Byelections: Labour defeated by Tories in Copeland, but wins in Stoke – as it happened

Labour’s Cat Smith, the shadow minister for voter engagement and youth affairs, has got a remarkably upbeat take on the Copeland result. This is from ITVs’ Daniel Hewitt.

Trudy Harrison is speaking to Andrew Neil on the BBC’s This Week.

Q: Why did you win?

Because what I represent is what the people here need. And I know what that is because I have lived here all my life.

Q: When did you realise you might win?

It was over the last three weeks, says Harrison. She realised the area did not need one single solution. It needed a holistic plan. She hopes she can get ministers to deliver on it.

Q: What do you want?

Harrison says she wants the Moorside nuclear plan to go ahead.

Q: And will you save the hospital?

Harrison says she hopes so. She has already spoken to the health minister, Philip Dunne, about that.

The Press Association’s Ian Jones has some graphs that illustrate the results.

The psephologist John Curtice told the BBC that the swing from Labour to the Conservatives in Copeland, around 7%, was bigger than current national polling suggests.

He also said that this was the biggest gain, in share of the vote, by a governing party in a byelection since the Hull North byelection in 1966. (That was the one that led to the construction of the Humber Bridge.) He said that that result prompted Harold Wilson to call a general election later that year.

This is from BuzzFeed’s Jim Waterson in Copeland.

Jeremy Corbyn has responded on Twitter to Labour’s loss in Copeland.

Trudy Harrison and the Conservatives won with a majority of 2,147.

Mobbed by cameras leaving the hall in a chaotic exit that saw the Ukip leader chased up and down the street searching for his car while escorted by police, Nuttall denied he would resign. “No, I’m only 12 weeks in, come on, give me a break,” he said cheerfully.

We’ve unified the party, we’ll go forward. Ukip’s moving forward and this will happen. This seat was 72 on our target list, there is a lot more to come from us. We are not going anywhere, we move on. There are other issues beyond Brexit. Lots more seats will happen where we will have more success in the future.

Nuttall denied it was the controversy over his Hillsborough comments or home address in Stoke that had cost him the seat. “I’ve apologised for that. We move forward,” he said.

Paul Nuttall, the Ukip leader and unsuccessful Ukip candidate in Stoke, has been speaking to the media.

He said that he had cut Labour’s majority in half and unified the party like never before. “Ukip’s time will come,” he said.

He claimed that Stoke was only number 72 on Ukip list of target seats.

“We are not going away,” he said.

Asked if his admission that his website claim about losing close friends at Hillsborough being false had harmed his campaign, he said it had not come up on the doorstep.

And, asked if he would stand again for parliament, he said he was already a member of the European parliament. There would be other seats and other chances, he said. He said he would stand at the general election, but did not specify whether he would fight another byelection before then.

Here is the psephologist Matt Singh on the significance of the Stoke results.

Here is an extract from Gareth Snell’s victory speech.

In recent weeks Stoke-on-Trent has found itself in the national spotlight. Our city has been the focus of a media which all too often prefers to dwell on our problems instead of highlighting our achievements.

But over these last few weeks a city lazily dubbed by some as the capital of Brexit has once again proven to the world that we are so much more than that.

We are a city of innovators and educators, artists and entrepreneurs. We pioneered the first industrial revolution and I believe that we have the potential to lead the next one.

This city will not allow ourselves to be defined by last year’s referendum. And we will not allow ourselves to be divided by the result.

Nor will we be divided by race, or faith, or creed. We will move forward together to tackle the problems that we face and secure a brighter, more prosperous future for one another.

So for those who have come to Stoke-on-Trent to sow hatred and division, and to try to turn us away from our friends and neighbours, I have one message – you have failed.

Tonight the people of Stoke-on-Trent have chosen the politics of hope over the politics of fear. We have said with one voice that hatred and bigotry are not welcome here. This is a proud city and we stand together.

The psephologist John Curtice has just been giving his take to the BBC’s This Week. He says pundits saw this contest as a two-horse race, but they were wrong. The Conservatives remained strong here, he said. Their vote was not squeezed. In fact, their share of the vote went up two points. And he said this was only the sixth byelection since 1970 where the governing party saw its share of the vote increase.

