‘I have come back here, to Sedgefield, to my constituency. Where my political journey began and where it is fitting it should end.’
TONY BLAIR, ON THE DAY HE RESIGNED AS UK PRIME MINISTER IN 2007
The Dun Cow Inn, on the main thoroughfare of Sedgefield, is the ancient market town’s most warming and traditional pub. A drinking house, in fact, fit for a prime minister and a president. It was here in 2003 that the local MP, Tony Blair, brought then American premier George W. Bush for a traditional English lunch of leek soup followed by fish and chips. In a visit costing the taxpayer well over £1 million (for 1,300 police officers shipped in from across the country), Blair and Bush’s post-Iraq bromance was sealed in Labour heartland country. The mythology of Sedgefield and County Durham was always core to Blair’s wide appeal to the voters of middle England. The subtle influence of Christianity, his Conservative-voting father, the north London-dwelling liberal lawyer who was rooted in the north. As one resident, Gary Forshaw, said during President Bush’s visit, ‘It is good for him to come up here and not just see the highlights of London, but to be shown the real world where Tony lives.’1
Seventeen years on from the visit, and thirteen years since Blair lowered the curtain on his New Labour project, which modernized the party and brought it back from the electoral wilderness, Brian and Janine Lowes were supping late-afternoon glasses of red wine on the benches outside the Dun Cow. It was a crisp autumnal day during one of the looser moments of the Covid restrictions: socializing outside allowed, indoor mixing forbidden. The pair worked as teachers, had lived in Sedgefield for thirty-six years and taught in the nearby cathedral city of Durham. Their memories of Bush’s visit were vivid. ‘It was really exciting, the police cordons were up there,’ Janine pointed at the crossroads. ‘The marksmen up there,’ at the church. ‘For an afternoon, it was the safest place in the Western world,’ Brian added. Despite the harsh memories of the Iraq war, which are especially potent in working-class England as they had a long tradition of supplying the armed forces with recruits, Blair remained a source of pride. ‘To me, to all of us, he was really great,’ Janine said. ‘He put Sedgefield on the map. Even now, if I say to people that I’m from Sedgefield, they say “Tony Blair”.’
Brian and Janine should be archetypal Labour supporters – public sector employees, staunch supporters of remaining in the EU, admirers of Blair and his New Labour project – but both backed Boris Johnson in the 2019 election. Janine had never voted Conservative previously, while Brian has done so occasionally, and both cited Jeremy Corbyn as the reason. ‘Because of the finances, that really worried me, where is it coming from? Covid has changed the whole thing, but it hasn’t changed my opinion about trusting a Labour government,’ she said. Brian, who still regretted Brexit, said, ‘Boris did well in the last election and it was mainly because of Brexit, because he was going to get the job done.’ Almost a verbatim translation of the Conservatives’ three-word election slogan: ‘Get Brexit Done’.
Their retirement lives are comfortable, enough for frequent afternoon glasses at the Dun Cow. Not least because the Sedgefield constituency has gentrified during their decades living here. Janine agreed the area was probably richer now than in its heavy-manufacturing prime. The secondary school has made its way towards the top of national best schools lists, while the primary schools are similarly highly ranked.2 ‘People move here for schools – there’s a social feeling here too with nice pubs and restaurants,’ she said. Brian concurs: ‘Compared to the north-east, it has got more upmarket.’
Of all the verdant small towns and villages in County Durham, Sedgefield is one of the most affluent. Leafy, avowedly middle class, with a thirteenth-century church and rows of neat Georgian houses, the passing visitor may struggle to align it with their stereotypical imagination of northern coalfields past their industrial prime. Parking up the red Mini in the town centre, I saw there were another four already there, all less than three years old. Well-tended hanging baskets hung from the town hall – opened 1895 – and vivid flower planters lined the pavements. Despite the economic storm of 2020, the small boutique shops all survived and were trading well. The estate agent showed a healthy market for small cottages in the town centre, well above the average price for a small County Durham residence.
For the casual traveller to Sedgefield, the most appealing destination is the racecourse – one of the most renowned in England, described by its infamous patron Clement Freud as ‘all field and not much sedge’. Richer, farming-dominated villages are dotted across the wider constituency, including the eponymous town, where foxhunting used to be popular. The South Durham Hunt was once frequently spotted throughout parts of Sedgefield, and residents claim that surreptitious meets continue as the police busy themselves elsewhere – years after the practice of chasing small animals for sport was outlawed by the area’s most famous son. These leafy parts historically leaned Conservative, yet were always outweighed by the sheer bulk of the working-class Labour vote from elsewhere in the constituency.
