The Tories are on track to win the critical by-election in Hartlepool.
Their candidate, North Yorkshire farmer Jill Mortimer, has pulled ahead of Labour in the opinion polls.
Defeat at the ballot box on May 6 would be a heavy blow for Sir Keir Starmer, in his first electoral test since becoming party leader.
Such an outcome would not be surprising. Labour’s vote in the former heavy-industry town has been steadily declining in recent years.
It would probably have been lost to the Tories in 2019, if the Brexit party had not stood, taking thousands of votes away from Boris Johnson.
The circumstances of this by-election were also unpromising. Mike Hill, the Labour MP who quit Parliament, had been suspended from the party over allegations of sexual harassment, which he denies, in 2019 but reinstated the following year.
His request for anonymity in a forthcoming industrial tribunal relating to the accusations, which he denies, was turned down and he resigned last month, bequeathing a deeply-vulnerable majority of only 3,595.
The Tories are also benefitting from a largely-undeserved “Vaccination bounce” in the polls, boosting the chances of the lady farmer from over the county border.
Stranger things have happened in what has traditionally been seen as a safe Labour seat in the party’s north-eastern heartland.
Stuart Drummond was Hartlepool’s first and only elected Mayor – standing as H’Angus the Monkey, the mascot of the town’s football team in 2002.
And in 1959, the war hero of what became known as The Yangtse Incident, retired RN commander John Kerans DSO, won the constituency for the Tories.
Under heavy fire from the Communist Chinese, he commanded the frigate HMS Amethyst in an escape mission for four navy vessels in 1949.
In the election ten years later, he was a trainee manager with the South Durham Steel and Iron Company, when the iconic 1957 film The Yangste Incident starring Richard Todd as himself was shown.
A local boy, Richard Ogden, later recalled: “The contribution to Kerans’ victory made by the manager of one of the local cinemas cannot be under-estimated.
“The film played for a couple of weeks immediately before the election and after seeing it the good people of Hartlepool reacted with appropriate gratitude at the polls.”
Cdr Kerans went on to beat Labour by 182 votes, retiring from politics five years later. The seat returned to the fold that year, where it has stayed for 57 years – until perhaps now.
.jpg?w=600)
