Transcript: Tory ‘red wall’ seats under threat

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Tory ‘red wall’ seats under threat’

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Lucy Fisher
Is the “red wall” about to come tumbling down? Welcome to Political Fix, your essential insider guide to Westminster from the Financial Times with me, Lucy Fisher. Coming up, we’ll be examining the Conservative party’s chances of holding on to those voters who switched to them from Labour in 2019, and looking at some of the reasons behind the failures of levelling up. With me here in the FT studio to discuss some of this are my FT colleagues Stephen Bush. Hi, Stephen.

Stephen Bush
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And Jim Pickard. Hi, Jim.

Jim Pickard
Hello.

Lucy Fisher
And we’re also joined by Luke Tryl, the UK director of the think-tank and consultancy More in Common, founded in the aftermath of the murder of the MP Jo Cox in 2016. Hi, Luke.

Luke Tryl
Hello.

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Lucy Fisher
So first off, it seems obvious we need to just establish what is the red wall? Luke, do you wanna just take us through that?

Luke Tryl
The red wall is a group of seats that, on the face of it, were historically safe Labour seats, but actually looked, if you looked at the demographics, much more like Tory seats — if you looked at the age profile, the demographic profile, the home ownership profile, they look like they should have been Tory seats actually much sooner than they were. And then what happened in both 2017 — and I think people forget the 2017 bit — but also 2019, is that a combination of Brexit but also the Conservative party’s pivot towards being more right on social issues but sort of more left actually on lots of economic issues, unanchored them from the Labour party. And these seats switched. So they went from this long allegiance to the Labour party to voting Conservative in 2019.

Lucy Fisher
And there’s how many of them? 50-odd, is it fair to say?

Luke Tryl
It’s about 50, yes, if you include the ones in 2017, which fell as well. It’s about 50 seats. And the reason they’re called the wall is that lots of them are around the M62 corridor, which goes across the north of England.

Lucy Fisher
So they’re broadly in the North Midlands.

Luke Tryl
North Midlands.

Lucy Fisher
Jim, Luke mentioned Brexit being a huge factor in the switch taking place across the red wall. Of course Boris Johnson and his appeal to voters there was another factor, and disdain for Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader in the 2019 election. And now, of course, none of those factors pertain. So I just want to have a look at some of those issues and whether the Tories can try and reprise a campaign based on retooling some of that. Let’s start with Boris Johnson. There’s been some murmurs about him potentially campaigning for the party ahead of the election. I mean, firstly, do you think he actually will bother to do that? And secondly, would just having him out and about in a battle bus make any difference to the party’s chances, do you think?

Jim Pickard
So I took with a pinch of salt this idea that Boris Johnson is gonna be front and centre in the Conservative general election campaign. They’ll obviously send him out to a few places. He will not want to look like he’s completely in a massive sulk. But the public know that Boris Johnson no longer a leader of the Conservative party, no longer a cabinet minister, no longer even a Tory MP, so I know limits to how much he can move the dial.

In theory as well, you know, I’ve seen polling suggesting that actually, Boris Johnson is much more unpopular than he was in 2019 because of partygate in particular and this idea that the leadership of the Conservative party were hosting these parties in Whitehall while everyone else was kind of locked down and unable to attend their relatives’ funerals and all the rest of it. Of course, Boris Johnson would maintain that he was unaware that a lot of these parties were happening at the time in his defence.

So when I was in Grimsby for an article for the FT a couple of weeks ago on the coast of North East Lincolnshire, just below the Humber; it’s a former fishing port and it still processes an awful lot of fish brought in from Iceland, but it no longer has these 650 boats that used to used to go fishing in the North Sea. That industry has faded over the years, down to just half a dozen crab vessels. And there’s a lot of resentment locally that maybe belonging to the EU was one of the reasons for this decline, and thus it was one of the most Leave voting seats in the country. And therefore it was quite a sort of seminal moment when that flips the Conservatives partly off the back of Brexit.

So anyway, so I was in Grimsby and I still found a lot of residual affection for Boris Johnson. And, you know, he made a point of visiting Grimsby quite a few times, including during the 2019 election campaign. He likes to wear or he used to like to wear a Grimsby FC hat. And so there’s still a lot of fondness for him there but not a lot of fondness for his successor, Rishi Sunak.

