Hartlepool by-election polls: all the runners and the favourite to win

Keir Starmer is facing potential disaster in the first major ballot box test of his leadership as latest polls suggest that another keystone in Labour’s “Red Wall” will turn blue this week.

The latest survey ahead of the Hartlepool vote on Thursday gives the Conservatives a 17-point lead in what has become a “crucial by-election battle for a Labour stronghold”, reports The Independent. Such a result would be “just the third time in 50 years a governing party has gained a seat at a by-election”, says the newspaper.

Why is there a by-election?

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The 6 May vote in the constituency of Hartlepool in County Durham was triggered by the resignation of Labour MP Mike Hill, who is due to face an employment tribunal later this year into claims of sexual harassment and victimisation.

Hill has denied the allegations, but the row threatens to result in a major loss for his party, which has held Hartlepool since the seat was created back in 1974.

The runners

• Labour - Paul Williams, a GP and former MP for Stockton South from 2017 to 2019
• Conservative - Jill Mortimer, a farmer who sits on Hambleton District Council
• Reform UK (previously the Brexit Party) - John Prescott, a self-employed businessman (rather than the former Labour deputy prime minister)
• Liberal Democrats - Andy Hagon, a school teacher and the party’s candidate in 2017 and 2019
• Greens - Rachel Featherstone, a university lecturer
• Social Democratic Party (SDP) - David Bettney, a former soldier and entrepreneur in the oil and gas industry
• North East - Hilton Dawson, a celebrant and former Labour MP for Lancaster and Wyre from 1997 to 2005
• Women’s Equality - Gemma Evans, a campaigner and abuse survivor
• Freedom Alliance - Steve Jack
• Heritage Party - Claire Martin
• Independent - Adam Gaines, a pub owner who has pledged to give half his MP salary to food banks should he win
• Independent - Samantha Lee, a former sports journalist who later started her own PR firm
• Independent - Chris Killick
• Independent - W. Ralph Ward-Jackson, a businessman and descendant of man who built West Hartlepool
• Independent - Thelma Walker, former teacher and Labour MP for Colne Valley from 2017 to 2019. She is endorsed by the Northern Independence Party but appears as an independent as the party was not registered by the Electoral Commission in time
• Monster Raving Loony - Nick “The Incredible Flying Brick” Delves, who has previously stood (unsuccessfully) in ten parliamentary elections around the country

What the polls say

• In the 2019 general election, Labour picked up 37.7% of the vote in Hartlepool, while the Tories came in second with 28.9%. The Brexit Party was a close third with 25.8%, while the Liberal Democrats trailed with only 4.1%.
• A poll by Focaldata for The Times in March gave Labour a slim lead of three points, with 39% of the vote to the Conservatives’ 36%. Reform UK, renamed from the Brexit Party in January, was still in third place - but with only 9%.
• Another poll published in April, by Survation for the Communication Workers Union, put the Tories in the lead by seven points: 49% to 42%. Reform UK’s support collapsed to 1%, with former Labour MP Walker, aligned to the Northern Independence Party, in third place with 2%.
• With the by-election just two days away, the Conservative lead has grown to 17 points, according to a new poll from Survation, for ITV’s Good Morning Britain. Half of the Hartlepool residents interviewed said they would vote for Mortimer, while just a third backed Williams.

What the bookmakers say

The bookies have shortened their odds on a victory for the Conservatives to as low as 2/9, while Labour’s odds have drifted to 4/1, according to betting aggregator Oddschecker.

Why does it matter?

The Hartlepool by-election has become a “bellwether for the biggest issues that have consumed the UK in years”, explains the FT Magazine. It will gauge whether the public has forgiven Boris Johnson “for early missteps in the handling of the Covid-19 crisis, or whether the success of the vaccine rollout across Britain is now foremost in voters’ minds”, it says.

If the Tories triumph in Hartlepool, it will demonstrate the extent to which Johnson’s party “has reinvented itself as a home for blue-collar workers” and also represent a “severe setback” for Labour’s Starmer, says the magazine.

One MP told The Telegraph: “I think we probably are in trouble up there.” They added that if the latest Survation poll turned out to be accurate it was “going to call for a major change in direction for the party”.

But Stephen Bush at the New Statesman has argued that “any analysis of what the Hartlepool by-election result ‘means’ needs to be taken alongside the local elections that will take place the same day”. In Hartlepool, that includes elections for the local council and the Tees Valley metro-mayor, he says.

Bush predicts that if Labour cleans up in the other elections, it might just mean Starmer chose the wrong candidate in former Stockton South MP Williams, a strong EU supporter now standing in a heavily Eurosceptic constituency.

“That’s not an existential crisis but one that would require a change of approach in the leader’s office,” Bush concludes.

The Daily Mirror also suggests that Starmer will not be wholly to blame if Labour loses.

The seat “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”, says the newspaper.

So if the Tories - who are benefitting from a “vaccination bounce” in the poll - now claim Hartlepool, it will be a “heavy but unsurprising blow” for the Labour leader.

Starmer has admitted it was “a mountain to climb”. He told BBC Radio 4 he would take full responsibility for the result, but added: “I don’t think anybody realistically thought that it was possible to turn the Labour Party round from the worst general election result since 1935 to a position to win the next general election within a period of one year.”