Theresa May has been visiting Stoke-on-Trent today ahead of the ‘really important’ by-election in the city on Thursday. That the Prime Minister is bothering to pitch up to a campaign in a Labour heartland suggests that the Tories at least think they are in with a fighting chance of winning the seat – otherwise it would be not just a waste of May’s time but also a bit embarrassing if they were seen to have thrown not just the kitchen sink but also the PM at the fight.
Labour, meanwhile, is throwing kitchen sinks wildly and at great expense in the two by-elections due this week, including buying the front page of the local newspaper in Copeland on a number of occasions to make stark warnings about the threats it claims the Tories pose to the local NHS in Cumbria. It is also working on expectation management for these fights, with Diane Abbott arguing yesterday that Labour could lose both by-elections but Jeremy Corbyn would still hold on as leader. She used words such as ‘difficult’ and ‘quite tight’ to describe the race.
Now, this doesn’t mean that Labour privately thinks it will lose. Often, expectation management is about encouraging the punditry to get excited about a possible defeat, only for the party to do far better than anyone expected – which in this case may be winning both seats. But if holding two seats in Labour’s heartlands is now to be described as a ‘surprisingly good performance’, then it shows the trouble the party is in.
That trouble could be worse were Ukip not having a rather tricky by-election fight in Stoke. Paul Nuttall has had to clarify whether he or other people did or didn’t say untrue things about his life, with two Ukip chairmen in Liverpool quitting in protest at the revelation that Nuttall did not, as his own website had claimed, have close friends who died in the Hillsborough disaster. A more bizarre campaign trail row involved a Ukip activist trying to force his way into an OAP’s home after urinating on her fence.
It could be that these incidents do not have the same impact with the voters Ukip is targeting as they do in the media. But they do underline that the party is not the slick fighting force that swept Scottish Labour away in the party’s heartlands in 2015. Which may give a little heart to other Labour MPs currently stocking up on kitchen sinks to throw at their own seats in ‘heartland’ territory.
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