Lucy Fisher
And we’ll come on to how Sunak’s viewed in the red wall shortly. Stephen, could the Tories reignite the Brexit ardour with a pledge to leave the European Convention on Human Rights? I mean, we know this is a conversation taking place in the party. Could that seize people’s imagination in the same way that Brexit did in the red wall?

Stephen Bush
I don’t think so. I think that a really important part of why Brexit was so important as a mover of votes is people actually had voted for it themselves first. So people have a much stronger relationship with their Brexit vote. It was one of those things where it felt like, you know, someone’s been going around the country. It’s hard to get people to tell you what they . . . I feel that people’s Brexit vote was a thing they often could not wait to tell you. You know, like you’d almost like have your hand on the knocker and someone would, you know, that someone was like, oh yeah, by the way, I am voting for Leave. And I just don’t think that a court that people don’t really understand and has some nebulous link to an area that the Conservative party is no longer trusted on is going to reconfigure voting patterns in the same way as this direct thing that we all did in the remain/leave referendum. So I just don’t think it will really work.

Lucy Fisher
Luke, the third 2019 factor I mentioned was Jeremy Corbyn. He was widely seen as this threat to national security for many voters. We know already there’s this attack campaign against Keir Starmer from the Conservatives. They’re trying to link him very closely to his defence of terrorists back in his previous career as a barrister. Is that having any purchase? What are the focus groups that you host showing about what voters in the red wall think of Starmer?

Luke Tryl
Well, so the interesting thing is that red wall voters are very clear that Keir Starmer is not Jeremy Corbyn. And I think that’s very important for the Labour leader. You are definitely right. In these seats people will still talk about Jeremy Corbyn and sort of recoil and say, you know, the thought of that man being in Downing Street. He really was a key factor in breaking that link between these seats, these voters and the Labour party. So they definitely don’t think that he’s Jeremy Corbyn 2.0.

What they tend to think, actually, and this is, you know, either a good or a bad thing, depending on whether you think this is a safety first election or . . . They basically sort of say Starmer is a bit meh, that he . . . They don’t really know what he stands for. And the “Captain Hindsight” thing comes back in focus groups. They say he just opposes, doesn’t he? He does the opposite to the Conservatives. He doesn’t have a vision, so they’re definitely not enthused by him. I also don’t think they’re worried by him.

And on the sort of lawyer charges we did some polling on this recently and it really is a minority that actually think it is an issue that he represented these people. Most people understand that, you know, lawyers, you represent people. It’s your job. They don’t associate you with them. I think the more worrying one, though, for Keir Starmer is we do find still, and it comes up quite regularly, particularly in more red wall focus groups, is his record as DPP, and in particular the Jimmy Savile criticism that comes up quite often, you know, and groups of people have read it online somewhere and they don’t know the full facts.

Lucy Fisher
So what do they think happened compared with what did happen?

Luke Tryl
So they basically say he didn’t prosecute Jimmy Savile. You know, a typical person might say, oh, he didn’t prosecute because they’re both members of the aristocracy. They’re both Sirs, they’re all in it together. It’s that sense of he didn’t do it because he was part of the club. And I actually think that’s a risk for Starmer on two levels. One is obviously, he didn’t prosecute Jimmy Savile. And that’s been, you know, so widely debunked, you know, across the media.

But secondly, it goes to Starmer’s other problem, which is that people think he’s a member of the establishment. So I get time and time again people saying things like, well, he’s a Sir; had someone in a focus group, he wasn’t the only person who said Tony Benn gave his title up. Why won’t Keir Starmer do the same if he wants to get in? They don’t realise that it isn’t a hereditary thing that he was born into. So I do think that’s a challenge. But the good news, I’m sure we’ll come on to it, is that he’s in a far better position than Rishi Sunak is among these voters. So, you know, people basically are lukewarm or mildly dislike Keir Starmer. Rishi Sunak is way down and way underwater with them.

Jim Pickard
I think as well, just going back to what Luke was saying earlier about what is the red wall and what was happening there, I think the sort of macro picture of British politics over the last 10 or 20 years is that the axis has shifted from people voting out of economic self-interest. So in the old days, if you had loads of money and a high income, you’re a Conservative. If you were a sweeping generalisation blue collar, you would head towards the Labour party and they would look after your interests financially more.

