roadmap – really making sure that we’re getting people into work, getting the economy bouncing back very, very strongly in a way that I know it will.

‘Anyway, I’ll be saying a bit more later on in Hartlepool.’

The Conservatives were increasing bullish about Hartlepool as they got the vote out yesterday, despite trying to manage expectations publicly by claiming it was ‘looking tough’. 

Meanwhile glum Labour activists had complained they were suffering from ‘Long Corbyn’ and on track for disaster.

Pensions Minister Guy Opperman predicted on Twitter shortly after the polls closed that Jill Mortimer would win the seat for the Conservatives. 

Amazingly, a shock poll by Survation earlier this week that showed the Tories 17 points ahead underplayed the final margin. 

In interviews this morning, Conservative Party chair Amanda Milling credited Mr Johnson’s personal appeal. ‘He is popular but he has also delivered… we made the promise at the general election that we would get Brexit done. That is very much what we did last year.’   

As Labour plunged immediately into a bitter civil war this morning, the Corbynite grassroots Momentum group said the result was a ‘disaster’ and warned Sir Keir could soon be ‘out of a job’.

Co-chair Andrew Scattergood said: ‘A transformative socialist message has won in Hartlepool before, and it would have won again.

‘Starmer’s strategy of isolating the left and replacing meaningful policy with empty buzzwords has comprehensively failed.

‘If he doesn’t change direction, not only will he be out of a job – but the Labour Party may be out of government forever.’

Diane Abbott, who was shadow home secretary during the Corbyn era, tweeted: ‘Crushing defeat for Labour in Hartlepool.

‘Not possible to blame Jeremy Corbyn for this result. Labour won the seat twice under his leadership. Keir Starmer must think again about his strategy.’

Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘Keir’s got to be given his chance and I’ve said that all the way along.

‘I’m not going to be one of those people treating (him) the way they treated Jeremy (Corbyn) – always challenging him, coups and all the rest.

‘Keir now needs to sit down and think through what happened in this campaign, and what I’ve been saying to him is you need to demonstrate to people the sort of society you want to create, the policy programme that will achieve that society, and you need to get back to that real grassroots campaign.

‘We must never again send our candidates into an election campaign almost naked, without a policy programme, without a clear view on what sort of society you want to create.

‘That’s the sort of thing that we need now.’ 

Lord Peter Mandelson, a former Labour MP for Hartlepool, said he felt ‘fairly gutted’ at the result.

‘I feel sad, disappointment above all, for the excellent campaign workers and party staff and volunteers and our excellent candidate, Paul Williams, who fought such a strong campaign,’ he said.

He added: ‘I also feel, I have to say, a mild fury, that the last 10 years of what we have been doing in the Labour Party nationally and locally has brought us to this result, because that is above all fundamentally an explanation of what’s happened today.’

Lord Mandelson went on: ‘What I would say is this, and remind the party we have not won a general election in 16 years.

‘We have lost the last four, with 2019 a catastrophe – the last 11 general elections read: lose, lose, lose, lose, Blair, Blair, Blair, lose, lose, lose, lose.

‘We need for once in this party to learn the lessons of those victories as well as those defeats, and I hope very much that when Keir and his colleagues in the shadow cabinet say this means that we have got to change direction that they actually mean it.’  

Lord Mandelson insisted that Brexit had not been raised with him once on the doorstep.  

‘The one thing they did raise with me however is Jeremy Corbyn – he is still casting a very dark cloud over Labour. Labour voters are not letting this off lightly, he still gets them going on the doorstep,’ he said.

‘One person said to me ‘Sort yourselves out, sort yourselves out. You picked the wrong brother and you ended up with Corbyn so that’s goodbye to you. When you’ve sorted yourselves out, we’ll look at you again’.

Another former Cabinet minister, Lord Adonis, gave an even more damning verdict. 

‘I supported Keir to replace Jeremy. There was no one else credible and retrieving the leadership from the hands of the Marxist far-left was the first step towards electability,’ he wrote in a blog.

‘I hoped that Keir, an effective ex-public prosecutor, might have sufficient leadership capacity and modernising social democratic vision to reshape Labour. 

‘Unfortunately, he turns out to be a transitional figure – a nice man and a good human rights lawyer, but without political skills or antennae at the highest level.’ 

Shadow minister Steve Reed was sent out to shore up Sir Keir’s position, insisting the party was getting a better reception on doorsteps.

Speaking on BBC Breakfast he said: ‘We’re going to see a lot more results throughout today and Saturday and over the weekend, from elections right across the country, so we’ll have a clearer picture at the end of that period, and I suspect the results are going to be patchy.

