The Conservatives are radically reshaping the UK in their image. Keir Starmer urgently needs an alternative vision
Last week, a senior member of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet told me: “If the Tories can win Hartlepool, nowhere is safe. They can win anywhere.” A seat that had been Labour since its creation, slap-bang in what the party once called its heartlands, its significance was painfully obvious to Starmer’s team. They had moulded their leader and their entire strategy around winning back the “red wall”, and here was their first crucial test. Even amid the largest ever set of polls outside a general election, senior officials at party HQ kicked off their operations meeting each morning with a discussion of this one constituency 260 miles up the M1. Time, money, staff: they threw whatever they could at it.
They still got bulldozered. Hartlepool has voted by a landslide for a Conservative who, by her own admission, has spent more time in the Cayman Islands than in the town she will from next week represent at Westminster. And the really bad news for Labour is: there’s much more bad news to come.