And we’ve moved much more with the arrival of social media and with the arrival of issues like Brexit, we’ve moved much more down an avenue of cultural differences and things like how do you feel about EU bureaucrats? How do you feel about net zero? How do you feel about the trans issue? These have become the kind of live rails on which our politics has changed very much. And therefore the red wall was one manifestation of this in that, you know, an awful lot of people in council estates in places like the North East and the Midlands were voting Conservative for the very first time.

And meanwhile, the Labour party was stacking up votes among university graduates in inner cities. You had these kind of liberal views on a whole load of different issues, and therefore they were getting massive majorities in places like central London but they were losing out at the other end. I think that’s quite a sort of important element, adding to this.

Lucy Fisher
And can I just jump in there, Jim, because you remind me of the big pitch that Boris Johnson made in the run-up to 2019 to voters in the red wall who had traditionally always backed Labour, was “Lend us your vote”. Lend us your vote on the Brexit question and we will work night and day to win your trust and ensure you don’t switch back. And Stephen, a big part of that second half of the programme to retain the trust of these voters was the concept of levelling up. But that’s just not really happened, has it?

Stephen Bus
No. I mean, look, in some ways, I think what’s happening in the red wall and indeed in marginals as a whole is not that deep, right? Like Boris Johnson moved his party to the left, right? Like the position he ran on in 2019 was considerably to the left of where Cameron fought in 2010 and 2015, a reasonable amount of the left where Theresa May fought in 2017. And surprise, surprise, the closer you get to the median vote voter, the better you do electorally.

Levelling up hasn’t really happened. I think it’s a reasonable argument. That was a sensible bit of homework for a government to set itself within a single parliamentary term. The condition of hospitals got worse. Broadly speaking, people do not feel that the promise on policing has been kept. And now the Conservatives are led by someone whose plan for the election is to go into it going, we will keep cutting public spending until we have reduced it by enough to eliminate national insurance. I mean, unsurprisingly, the promise from Boris Johnson was “I am a different type of Conservative”. And Rishi Sunak’s plan is to go to the country going, “No, no, no, I’m not a different type of Conservative at all”. I mean, how would we expect that to play out other than with a Tory defeat?

Lucy Fisher
I mean, Luke, do you agree that levelling up has failed? Do you think there’s some aspects in which it’s worked? Do voters in the red wall feel a betrayal about that specifically, beyond the issues that Stephen rightly points out — you know, concerns about cost of living and with the NHS?

Luke Tryl
It is really interesting. Levelling up is, I would say, the one Whitehall Westminster policy which has really cut through in focus groups. People say, we were promised this. We were told we were getting this levelling up. And most people say it now hasn’t happened. It was just another broken promise. Occasionally people are a bit generous and they say, well, you know, there was the pandemic and they had to deal with all of that. And I actually think it’s contributed quite a lot to growing cynicism because you have this group of voters who exactly Boris Johnson said, you know, lend me your vote, but also said, we’ve listened. We’ve heard what you said in the Brexit referendum. We then heard what you said in 2019. Now we’re going to do things differently. And levelling up was supposed to be the embodiment of that. And I think, you know, you’ve got genuine excitement about it from people. And I think the failure of that has actually led to cynicism being worse than it was before.

In fairness, you do get some people say, and actually, we did a lot of work in Rochdale, which is sort of red wall-adjacent, in some ways. Some bits of it are similar to red wall seats. And you did get some people in focus groups say, well, the town centre’s a bit better. We’ve had a bit of investment. But it’s . . . 

Lucy Fisher
And this is the town’s fund where kind of several million given to various different . . . 

Luke Tryl
Exactly. And people do notice that. But I think it’s interesting that Stephen talked about crime because A, we are definitely hearing much more about crime in focus groups and the sense the police have just given up. But also, people link it directly to levelling up. What they say is there’s just no point in making anywhere nice, because it’s just gonna be trashed in a couple of weeks. So I think the problem with levelling up is A, it hasn’t delivered much but B, it’s so linked with those other issues: crime and also the cost of living, right? If you can’t afford to go to the town centre shopping, you’re not gonna appreciate it as much. So it’s very difficult. It was a hard challenge the Conservatives set themselves. I don’t think they’ve delivered against it.

Lucy Fisher
Jim, what is Labour’s offer to the red wall, or is it simply enough for them to sort of ride this wave of people thinking it’s time for a change after 14 years of Conservative rule?