Drive out of Sedgefield town to the neighbouring villages of Trimdon and Fishburn, both once dominated by coal mines, and the less well-heeled side becomes apparent. These isolated pit villages, once layered in dirt and soot, have minimal employment opportunities and stand as reminders of the decades when mining underpinned the whole economy. Wealth may not have been in abundance during their industrial heyday, but residents recall that the small intertwined communities had a deep sense of contentment. They lived, breathed and socialized their work. There was no need to consider life beyond the pit, or even the village, until the pits disappeared. The largest settlement is by far the new town of Newton Aycliffe, created in 1947 to be the model of William Beveridge’s welfare state – where the safety net of the National Health Service, government-backed housing and low unemployment would be on show for all to see. Successful in its day, Aycliffe has latterly suffered its own decline, with the industrial park usurping heavy manufacturing. Labour’s vote was strongest in these urban and poorest parts of the constituency. When they began to slide away, Sedgefield’s days as a safe Labour seat were doomed. When Tony Blair’s old seat fell to the Tories on 2019 election night, it was the greatest symbol of Labour’s collapse in its traditional heartlands.
Mining and horse racing are important assets for Sedgefield, but they will forever be eclipsed by Blair, who represented the seat from 1983 to 2007: the politician who led Labour back to power and embodied the centrism that dominated British politics. It was here his political journey started, where the New Labour project to modernize the party’s electoral offering was conceived and where it met an abrupt end.
In Trimdon village – the pit closed in 1925, employing 300 in its prime – the Labour Club hosted many key moments in his rise and fall.3 Blair declared his candidacy for the party leadership from the concert room in 1994 and welcomed in successive New Labour election victories from the same location. On election night in 1997, the barmaid struggled to find the newly elected prime minister when ‘someone called Clinton’ rang on the club phone.4 And it was St Mary Magdalene’s Church in the next-door village that provided the backdrop for possibly his most famous soundbite. The morning after Princess Diana died in Paris, the prime minister peeled away from Sunday morning mass to tell the world of the British people: ‘They liked her, they loved her, they regarded her as one of the people. She was the people’s princess.’
Blair’s arrival in this north-eastern ‘real world’ was almost by chance. The young socialist barrister had previously stood in the unwinnable southern Tory seat of Beaconsfield in the 1982 by-election, but was eager to find something more favourable four years on. Labour legally challenged the constituency boundaries during the 1983 campaign, meaning Sedgefield required a last-minute stand-in candidate. The constituency’s Labour Party – which had mini-branches in each major village at that time – wanted a left-winger. But a gang of ‘famous five’ plotters had a better idea. Led by activist John Burton, who went on to become Blair’s constituency agent, the group worked through the constituency’s branches and cajoled him onto the shortlist. That glinting smile and easy charm were put to good use on the members of the Sedgefield Labour Party. He was duly chosen as its candidate and elected to Parliament at the age of thirty.
Blair’s majority in Sedgefield never slid to below five figures. But as with all of the red wall seats, Sedgefield consistently returned a solid base level of several thousand Conservative votes that never posed a threat to Labour’s supremacy. The Conservative vote share gradually increased over a decade, before a significant ten-point jump between the 2015 election and 2017.5 The constituency had last returned a Tory MP for a brief period in 1931, during the Tory–Labour national government, and had been solidly red ever since. Just under 60 per cent voted to leave the EU.6 Most of its heavy industry – and its thousands of blue-collar jobs – has long since shrivelled up, yet parts of Sedgefield are more prosperous than ever. One of the area’s biggest employers is the North East Technology Park, or NETPark, where small businesses are working on advanced materials and medical research in partnership with Durham University. They are the kind of employees who Blair’s policies appealed to – that dreaded word, ‘aspirational’ – but who now find themselves drifting towards the Conservatives. In short, Sedgefield’s economic base is more diverse, more prosperous, and therefore more Tory.
Tony Blair has been out of front-line British politics for fourteen years, since he left Downing Street, stood down as an MP and dedicated himself to (sometimes controversial) international affairs. He has not, however, disengaged with domestic matters and continues to closely follow his party’s ups and downs. He was harshly critical of his successors Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, and the party’s historic loss in 2019 was, at least in part, an affirmation of his warnings about it becoming unelectable by veering too far from the centre ground. He was eager to talk through what has happened to his party and why it should listen to him again.