Paul Nuttall focused on attacking Labour, Curtice said. But he should have focused more on trying to take votes from the Conservatives, Curtice said.

Gareth Snell has just been interviewed by Andrew Neil. Neil asked him if he thought Jeremy Corbyn was an asset in the campaign. Snell said he was. He said Corbyn helped to fire up the troops in the constituency.

Here is Gareth Snell’s victory speech.

Jeremy Corbyn has welcomed the result, saying Ukip’s claim to represent the working class has been exposed as a sham. A spokesman for the Labour leader said:

Labour’s excellent campaign has won a clear victory in an election Ukip and the Tories threw everything at.

Stoke has rejected Ukip’s politics of division and dishonesty. Ukip’s claim to represent working class people has been exposed as a sham.

Garth Snell’s Labour majority is 2,620.

The candidates are about to take to the stage now in Stoke.

At Stoke the agents and candidates have just been summoned to meet the returning officer. That normally means they are about to be told the results, before they are announced publicly.

And here is Paul Nuttall’s analysis of why he may have lost the Stoke byelection.

This is from my colleague Josh Halliday in Copeland.

Here is Paul Nuttall arriving at the count, to be greeted by one of the “loony” contingent.

Echoing what Labour’s Jack Dromey said earlier (see 1.07pm), the Lib Dem leader Tim Farron has said that losing Stoke would be “the beginning of the end for Ukip”.

This is the beginning of the end for Ukip. They no longer have a purpose.

Theresa May has adopted Farage’s approach to Brexit and her government has become indistinguishable from Ukip.

Here is the Labour candidate in Stoke, Gareth Snell, with his wife Sophia.

Ukip’s Paul Nuttall was not very forthcoming when he arrived, the Evening Standard’s Kate Proctor says.

At Stoke the candidates are being invited to check the last few doubtful papers. That means we’re now very close.

This is from BuzzFeed’s Jim Waterson at Copeland.

Paul Nuttall, the Ukip leader and Stoke candidate, has just arrived at the count.

Labours’ Jack Dromey has just been speaking to Andrew Neil on This Week. Neil asked him if Tony Blair’s speech about the need to reverse Brexit, or Lord Mandelson’s declaration that he works on undermining Jeremy Corbyn every day, had damaged the campaign in this seat. Dromey said they hadn’t.

The psephologist John Curtice has just told This Week that, if Labour lose Copeland, it will be the worst defeat for the opposition at the hands of the government party since 1945.

He said that since 1945 the main opposition party has only lost byelections to the governing party on three occasions. One of those was at Mitcham and Morden (see 10.52pm). The other two were Brighouse and Spenborough in 1960, when Labour lost the seat to a Conservative/National Liberal candidate (a Tory, essentially), and Sunderland South in 1953, when Labour lost to the Conservatives.

Curtice said in all three of those seats Labour’s majority was lower than it was at Copeland. That is why Copeland would be the worst byelection defeat for an opposition to a party of government since the second world war, he said.

Labour’s Gareth Snell arrived at the count in Stoke a few minutes ago with local Labour MP Ruth Smeeth. They are looking extremely cheerful, Smeeth and Labour’s campaign chief Jack Dromey high-fived as she came in.

Speaking to journalists earlier, Dromey said he hoped Ukip would learn lessons if the party was defeated. He said:

If you have a carpet bagger with a loose sense of the truth who comes to a great city like Stoke and seeks to exploit for his own advantage and then comes unstuck, as we hope he will do, that’s the big lesson from tonight.

Labour sources are extremely pleased with the 38% turn-out. “Our huge final hours ‘get out the vote’ operation in Stoke appears to have made all the difference,” one source said.

At Stoke the candidates have just been summoned to go over doubtful papers with the returning officer. That suggests we might get a result quite soon.

The Ukip chairman Paul Oakden has told the Press Association that losing Stoke will not affect Paul Nuttall’s leadership of the party. Asked what would happen if Nuttall did not win, Oakden said:

He has a well-earned rest and then he comes back and leads our party, I suspect.

The whole narrative of Paul’s leadership depends on winning in Stoke is a nonsense.