Jim Pickard
So I think that there’s two questions within that, one of which is, are the public listening to and hearing what Labour’s offer is? And I don’t know what Luke’s finding in focus groups, but the impression I get is that people in general aren’t quite sure what Labour stands for or what it would do. But in terms of what they think the offer is, I think in terms of the manifesto that’s taking shape at the moment and the national policy forum-like shopping list of policies from last year, the things that they think they can sell in the red wall are probably the two main ones: are the New Deal on employment rights, you know, aimed fairly and squarely at working people. You know, strengthening your rights for maternity leave, paternity leave, removing zero-hours contracts, how can people’s right to go on strike, that kind of thing they think is or ought to be something that would be popular among blue-collar red wall voters.

And they are also trying to create the narrative in the way that Joe Biden did in the US that the green transition on which Labour would spend more than the Conservatives, despite having reined back their massive green prosperity plan to quite some extent. They’re still arguing that they would put more money into the green transition. And a lot of the opportunities for things like wind farms and for carbon capture and storage and the whole low-carbon economy dovetails with some of these left-behind post-industrial areas. So for example, you know, when you go to Grimsby, there are deep scars from the virtual elimination of the fishing industry. But there is a nascent offshore wind industry there which employs over 1,000, close to 2,000 people and looks like it’s growing quite fast. The issue within a town like Grimsby though is how many of the jobs are people from Denmark or elsewhere in Europe — you know, skilled engineers coming into the country — and how many are British people working there, and how fast can you train up teenagers and young adults in a town like Grimsby to be able to work on these offshore wind farms? But there is optimism in the end that it’s possible. But not every single red wall seat has that potential, and therefore it’s an argument that will work better in some places than others. And the Conservatives, of course, are making that argument in Teesside, where Ben Houchen, the local mayor, is trying to encourage green industries there as well.

Lucy Fisher
And Stephen, what about the Conservatives? They seem to be quite far behind Labour in their manifesto formation. Is there anything they can offer to the red wall, or do you think that they should actually pivot to the blue wall now? Because one of the things about the red wall is the vast majority of the seats that were won have pretty small majorities. So if there is a big national uniform swing to Labour, are these seats already lost?

Stephen Bush
Broadly speaking, right, if you’re a party that’s 20 points behind in the polls and there’s a huge dissatisfaction with the public services and the economy, you probably are better off just going, well, we’re not going to contest these marginal seats, which is broadly speaking what Labour did in 2010, right? That is the difference between the 2010 result Labour got and the 1997 result the Conservatives got. Those were both, in terms of the popular vote, were sharp repudiations of the government in question.

But the Labour party, partly helped by the fact that Gordon Brown, you know, that the coup against him had failed and he was so internally unchallengeable, made some pretty ruthless resourcing decisions. You know, you had sitting MPs who were basically told, well, I don’t care that you had two full-time organisers last time. You don’t have any now. Your money is whatever you can raise locally, you know. Good night and good luck. And that’s what helped them to build up that actually very efficient electoral coalition they still had in 2010.

If the Conservatives obviously would be better off doing that, right, then broadly speaking, anything that changes the political mood in the marginals will be something that changes the political mood in the country as a whole. That will be a kind of air war and a policy war. I think it was entirely correct. Both, actually. It’s just true about what life is like in Surrey, but also in terms of what the Conservatives ought to be saying. Jeremy Hunt saying £100,000 is not a lot of money to live on is exactly the kind of thing the Conservatives need to be saying, because that is the difference between 160 seats and 260 seats. One of the many, many risks in the current Conservative leadership is taking is that they still are, if you look at where they’re resourcing, they’re still fighting the old 80-20 campaign. So this was a target to win 20 extra seats from Labour and defend 80, a strategy which made a great deal of sense when Boris Johnson was leader, when they were riding high in the polls, when their political position was quite different to what it is now. They obviously need to jump right in and focus on a core vote strategy of getting people, you know, in Surrey who do not think that the Conservative party understands that they don’t have a lot of money floating around. They need to get back to . . . I can’t believe I would actually use the words back to basics. (Lucy laughs) So yeah, they should just forget about the marginals and focus on the core.

