Hartlepool by-election: Labour thrashed by the Tories

The Conservatives have secured a resounding win in the Hartlepool by-election in County Durham, taking the seat off Labour for the first time since it was created in 1974.

The Tories won more than 50% of the vote on a 16% swing from Labour.

Jill Mortimer, the Conservative candidate, was elected with 15,529 votes – securing a 6,940 majority. Dr Paul Williams, the Labour hopeful who voted Remain at the Brexit referendum, failed to win over the Leave-backing seat and took just 8,589 votes. 

In her victory speech, Mortimer said that Labour had taken Hartlepool for granted for too long. She pledged to “work tirelessly” to bring “jobs and investment” and said it had become apparent people in the town have had enough of Labour.

Amanda Milling, the Conservative party co-chair, said: “This is a historic result. We’re delighted that the people of Hartlepool have put their faith in Jill and the Conservatives to deliver on their priorities: to bring the change, investment and jobs Hartlepool deserves.”

She added: “The work to repay that faith starts right now, as we continue with our agenda to level up and build back better from the pandemic.”

Steve Reed, Labour’s shadow communities secretary, said that it was “absolutely shattering to see a Conservative MP elected in a place like Hartlepool after nearly 50 years”.

He told BBC Breakfast: “I think what this shows is that although we have started to change since the cataclysm of the last general election, that change has clearly not gone far enough in order to win back the trust of the voters, and we’ve just seen that in spades in Hartlepool.”

He said that it was “always going to take more than a year to make this change”, adding:

“We need to drive change harder and faster if we’re going to win back the trust that has been broken over many, many years between too many British people and the Labour Party”.

The final results were: Conservative 15,529, Labour 8,589, Independent 2,904, Heritage 468, Reform 368, Green 358 and the Liberal Democrats 349.

The result is a heavy blow to Sir Keir Starmer, who built his 2020 leadership campaign around a promise that he was the best person to turn around his party’s fortunes in the north and Midlands, following a damaging 2019 election defeat under former leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Less than an hour after the defeat, Starmer was already facing criticism from the left of his own party over his failure to “cut through” with many former Labour voters in the so-called “red wall” seats.

Momentum, the left-wing Labour group set up during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, tweeted that the result was a “disaster” and said: “In 2017, we won over 50% of the vote in Hartlepool. Now it looks like we’ve lost it to the Tories. A transformative socialist message has won in Hartlepool before, and it would have won again.”

Two Labour MPs who were prominent Jeremy Corbyn allies have also called on Starmer to rethink his approach.

Richard Burgon said Labour was going backwards and that the party’s leadership needed to “urgently change direction”, while Diane Abbott said that it was not possible to blame Jeremy Corbyn for this result, as Labour won the seat twice under his leadership. She called on Starmer to “think again about his strategy”.