The membership are behind Paul, they want him to be leader of the party, he wants to be leader of the party and whatever the result here is, that’s not going to change.

Matthew Hancock, the culture minister, is the Conservative figure on the BBC’s This Week tonight. But he came a cropper when asked if he could name the Conservative candidate in Stoke.

At Stoke Jack Dromey, the Labour campaign manager, has been telling journalists that a Labour victory here would be a “defining moment” in politics because it would show the Ukip incapable of making a breakthrough.

When Paul Nuttall was elected Ukip leader in November, he gave a speech saying he wanted his party to replace Labour. He said:

My ambition is not insignificant: I want to replace the Labour party and make Ukip the patriotic voice of working people.

Dromey also said that if Labour did win in Stoke, it needed to react with “necessary humility”. He said:

I hope we win. I think as we win we need necessary humility because there is a view that Labour is no longer listening in the way it should do.

I think what we have done in this community is precisely to do that [listen].

The Ukip MEP Gerard Batten is at the Stoke count and is being interview by Andrew Neil on This Week now. He says it is too soon to know what the result will be but, as Neil points out, he does not sound very confident.

Batten complains that Paul Nuttall, the Ukip leader and Stoke candidate, has been the victim of a character assassination by the media.

This is from Sky’s Faisal Islam at the Stoke count.

At the 2015 general election Stoke had the lowest turnout in Britain. That record, combined with today’s storm, meant people were expecting another very low turnout today. But, at 38%, the turnout was by no means the lowest for byelections this parliament. It was lower at Sleaford and North Hykeham (37%) and at Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (33%). It was also much lower at Batley and Spen (26%), but that is understandable because the main parties did not put up anyone up against the Labour candidate chosen to replace the murdered Jo Cox.

At 51% the turnout in Copeland was the second highest of the 10 byelections held this parliament. It was only higher in Richmond Park (53%).

Alan Johnson, the Labour former home secretary, is on Andrew Neil’s This Week programme tonight. Neil asked him what he would think about Labour losing Copeland. Johnson said it would “certainly” be “a bad byelection result”.

Byelections are there for oppositions to prosper. But I hope we prosper.

In Stoke the loonies have arrived.

MRLP = Monster Raving Loony party.

This, from Matt Singh, helps to explain what the Labour source I quoted earlier (see 11.46pm) meant when he talked about the boxes coming in from rural areas favouring the Conservatives.

Sky’s Faisal Islam says the turnout in Stoke is around 25-30%.

We are due to get the official figures in the next five minutes or so.

This is from Sky’s Tom Boadle.

The Lib Dems are now convinced that the Conservatives have won in Copeland, my colleague Jessica Elgot says.

The Sun’s Harry Cole is getting the same briefings.

I’ve updated the post at 10.52pm to include one more case of the main opposition party losing a seat at a byelection, Glasgow Govan in 1988. You may need to refresh the page to get the update to appear.

Jamie Reed, who triggered the byelection in Copeland by resigning so that he could take up a job at Sellafield (and see a lot of of his family), is wondering what happens to the honorary title he had to take to quit as an MP.

(The formal process for resigning as an MP involves being appointed steward of the Chiltern Hundreds or steward of the Manor of Northstead, posts which are incompatible with being an MP because they are “offices of profit under the Crown” - even though they are not offices of profit, because there is no pay.)

UPDATE: In the comments cynosarge has an answer to Reed’s question.

cynosarge

24 February 2017 12:46am

Andrew writes

Jamie Reed, who triggered the byelection in Copeland by resigning so that he could take up a job at Sellafield (and see a lot of of his family), is wondering what happens to the honorary title he had to take to quit as an MP.

The answer is that he remains Steward of the Manor of Northstead until another MP resigns and is appointed to the post.

I just spoke to Andrew Stephenson, the Tory MP for Pendle, who is putting the brakes on any runaway triumphalism among his party colleagues. He said:

It’s too early in the evening to say. This was always going to be an uphill battle for us. This has been a Labour seat for over 80 years and that Labour vote has been fairly stable over the years.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks knocking on doors here and it’s clear there is no enthusiasm for the Labour party. But at the same time there are a lot of people who for generations have voted Labour and that core vote is still there. Whether it’s going to turn out today, we don’t know yet.

