UK Tories aim to chip away at ‘red wall’ in key electoral test for Boris Johnson

HARTLEPOOL, England — The damage done to Labour’s “red wall” was the dominant story of the 2019 U.K. election — now the Tories are hoping to take another chip out of it.

The moniker refers to a stripe of Brexit-voting deindustrialized towns across the Midlands and the North which had been Labour strongholds for generations but switched their support to the Tories to help give Prime Minister Boris Johnson his landslide election victory in December 2019. 

Less than two years later, the country is watching to see if Hartlepool, which matches many of its neighbors’ characteristics but held out stubbornly last time, will follow suit. The first by-election of this parliamentary session, to be held on May 6, was prompted by the resignation of the previous Labour MP, Mike Hill, amid sexual harassment allegations, which he denies.

It was clear to see from walking through the town which party feels it has more at stake. There were posters of Labour candidate Dr Paul Williams, beaming in his scrubs, pinned up by the bus stop near the main shopping street and flyers with his name plastered the pavement.

On the face of it Williams has several advantages. He’s an NHS doctor who previously served as an MP for nearby Stockton, who finds himself defending a historic Labour stronghold in a by-election after 11 years of Conservative government. 

Yet he faces an uphill struggle. A group of men in their 70s sitting in the civic square at lunchtime referred to him variously as “the doctor,” which is the intended effect of the posters, and “the Remainer,” which definitely is not. 

One of them even mentioned the number of times Williams broke the Labour Party whip as an MP in an attempt to “block Brexit,” adding that Labour “doesn’t listen.” The conversation quickly moved from Williams to Sir Keir Starmer, the leader who is meant to be reinventing his party to be more in line with the values of English towns like Hartlepool.

Referring to a recent incident in which Starmer was chased out of a pub on the campaign trail, one man said: “I don’t think he’d be welcome in very many pubs round here.” 

More than Brexit

Williams himself insisted this election is not about Brexit. “Occasionally it comes up, but it’s no longer an issue of Leave or Remain. It feels like everyone’s united now in that we want to make a success of it.”

As for the Labour leader, Williams acknowledged “people haven’t gotten to know [Starmer] very well in the last year,” which he put down to COVID restrictions. He said: “There was a bit of an assumption that because he was from the south, he must’ve had some kind of privileged upbringing, but when he came here he listened really carefully to people and he made a strong, positive connection.”

Williams would prefer to focus on NHS pay and jobs. He is skeptical of the impact that various announcements made by the chancellor in his latest budget will have in the area, and by extension the government’s entire “leveling up” agenda. 

An expansion of the Treasury in Darlington will be seen as “another area that’s getting something that Hartlepool isn’t,” Williams argued, adding that the area was treated as “an afterthought” in plans for a freeport on Teesside. 

Eye-catching Tory investments in the North East have left him treading a difficult path, and this is not lost on voters. A lifelong Labour voter confessed he is “wavering for the first time” because he sees the infrastructure projects springing up around Hartlepool and fears the town being “left out on a limb.”

Out on a limb describes Hartlepool in more ways than one. Geographically, it hangs on the upper lip of the Tees and looks straight out to sea: no beach, no pier. It is part of the official Tees Valley region, but does not see itself as part of Teesside. The slogan on the welcome sign — “Hartlepool: A marina and so much more” — poses more questions than it answers.

It is not wholly deindustrialized while it is home to the Liberty Steel pipe plant, although the factory is now at risk as part of Sanjeev Gupta’s empire. Offshore wind manufacturing is set to join chemical processing as one of the big local industries, but it is still a world away from the era when steelmaking was the heart of the Teesside economy.

In other ways, it exemplifies the challenge the Conservatives have set themselves under the slogan of leveling up, suffering from higher-than-average economic inactivity, child poverty, obesity and wage stagnation.

Monkey hangers

Politically, it has marched to the beat of its own drum in more subtle ways than the scorecard of steady Labour representation since 1974 would suggest. The constituency has a strong tradition of independent challengers in parliamentary elections, an unusually high number of independent councillors and once elected the local football mascot — or at least the man inside it — as mayor. (Called H’angus, the monkey mascot recalls another eccentric episode during the Napoleonic Wars in which the town hanged the simian survivor of a shipwreck believing it to be a French spy.)

When the constituency bucked the trend in 2019 and stayed red, Labour owed its victory in no small part to the Brexit Party — formerly UKIP — which has long enjoyed strong local support and sucked up 10,000 votes.

If Labour manage to hold on again, they will inevitably rely on the votes of those like the man on a mobility scooter who stopped when he saw Williams and said: “I’ve voted Labour all my life.” He added: “I wouldn’t trust Boris with my kids’ lunch money.”

The final week of campaigning could prove the trickiest for Conservatives, with activists suddenly having to answer questions about whether the prime minister really said he’d rather see “bodies pile high” than impose another lockdown and how he paid for a refurbishment of his Downing Street flat. One MP from a red wall seat observed with masterful understatement: “It’s not all that helpful.”

Labour door-knockers are allowing their hopes to rise in the final stretch, mobilizing their ground game more methodically than their rivals.

In spite of this, the Tories closest to the campaign sum up their strengths as lying in the “three Bs”: Brexit, Boris and Ben. As Jacob Young, Conservative MP for nearby Redcar, said: “When I talk to people in my area, they say Boris hasn’t been able to do everything he wants to do yet because of COVID and they want to see him given the chance.”

The “Ben” in this equation is Ben Houchen, Conservative mayor of Tees Valley, who is closely associated with “wins” for the region such as the Treasury in Darlington and the freeport, as well as the addition of more flights from the local airport. 

Nicola Headlam, chief economist for Red Flag Alert business intelligence, a consultancy, and former head of the government’s Northern Powerhouse unit, said it’s not quite so simple. “Houchen made the link in the minds of the people in Tees that he would bang the drum for Treasury cash and be heard, but the hard-infrastructure-led approach at the core of the Conservatives’ northern strategy won’t touch the reality of actual deprivation.”

“The airport money could have been better-spent shoving £50 notes into the pockets of residents of horrifically neglected areas.” Nonetheless, it will be a shock if he doesn’t hold on to the mayoralty.

Win-Win

The same appears not to be true for the Tories’ Hartlepool candidate Jill Mortimer, with even party activists playing down her chances. The one voter who mentioned her spontaneously summed up her flaws with perfect disdain, referring to her as “the farmer from Thirsk.” Mortimer and her campaign did not respond to interview requests.

Both her occupation and extraction are seen as too far removed from Hartlepool and, in a word, posh. One party colleague admitted “it would have been nice” to have a Hartlepudlian in the running, while another said there is an “experience gap” between Mortimer and her Labour rival.

The impression overall, however, is that Conservatives will not be too concerned about whether this candidate should have been chosen over that one, because they find themselves in a win-win situation.

If they take the seat, it gives Conservatives hope that their winning 2019 strategy can be replicated even without the galvanizing promise of “getting Brexit done.” If they lose narrowly, they can claim it was always a tall order — which given the seat’s voting history, it was.

Another Teesside Tory said the attitude towards his party has changed “deeply” since he became involved in politics and “if anything, people would be more embarrassed about saying they vote Labour now.”

If the noise is wrong and Labour can still hold its own in Hartlepool, commentators and politicians alike will have to grapple with the fact there’s now such a thing as a shy Labour voter in the North East. If it loses, the true scale of the task facing Starmer is only now becoming apparent.