Lucy Fisher
OK. Well, I think the reason, perhaps, that the strategy is so confused is that there would be revolt in the parliamentary party if they made clear, admitted that they were ditching this 80-20 strategy. But there is growing concern among the blue wall about, you know, their failure to pivot to the core vote. Luke, it’s often said that, you know, parties always fight the last war. Perhaps the same is true of commentators analysing the last election in the lead-up to the next. But without wanting to completely destroy the premise of this entire podcast, you know, is it worth trying to save the red wall? There was a lot of talk after the immediate outcome of 2019 that this spoke to a shift in the tectonic plates of the party. The Tories were now, like the Republicans in the US, the party of blue-collar workers, whereas Labour’s the party of kind of liberals, richer people in cities with higher education levels. What do you think?

Luke Tryl
I think the truth is that red wall seats have basically moved more towards becoming classic bellwether seats and as a result, in a change election, I think the Conservatives are going to lose most of them on that basis. What has happened in the UK is we have had some realignment, but it hasn’t been as strong as it was in the US, in part because we don’t have such stark regional differences as you have in the US. And I actually often prefer to speak about the sort of typical red wall voter rather than the seat. And by that I mean that profile of someone who is sort of socially Conservative but left-leaning economically, because chat to lots of Tory MPs in even safe seats in 2019 and they will say, the nature of my vote changed in that election. You know, I was chatting to an MP from a coastal city who was like, I was getting more votes from my estates than I ever got and losing them in some of the leafier areas because it was a type of person that switched rather than just a seat. And I think that will continue to some degree. But I think the real challenge, and it goes to what Stephen said, we’re trying to recreate the red wall is, that this is not a Conservative party which is currently geared up to it. They didn’t lean into the realignment in the same way that the Republicans did. For good or ill, Sunak doesn’t go down well in the red wall. He actually goes down much better in blue wall seats and that’s part . . . 

Lucy Fisher
Pause on that for a second. So I wanted to come back to you to ask you what, you know, you spoke about Starmer in your focus groups. What do voters say about Sunak in the red wall?

Luke Tryl
So it’s two things. It has always been that he’s too rich. And what seems to have really stuck in the red wall when we talk to people are the wealth gaffes. So, you know, people in the red wall don’t mind people being rich, but the gaffes have really stuck and the number of times people . . . 

Lucy Fisher
What are the gaffes? Like the Peloton bike or . . .?

Luke Tryl
So, not the Pel—. So the one we get a lot is the Prada shoes on the building site, because it makes people think you have more money than sense. And his family’s tax affairs come up a lot as well, because it seemed to embody that kind of one rule piece. I think the more worrying thing, though, is that it started there, but it’s shifted since he became PM. You’ve still got those concerns. He’s out of touch during a cost of living crisis. He doesn’t get it. But what’s come in as well is the sense that he’s weak. So people will say, well, he’s not in control. You know, he’s not driving the car anymore. And you also get a lot of people saying, which, you know, someone who is actively engaged in politics in Westminster, I don’t see. But it’s clearly a thing for the public because of how much we see and hear it. It’s, he’s disappeared. People say they don’t see him ever. And they will contrast that with Boris. And even though, as far as I can tell, Rishi is in the red wall almost as much as Boris, they will say that Boris was always up here doing stuff. And, you know, maybe that’s a product of Sunak’s personality. You know, he’s more restrained; Boris, very large. But that combination is making him unpopular.

In the blue wall, though, it’s quite different. You know, people basically think he’s David Cameron 2.0. They didn’t recognise that he’s actually quite to the right of David Cameron, particularly on social issues. And I think the real danger for the Conservatives is that they fall between two stools. They end up trying to claim back the red wall, which it looks like it’s already lost. But also in doing so, they alienate more of this blue wall with things like the ECHR, which we know in the blue wall actually, they see it as a Brexit 2.0, which they really don’t want, and you end up losing both. So I think, you know, time to pick.

Lucy Fisher
Interesting. Jim, how well are Reform going to do in the general election, do you think? Are they underpriced or overpriced at the moment?

Jim Pickard
So I think there’s a popular narrative growing that Reform is this kind of awakening beast, which is just growing in strength with every passing week. And of course, if you look at the raw polling data, you know, the numbers have been ticking up, and I think I saw a poll where they reached about 15 per cent the other day, which was only several points behind the Conservatives.

I think what we saw in Rochdale, though, was a reminder that, you know, that saw the local candidate, Simon Danczuk, do pretty badly, way behind two independents at the top of the pack there. And that was a bit of a salutary reminder that Reform don’t necessarily have a magic touch. I think the question that I’m very interested in is whether they’re gonna stand everywhere, or will they do what the Brexit party did in 2019, which is in the end, they pulled their punches and there were an awful lot of seats they didn’t stand in for the benefit of the Conservatives.

