Is Batley and Spen Labour’s next by-election headache?

If Labour wins the first election to the new West Yorkshire mayoralty, it will trigger another hard-to-win by-election, writes John Rentoul

Tracy Brabin can’t be mayor of West Yorkshire and MP for Batley and Spen (Getty Images)

If Keir Starmer thought the Hartlepool by-election was bad, he must be praying for Tracy Brabin to lose her bid to be Labour mayor of West Yorkshire. The result of the contest to be leader of the combined authority covering Leeds, Bradford, Kirklees, Calderdale and Wakefield is expected to be announced at about 4pm today.

If Brabin wins, she will be required to give up her seat in the House of Commons, because the law says you cannot be a police and crime commissioner (PCC) and an MP – and the mayor of West Yorkshire, a new post, will be the PCC for the area. (Dan Jarvis is mayor for the Sheffield city region and an MP because he isn’t a PCC.)

That will mean a by-election in Batley and Spen, Brabin’s constituency, in the middle of West Yorkshire. And Batley and Spen is one of many northern Labour seats that are vulnerable to the Conservatives as they hoover up the working-class Leave vote.

Labour lost Hartlepool partly because much of the large Brexit Party vote at the 2019 election went to the Tories. If similar shifts were repeated in other seats, there are more than 30 that would go Tory, including the seats held by Ed Miliband, Yvette Cooper and Dan Jarvis.

Batley and Spen is not always included on the lists of such seats because the third-placed candidate there in 2019 was Paul Halloran, of the Heavy Woollen District Independents (HWDI). He won 12 per cent of the vote and the Brexit Party candidate picked up a further 3 per cent. But the leader of the HWDI had been the chair of the local Ukip branch, and its manifesto included a “clean” Brexit.

In effect, then, the Ukip/Brexit Party tendency won 15 per cent of the vote last time, which was twice Brabin’s 7 per cent majority.

If there is a by-election in Batley and Spen, Labour’s chances of holding the seat look poor. It may be that Starmer won’t make the same mistake as in Hartlepool, of choosing an ardent Remainer for a seat that voted strongly to leave the EU (Batley and Spen was 60 per cent Leave), and he might even find a candidate who actually lives in the constituency. But even so, the 16 per cent swing against Labour in Hartlepool does not bode well for a seat that needs just a 4 per cent swing to lose.

If at 4pm today Matt Robinson, the Conservative candidate, is announced as the winner of the West Yorkshire mayoral election, expect the loudest cheers to be heard from the direction of Keir Starmer’s home in Islington.