‘Certainly from my door-knocking – places like Sheffield, Nottingham, Bristol, Milton Keynes, Hertfordshire – the reaction on the doorstep to me as a Labour campaigner has been a lot warmer than it has been in recent years, but that isn’t enough if it’s not translating into votes.

‘So I think people understand the leader has changed, they don’t understand the party has changed, because we haven’t yet done enough to prove that.’

Meanwhile, former No10 chief Dominic Cummings launched an extraordinary Twitter diatribe against both Sir Keir and his former boss Mr Johnson.

In a brutal assessment, he wrote: ‘KS is a beta-lawyer-gamma-politician, like ~all in SW1 he obsesses on Media Reality not Actual Reality, he’s played the lobby game (badly) for a year WITHOUT A MESSAGE TO THE COUNTRY, now the pundits will a/ savage him, b/ tell him he needs to focus on them more, more exclusives!’

He added: ‘A measure of how bad KS is: until I googled yesterday I didn’t know who Shadow CHX is & when I looked at photo I had 0 recognition, she never touched my consciousness in a year…’ 

Mr Cummings also took aim at the current No10 operation – with whom he has been engaged in a bitter war of words. 

‘We have a No10 & Opposition who see their job as Media Entertainment Service & neither knows how to be this better than TB/Mandy. Neither will try to be… a government,’ he wrote. 

In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon faces a nervous wait to find out if the SNP has won a Holyrood majority – seen as crucial to her hopes of forcing a second independence referendum.     

The coronavirus pandemic resulted in last year’s elections being delayed by 12 months.

That means that two years’ worth of polls took place across the UK yesterday, making for a bumper crop of results.  

Voters have had their say on the make-up of English councils, the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Senedd as well as in a wave of mayoral contests, including in London.

A Labour source said this morning: ‘We’ve said all along the North East and the Midlands would be difficult. We also said the places declaring Thursday would be particularly difficult.

‘But, the message from voters is clear and we have heard it. Labour has not yet changed nearly enough for voters to place their trust in us.

‘We understand that. We are listening. And we will now redouble our efforts. Labour must now accelerate the programme of change in our party, to win back the trust and faith of working people across Britain.

‘People don’t want to hear excuses. Keir has said he will take responsibility for these results – and he will take responsibility for fixing it and changing the Labour Party for the better.’

The Hartlepool by-election outcome was triggered when former MP Mike Hill resigned in March amid sexual harassment allegations. 

Respected elections expert Professor Michael Thrasher said the results so far were a ‘nightmare’ for Labour and ‘the slide appears to be continuing’. 

He told Sky News that voters had ‘simply migrated from Labour to the Conservatives’. ‘That is a hard thing for voters to do but but we saw it in 2019 and we are seeing it again in 2021,’ he said.  

Voter turnout in the contest in Hartlepool was 42.55 per cent – a relatively high number for a Westminster by-election.   

Hartlepool was held by Labour with a majority of 3,595 in 2019, even as other bricks in the ‘Red Wall’ crumbled – in part due to the Brexit Party splitting the Tory vote.

Both Mr Johnson and Sir Keir made three visits to Hartlepool during the campaign in a sign of the importance the by-election represents to their parties. 

Opinion polls suggested the Tories were on course to win the seat for the first time ever, with one survey putting the party 17 points ahead of Labour.

Mr Johnson sought to dampen expectations ahead of polling day as he said the contest looked like it would be a ‘very tough fight’. 

Sir Keir said during the campaign that his rebuild of the party would take longer than 12 months.

He stressed he had taken over the leadership after the party’s worst general election result since 1935 and ‘we’ve got to rebuild into the next general election – that is the task in hand’.

Sir Keir said: ‘This is the first test and we go into that test fighting for every vote, but I never thought we would climb the mountain we have to climb in just one year – it is going to take longer than that.’

However, losing ground instead of gaining it at 2021 elections would represent a devastating set of results for Sir Keir as he tries to lay the foundations for a general election victory in 2024.

He said on Wednesday that he would take responsibility, regardless of how the elections play out. 

‘I take full responsibility for everything the Labour Party does, including the elections whatever they are tomorrow,’ he said. 

‘And for me it’s very important – it’s the same approach I took when I was director of public prosecutions running the Crown Prosecution Service for five years, which is when things go right, the leader takes the plaudits; when they don’t go right, the leader carries the can and takes responsibility.’

Sir Keir’s allies last night said they were expecting civil war to break out in the party if election results are as gloomy as forecast by some opinion polls.