It was very striking to me that in Great Grimsby I was up there probably three weeks ago and they still didn’t have a candidate there. That seems to me quite telling. You’d have thought they would by now. And then there is the big factor that we all know about, which is, is Nigel Farage, who’s of course, you know, the most influential man in British politics for the last 20 years. Is he gonna come back and play a massive role in that campaign, which would move the dial one way or another?

Lucy Fisher
Well, I just want to ask each of you if there’s one particular red wall seat that you are looking out for in the general election as being particularly interesting. Stephen, is there any that’s caught your eye?

Stephen Bush
So I’ll firmly be a spoilsport and say in some ways none of them, right? Because the thing which is interesting about them as a category is their seats, which look like they should be Conservative-Labour marginals, but they actually have much less in common with each other as a band of seats than they do with other alt/more reliable marginals. So like, say, Don Valley, Caroline Flint’s old seat, is your classic well-to-do suburban constituency now where, you know, very few people work in the constituency because they commute elsewhere to somewhere else.

And then you have Grimsby, which is again a typical marginal of the type that we’ve seen quite a lot of in Kent, but it hasn’t voted like those marginals in Kent before. So I think to me the thing I’m really interested in is when the dust settles, do . . . When we look at all of the new majorities in these seats by order, does Don Valley look more like a regular suburban marginal seat, probably with a Labour MP as we would expect most suburban marginal seats have at the next election? Or does it still look a bit odd in one way or the other? And so I think that’s kind of the interesting story for all of the red wall constituencies, because going forward, the big political question is are these seats now, as Luke says, just traditional bellwether seats who act like regular marginals from now and into the future? Or is the Conservative party’s regional penalty gonna come back with a vengeance? Because in terms of the question of whether or not the Conservatives can come back after only one term in opposition, that is, I think, probably the biggest question about what happens in the red wall.

Lucy Fisher
Luke.

Luke Tryl
I’m slightly gonna be a spoilsport too and say I think there’s something more interesting to look at in the red wall, on red wall-adjacent areas before the general election, which is the metro mayors, because I think we will learn a lot from what happens in those elections because they cover lots of these seats.

Lucy Fisher
So remind us which ones we’ve got. There’s been a lot talked about Ben Houchen, the poster boy for levelling up in Tees Valley. Where else have you’ve . . .?

Luke Tryl
You’ve got Ben Houchen, you’ve got this new, expanded North East mayoral election where you’ve got the really interesting dynamic, where you’ve got Jamie Driscoll, the current mayor of North of Tyne, running as an independent. And if Labour’s dissatisfaction, if that sense of, ugh, Labour’s winning by default across the country is true, Driscoll might actually do quite well off the back of that, which might change the narrative going into election. We’ve got the East Midlands for the first time, where Ben Bradley, the Tory MP, is the candidate — question about whether he can buck national trends and win there; Andy Street in the West Midlands, who has done a lot to distance himself from the Conservative brand; and probably the least interesting of in the sort of red wall adjacent areas is Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester, where we would expect him to win comfortably. But those other ones — actually, if they don’t enthusiastically embrace Labour, I suspect at least the narrative will shift a bit to are they sealing the deal in some of these red wall areas?

Lucy Fisher
Interesting. And I was struck by a Bloomberg story in recent days that showed that lots of the Conservative candidates, I think Ben Houchen and Andy Street in particular, have jettisoned Tory branding. They’re avoiding the colour blue, favouring green. So it shows, I think, that they fear that the Tory brand is quite toxic. Jim, any red wall seat that you’d like to flag?

Jim Pickard
I think Luke and Stephen are spoilsports for not picking an individual red wall seat. I want to go back to Hartlepool because I went there in the spring of 2021 and I went on to write a magazine piece with Sebastian Payne, formerly of this parish, about, you know, the red wall and the problems facing Keir Starmer at the time. We did that piece right at the moment where morale in the Labour party was at rock bottom. Boris Johnson was riding high. He had the vaccine bounce and a lot of the local elections taking place in May are gonna be off the back of that Tory high point. So that’s one reason it’s gonna look particularly terrible for the Conservative party.

