Keir Starmer is heading for an embarrassing defeat in Hartlepool

The Labour leader chose the wrong candidate to run in a working-class Leave seat, but other setbacks in the north and midlands will be harder to explain away, writes John Rentoul

Paul Williams, the Labour candidate, at the Hartlepool Marina (Getty Images)

A Survation opinion poll suggests that Paul Williams, the Labour candidate, is heading for a crushing defeat in the Hartlepool by-election on Thursday. This is obviously not good for Keir Starmer’s attempt to present the party as starting to climb the mountain of recovery “under new management”. But his mistake was to allow people to think that Labour could hold the seat.

His starting point should have been that the Conservatives should have won the seat at the general election. The reason they didn’t was the intervention of the Brexit Party. Whereas Nigel Farage stood his Brexit Party candidates down in northern Leave seats where the Conservatives had a chance of beating Labour, he thought Hartlepool was different. The Conservative candidate had come a distant second at the 2017 election, whereas in 2015, when Farage was leader of Ukip, the Ukip candidate came a close second, pushing the Tory into third place.

Farage and Richard Tice, the businessperson who was a co-founder and chair of the Brexit Party, thought Hartlepool was their best prospect in the 2019 election, and that they would be better placed than the Tories to take it from Labour. They didn’t realise how much the Labour vote would collapse in working-class Leave seats – the red wall – and how much of it would go directly to Boris Johnson’s Tories.

Tice himself stood in Hartlepool, and scored one of the party’s best results nationally. But he still came third, and his 26 per cent share of the vote succeeded only in splitting the Leave vote. If the Brexit Party had not stood, Hartlepool would almost certainly have joined the roll-call of red wall seats switching from Labour to Conservative in 2019.

So that should have been the baseline for judging the by-election contest. This is not a typical opposition seat, which it is highly unusual for governments to gain at a by-election. It is in effect a Tory seat that Labour held last time by a freak of the first-past-the-post voting system.

However, strange things can happen in by-elections, and Starmer compounded his error by choosing the wrong candidate. Williams is an earnest doctor and a committed public servant, but he is not from Hartlepool – indeed he was the MP for Stockton South between 2017 and 2019, one of the red wall seats that did fall to the Tories last time – and above all, he was a passionate Remainer.

His Tory opponent, Jill Mortimer, isn’t from Hartlepool either – she is from posh North Yorkshire – but she is a Leaver, with Boris Johnson, the leader of the Leave campaign, on her side. It is telling that the Labour Party could not find a single Leaver who lives in Hartlepool as its candidate.

Thus Starmer is doomed to face the first real setback of his leadership. It doesn’t help that the Hartlepool result will be among the first to be declared – some time after 4am on Friday morning, we are told, when many of the elections to be held on Thursday won’t even start to be counted until the next day.

Another poll today, from Opinium, puts Ben Houchen, the Conservative, so far ahead in the election for mayor of Tees Valley (an area that includes Hartlepool) that it is embarrassing. That ought to be seen as a more serious result for Labour, as Houchen won the election in 2017 by a hair’s breadth at a time when Labour under Jeremy Corbyn was trailing 18 points behind Theresa May. Indeed, a third poll, also from Opinium, confirms that Andy Street is on course to retain the West Midlands mayoralty. He too was elected by a wafer-thin margin over Labour four years ago, and he and Houchen are about to repeat the Johnson trick of getting re-elected as Tories in Labour urban areas.

Labour may do well in local elections across the rest of England. The national opinion polls have shown a range of Tory leads, from one to 11 points in the past week, but the underlying trend suggests the gap is closing, with an average Tory lead of five points. That would suggest Labour should make big advances in most places where the last elections were held four years ago.

But, even if Starmer were able to shrug off defeat in Hartlepool, he will not explain away so easily Labour’s failure to recover ground in so much else of the north and midlands.