Alan Milburn, a Labour Cabinet minister under Tony Blair, told BBC Newsnight that the elections should not be seen as a referendum on Sir Keir’s leadership because it was ‘always going to be a long, hard battle back’ after the party’s 2019 collapse.  

However, Mr Milburn said ‘this is the time to inject new blood’ into the shadow cabinet because some of its current members are ‘barely visible’.

He warned the party is in a state of ‘crisis’ and said: ‘The truth is that the Labour Party, and social democratic parties, they need to reinvent themselves. 

‘It’s not a question of just rebuilding – it’s a process of reinvention. There needs to be a big programme change, a big policy change and I think a big procedure change.’ 

Shadow public health minister Alex Norris said Labour did not expect to recover from its 2019 general election loss within 18 months.

Asked whether Sir Keir would be to blame for a defeat in the Hartlepool by-election, Mr Norris told Sky News: ‘No, not in the slightest. Let’s not prejudge it, for one. 

‘But what Keir is going to be very clear about, what we are clear about as a Labour Party is that this is going to be a no-excuses election for us.’ 

But in a sign of the discontent on the Labour left, MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle appeared to mock the party’s attempts to change its image.

He said: ‘Good to see valueless flag waving and suit wearing working so well… or not?’

The comment is a reference to a leaked strategy document which suggested Labour must make ‘use of the flag, veterans, dressing smartly’ to win back voters in ‘Red Wall’ seats in the party’s former industrial heartlands.

Bullish Conservative MPs who had been on the ground in Hartlepool claimed they had noticed a ‘clear swing’ towards their party as they predicted a bad set of results for Sir Keir. 

‘If you thought the bottom of Labour was Corbyn then you are wrong,’ one told MailOnline. 

Labour activists doorknocking in the constituency sounded relentlessly glum. 

‘We are suffering from Long Corbyn,’ one senior figure said in a grim coronavirus analogy. ‘It is going to be really difficult… we will find out tonight whether we have hit bottom.’

The elections came after Mr Johnson faced a number of weeks of damaging headlines over the Covid crisis, a Whitehall lobbying row and controversy over the refurbishment of his Downing Street flat.

Many senior Tory figures believed the rows were only of interest in the ‘Westminster bubble’ and they will be hoping that they are proved correct after the nation went to the ballot box.

Meanwhile, in Scotland the SNP will be hoping to have strengthened its position in Holyrood as Ms Sturgeon pushes for a re-run of the 2014 independence referendum.

A number of opinion polls in the run up to ‘Super Thursday’ suggested the SNP was on course to win a majority.

Ms Sturgeon believes winning a majority would give her a mandate to hold another border poll.

Mr Johnson has repeatedly rejected calls for another independence vote, arguing the first one was supposed to be a once in a generation event.

But Ms Sturgeon believes an SNP majority would force the PM to reconsider. 

The SNP leader said after the polls closed tonight that it had been ‘an election like no other’ as she laid down the gauntlet to Mr Johnson on independence. 

She said: ‘At this election the SNP have also offered the people of Scotland the opportunity to choose their future once the Covid crisis has passed. 

‘If, when the ballots are counted, there is a parliamentary majority for that choice then when the crisis has passed that democratic mandate must be respected.’

Authorities have found it difficult to predict when results will come in because they are unsure how long counting will take because of social distancing requirements.    

The results of all of the UK’s elections are not expected to be finalised until Monday. 

Most of the seats in the Holyrood election are expected to count during the day on Friday, with results starting at lunchtime and peaking in the evening. 

However, some areas are expected to count votes during the day on Saturday, with results due from lunchtime. 

Results from the eight regional proportional representation top-up seats are expected on Saturday night.              

Counting for the Welsh Assembly elections is expected to take place on Friday with results in the afternoon and evening. 

In London, the result of the race for City Hall may come on Saturday but it could potentially be Sunday as Labour incumbent Sadiq Khan tries to secure a second term by defeating Tory rival Shaun Bailey. 

The Tories are expected to find out on Friday night if Ben Houchen has held on as Tees Valley mayor, in what is seen as a key race and a barometer for how the party is performing in the former ‘Red Wall’ constituencies that Labour lost to the Tories in the 2019 general election. 

The parties will face another by-election if Labour MP Tracy Brabin succeeds in her bid to become West Yorkshire mayor, as expected.

It means she will stand down from her Batley and Spen constituency, which she held in 2019 with a small majority of 3,525 over the Tories.

Labour figures have suggested the party could delay holding a by-election until the autumn in a bid to avoid losing another brick in the ‘Red Wall’. 

The results of 39 police and crime commissioner elections in England and Wales are expected to be announced across Friday, Saturday and Sunday.