Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O’Flynn

Labour is doomed whether Starmer stays or goes

So the Conservatives have won the ‘pools, as we used to say of jackpot winners before the advent of the National Lottery.

The Hartlepool constituency, known before 1974 as ‘the Hartlepools’ in recognition of the distinct settlements of old Hartlepool and West Hartlepool, has just secured its place in British political folk lore. It isn’t just the fact of a red wall brick turning blue at a by-election some 11 years into Tory-led governments that is remarkable, but also the crushing extent of the Conservative victory.

While by-elections are often remembered as flashes in the pan – with shock results reversed at subsequent general elections – that is because they are normally won by opposition parties when governments are going through unpopular phases.

The rest of Starmer’s Labour leadership is now eminently predictable

For governing parties to win hitherto safe opposition seats in by-elections is very rare indeed. When it happens by a landslide, at the start of mid-term, amid ‘sleaze’ accusations being flung at the PM and against a leader of the opposition who should still be in his honeymoon phase then we are entitled to suppose that something more profound is going on.

Which it is. As I have been arguing ever since the 2019 general election, most recently for Coffee House earlier this week, a long-term structural political alignment is in progress that stems from the collapse of Labour’s traditional coalition of support.

Brexit was the catalyst and Labour’s post-referendum behaviour the accelerant. The traditional working class, to be found in largest numbers in post-industrial towns in the Midlands and the north of England, has come to understand that its values are despised by the modern, woke, middle-class Left which now holds the Labour party in its grip.

Were Labour now to decide that it must tilt drastically back towards the pro-nation, tough on crime, socially conservative, immigration-sceptic, anti-ID politics outlook of its lost tribe of voters, then Keir Starmer would not be the man to lead it.

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