Labour Party Loses Hartlepool to Conservatives in by-Election

Jill Mortimer, who won the by-election, is the first Conservative MP for Hartlepool since the constituency’s creation in 1974 - beating her rival, Labour party member Paul Williams by 6,940 votes. 

In her acceptance speech, Mortimer, who won 15,529 votes to Labour’s 8,589, said the result was “truly historic.” 

“Labour has taken the people of Hartlepool for granted for too long - I heard this time and time again on the doorstep. People had enough. Now through this result, the people have spoken and they’ve made it clear: it’s time for change,” she added. 

Williams, the Labour candidate, wrote on Twitter in response to the defeat: “A massive thank you to everyone in Hartlepool who voted for me, and to the incredible Labour volunteers who worked so hard. #Congrats to Jill Mortimer. I’m off to do the important job now of taking the kids to school.”

The result is a major blow for Labour party leader Sir Kier Starmer, who had warned that his party had a “mountain to climb'' to retain Hartlepool. He now faces mounting pressure from within his own party amidst criticism that he failed to “cut through” with voters in the traditional Labour heartlands. 

The former shadow home secretary and Member of Parliament for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, Diane Abbott, tweeted: “Crushing defeat for Labour in Hartlepool. Not possible to blame Jeremy Corbyn for this result. Labour won the seat twice under his leadership. Keir Starmer must think again about his strategy.”

Far-left Corbynite group ‘Momentum’, called the result a “disaster” and implored the party’s leadership to “build a coalition with the left on transformative policy, return to community organising, and empower members to shape the future of our party.”

Steve Reed, the shadow secretary for communities and local government, told BBC Breakfast: 

“I congratulate Jill Mortimer on her victory but it was for me, as a Labour Party member, absolutely shattering to see a Conservative MP elected in a place like Hartlepool after nearly 50 years. 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.”

Speaking to BBC Radio 4, former Hartlepool MP Lord Mandelson said he was “fairly gutted” in reference to the result and blamed the defeat on the “two C’s” - the COVID-19 pandemic and Jeremy Corbyn. He said it was clear from his conversations with voters in the town that Corbyn was “still casting a very dark cloud over Labour” and that the party had more work to do to put that era behind it.

In the wake of the vote, a large blimp of Boris Johnson was erected outside of the Mill House pub opposite to where the vote count took place, the Times reports. Liam Westmoreland, 33, who voted in Hartlepool, said: 

“If I’d have told my grandad, who has passed away now, that I was going to be a Conservative voter he’d have probably given me a slap. My family have been staunch Labour voters for years. But those were the days when Labour actually represented the working man.”

Gerald Oliver, 68, added: “To be honest, I think the town could do with a change. We feel like we’ve been left behind. We want Hartlepool put on the map for good reasons.”

Many commentators have hinted that the Hartlepool result is important in that it “underlines the way the British political map has been changing and suggests that this change is profound rather than a freak.” Writing for the Spectator, Patrick O’Flynn attributed the Labour party’s decline to its “theft by a bunch of middle-class progressives, inculcated with values alien to those who brought it into being.”

“This is a party whose activists are ashamed of their country’s heritage and culture, who consider respect for the nation to be a mark of stupidity, who are pushing for reparations to be paid for slavery, who wish to have no effective controls on immigration, who wish to campaign to rejoin the EU, who see the Union Flag as an affront and whose leader knelt to the Cenotaph-defacers of BLM … Voters in the old ‘red wall’ towns have registered that Labour has changed, they show no sign at all of wanting the party back, and certainly do not wish to share it with the pseudo-intellectuals and juvenile ideologues of the modern left,” he added.