What’s the mood in the Labour camp in Copeland? Not as confident as in the Tories’, it’s fair to say.

A senior Labour source I spoke to this afternoon said it was “too tight to call”. The party had said that bad weather and geography could conspire against them on election day, as well as boundary changes in 2010 that altered the voting demographic.

“Our feeling is it’s genuinely tight and we just genuinely don’t know,” the source said. “Often you’ve got enough information that it’s definitely in the bag, for us or them, but it’s too tight to call.”

Labour sources in Stoke were sounding cheerful late in the day campaigning, saying they had well over 500 activists out in the wind and rain.

“I’ve been out all day and I haven’t seen much Ukip. I think our ground war has been great, obviously there have been difficult conversations in this by-elections but I think we will get enough of our vote out to win,” one Labour MP campaigning today said.

Labour’s organisation suffered a frustrating setback early on however, a train with at least 10 Labour MPs as well as party staff set off from Euston at 10am and was stuck for several hours in Rugby because of Storm Doris. Most then headed for the phone bank at warm and dry Labour HQ instead.

Weather is not thought to have helped turn-out. “Activists have been out in all weathers, and when it dried up a bit, the sheets were looking a lot more promising,” the MP said.

Another non-Labour source also said a Labour win could be down to a solid ground operation. “Ukip have not been well organised, Labour have almost certainly held it,” the source said.

Officially though, Labour campaign staff are saying this remains a tight marginal seat, with turn-out in the balance and the weather in play.

ITV has also picked up strong Tory optimism about their prospects in Copeland.

The ballot boxes started arriving in Stoke a few minutes ago. This is from my colleague Jessica Elgot.

I’m sitting about 20 feet from that door. And they have left it open as the boxes keep coming in. We’re all freezing.

Here is the scene at the count at Stoke. This is from the Evening Standard’s Kate Proctor.

On the our live blog earlier today my colleague Haroon Siddique posted graphs from betting exchange Smarkets showing how the odds on tonight’s byelections have shifted. By this afternoon their odds gave Labour an implied 68% chance of winning in Stoke, Ukip an implied 28% chance and the Tories an implied 5% chance. And in Copeland Smarkets gave the Conservatives an implied 70% chance of winning, and Labour an implied 30% chance.

There are few less glamorous places to spend the night than in a draughty sports complex, but if you want to witness the moment when power shifts in our democracy you need to come to an election count, and they are almost always on a Thursday night, in a council leisure centre. Officials need a large space to lay out all the tables for counting and a multi-purpose sports hall is ideal.

So I’m in Stoke in the Fenton Manor sports centre for the Stoke-on-Trent Central byelection and I’ll be blogging all night covering Stoke (in front of my eyes) and also the Copeland byelection (remotely), which is counting in the sports centre in Whitehaven in Cumbria. We are not going to witness any dramatic power shifts tonight but these are the most interesting byelections of this parliament (the Washington Post are coming to Stoke, apparently) because they may reveal something quite telling about what is happening to the Labour vote in England. Stoke and Copeland are both seats that have been Labour for yonks and, although the majorities in both places have been falling (in Stoke it was 5,179 at the time of the general election, or 16.7%; in Copeland 2,564, or 6.5%) these are both seats that a Labour party on course to win a general election should be holding comfortably. Instead in Stoke they have been fighting off a high-profile challenge from Ukip, who are fielding their leader, Paul Nuttall, as the candidate. And in Copeland the Conservatives say they have a real chance of becoming the first governing party to take a seat from the opposition since Mithcham and Morden in 1982.

Poll close in about half an hour. I will be posting more background about both contests, as well as bringing you all the latest info and spin as the counting starts.

In Copeland they say they are expecting a result around 3am. In Stoke they say by 3/4am, although that sounds unduly pessimistic because it is a much smaller constituency.

If you want to follow me or contact me on Twitter, I’m on @AndrewSparrow.

Please feel free to post comments but, if you live in either of these constituencies and you’ve voted, please don’t post any comments about how you have voted until after 10pm. They are not allowed under article 66A of the Representation of the People Act 1983 and, if they go up while polls are open, the moderators will have to take them down.