‘Spectacular’ Hartlepool win cheers Tories
BRITISH prime minister Boris Johnson said the victory of his party in the former Labour stronghold of Hartlepool was down to focusing on the needs and priorities of voters, including on Brexit.
“The public want politicians to get on with focusing on their needs and their priorities,” he said in the north-east English town last Friday (7). “This is a place that voted for Brexit. We’ve got Brexit done, and then we’re able to do other things.”
Conservative Jill Mortimer beat Labour’s candidate in last Thursday’s (6) election by 15,529 votes to 8,589 to take the parliamentary seat for Hartlepool. It was a victory once unthinkable in a north-eastern English port town that for decades had backed Britain’s main opposition party.
The overwhelming victory for an often-criticised governing party increases pressure on Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who has struggled to revive his party’s fortunes since a disastrous national election in 2019.
Starmer expressed his dismay at the result, pledging to do whatever it takes to reconnect to voters.
“I am bitterly disappointed in the results. I take full responsibility for the result and I will take full responsibility for fixing things,” he told reporters. “We have changed as a party but we haven’t set out a strong enough case to the country.
“Very often we have been talking to ourselves instead of to the country and we’ve lost the trust of working people, particularly in places like Hartlepool. I intend to do whatever is necessary to fix that.”
The Hartlepool by-election, which took place outside the normal parliamentary cycle, was triggered by the resignation of a Labour lawmaker in March.
Election analysts said it was the biggest swing of votes to the governing party at a by-election since the Second World War. The outcome wrong-footed critics who have taken aim at the prime minister over sleaze allegations and for failing to move quickly enough to tackle the coronavirus crisis. Britain has one of the world’s highest Covid-19 death tolls.
“It’s quite a spectacular turnaround in a seat that Labour should really have saved and defended,” politics professor Michael Thrasher told