But the thing about Hartlepool was, you know, it was a town, you know, on a sweeping headland, you know, really independent-minded people. A lot of local councillors there, very high proportion of independents rather than party politics. You remember the story about Peter Mandelson stepping forth there and mistaking mushy peas for guacamole anecdotally. It’s a town full of history and colour but it’s also a very deprived place with high unemployment, a lot of deprivation. You can buy a flat on the headlands, look out across the beautiful sea for something like £30,000. It has huge deprivation and therefore it was always bizarre in conventional political thinking that that would fall to the Conservatives. And of course it didn’t in 2019, but it did in that by-election early 2021. I would love to go back and talk to people there about how they feel now.

Lucy Fisher
Well, I look forward to reading your work when you when you do go back.

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Now, just finally we’ve got time for the Political Fix stock picks. I’m gonna ask you to focus your choices this week on the red wall. Luke, who are you buying or selling in the red wall?

Luke Tryl
Well, I think it’s a moment when we can decide whether we buy or sell Reform with the Blackpool South by-election because that by-election in a, you know, red wall seat should have all of the ingredients for a major Reform success: high Brexit vote, reasonable levels of deprivation. When you do focus groups in the seat it is very much a pox on all your houses-type attitude. And so I think we will know from that how real this Reform voter is. You know, we would expect them to be hitting 20 per cent plus if the polls are right. If they don’t hit that, I think we can start selling Reform.

Lucy Fisher
Jim.

Jim Pickard
So I’m gonna pick Melanie Onn and Mary Creagh. These are two of more than a dozen former Labour MPs who are standing again and are likely to get back into parliament, and it seems a particularly high number of retreads. We also have Doug Alexander in Scotland, the former cabinet member coming back again. It’s an interesting trend to watch.

Lucy Fisher
Stephen.

Stephen Bush
I’m actually going to buy the Conservative party, right, because . . . 

Lucy Fisher
(Laughter) OK. Explain.

Jim Pickard
They’re quite cheap.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, yeah. The price is really low right now. They’re gonna lose basically everything in the red wall. The price has never been lower. And I think broadly speaking, what we are going to see in the red wall, and I think what we’re already seeing in local elections and by-elections, is that the seats — including ones which had moved a lot before 2017, so places like Staffordshire, right, these huge Conservative majorities, seats that looked like they were realigning to become very safe, swinging back hugely in the other direction in local elections and of course, in the Tamworth by-election. I think this is basically we just have many, many more marginals than we used to so our politics is gonna start to look much more Canadian, ie, much swingier. I think just as the Labour party was, including by many people in the Labour party, overly written off in 2019 and 2021. I think the same thing will happen to the Conservatives in the red wall. They’ll lose everything. Everyone will go like, oh, you know, that’s done. They’re out for a generation. And I think that won’t necessarily be true because there’s gonna be a lot more marginals. And that means any political parties ability to come back from the dead is gonna be much greater than it would have been 10, 15 years ago.

Lucy Fisher
Well, there’s nothing I love more than a Stephen Bush counterintuitive take.

Stephen Bush
And what’s your stock pick, Lucy?

Lucy Fisher
I’m buying Jonathan Gullis, who in the past fortnight has been made deputy party chair. Now he’s quite a colourful character, having referred to some of his own constituents in his Stoke-on-Trent seat as “scrotes”, “scum” and “savages”. So might suggest the Conservative party and Rishi Sunak haven’t learnt from their errors with Lee Anderson, but, no. He’s a plain speaker that reaches parts of the electorate that I think some of the smoothie chops who come straight out of central casting in Westminster struggle to meet. So he’s obviously gonna be pretty front and centre of the election campaign.

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Well, that’s all we’ve got time for, so my thanks today to Luke Tryl, Jim Pickard and Stephen Bush.

Luke Tryl, Jim Pickard and Stephen Bush
Thank you.

Lucy Fisher
That’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. I’ve put links to subjects discussed in the episode in the show notes. Do check them out. They’re articles we’ve made free for Political Fix listeners. There’s also a link there to Stephen Bush’s award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You get 30 days free. And don’t forget to subscribe to the show. Plus, do you leave a review or a star rating if you have time. It really helps us spread the word.

Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Audrey Tinline with help from Leah Quinn. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Original music by Breen Turner and sound engineering by Simon Panayi. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. We’ll meet again here next week.

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