What did Blair feel, when the result was declared and his constituency went blue for the first time in his life? ‘It was completely obvious,’ he told me during our lengthy chat. ‘You can do all sorts of complicated sociological and psephological theses as to what went wrong. But what went wrong was precisely what went wrong in 1983 [when left-winger Michael Foot led the party to a historic defeat], except worse, which is that we ended up with a party leadership that was completely alien to traditional Labour voters. I mean, it’s really not complicated.’
Yet it is a little more complex than that: Blair admitted there has been a cultural change since he first stood in the seat. The mining traditions have drifted into history: the most you will see of them in Sedgefield now are abandoned minecarts filled with flowers and memorials to those who died in successive disasters. And with the end of heavy manufacturing, the diehard bonds with the Labour Party also loosened. As Blair recalls from the 2019 campaign, ‘The only difference is that in 1983 I cannot tell you the number of people on the doorstep that said to me “I’ve always voted Labour, I’m voting Labour because my dad would just kill me if I didn’t. He’d come back from the grave and kill me.”’
The second, slightly more complicated reason the likes of Sedgefield slid away from Labour is Brexit. Blair was a fervent advocate of a second referendum, as was Phil Wilson, his successor as the MP for the area. Almost every figure central to the New Labour project campaigned hard to re-run the 2016 referendum. Their analysis of what went wrong duly focuses almost entirely on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. In politics, there is possibly no greater loathing than that centrists hold for the hard left. It is a comfortable crutch for Blair’s allies to dismiss the impact of calling for another referendum. But he admits the pair of issues are intertwined.
‘Brexit was also a major problem, though I think Corbyn was at least as big a problem. Once those people voted for Brexit, they wanted it implemented. But the thing you’ve got to understand about this is you can’t divorce people’s feelings about Brexit from the absence of any Labour leadership on the issue,’ he said. ‘Brexit of course played a role in it, it would be bonkers to think otherwise. I think if you’d had David Miliband leading the Labour Party you would never have had the 2015 election result that we did, and you’d probably never have had Brexit.’
David Miliband, for those unaware of the former Foreign Secretary, was the golden boy of the Blair era – nicknamed ‘Brains’ during his time running the Downing Street policy unit. Born and bred in the intellectual milieu of north London academia, he entered Parliament in 2001 for the north-east fishing town of South Shields. His failed attempt to take the party leadership in 2010 – beaten by his more left-wing brother Ed – marked the end of New Labour. Blair sees him as the party’s lost leader, the one who could have avoided the party’s collapse in England. Miliband has long moved on from British politics, relocating to New York in 2013 to lead the International Rescue Committee. Yet every so often, he surfaces on Sunday political programmes and at ideas festivals to offer his thoughts on the status quo. What is less known is that he also continues to return to the UK to campaign for Labour in the north-east. He still owns a house in South Shields and visits at least once a year for a holiday with his family. He also hosts an annual lecture in the town, bringing celebrities from Gary Lineker to John Major to stir up deep thoughts in his old patch.
I took a break from my Sedgefield travels to speak to Miliband at his New York apartment, sadly not in person. He recalled doorstep memories from the 2019 campaign. ‘I was up in Ronnie Campbell’s former constituency, I was in Sedgefield. The campaigning that I’d done on the Thursday, Friday, Saturday before the election had given me a very strong sense that while there was some enthusiasm for Labour in London . . . you could see big problems for the party up there.’ Similarly to Blair, he pinned the blame on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, which ‘was going to alienate a lot of voters’, a situation he saw as ‘a very large self-inflicted wound . . . People did not see Labour as credible, in terms of government, they were pretty repelled I’m afraid, so I think it was quite a simple story in some ways.’
But, digging a little deeper, Miliband agreed there has been both structural and contingent changes in these communities that fed into the party’s collapse. The structural side, in his view, is significant: economic change that has disrupted the working-class demographics in these ‘older communities’ that now tilt away from the Labour Party. And he acknowledged that the decline in collectivism has also played a role. ‘The mechanisms of collective organization have been changed, there’s no point denying that,’ he said. ‘Then there are contingent things – who’s running, what’s the political issues and personalities of the moment. I think that, in general, the contingent are more important than the structural, and certainly the contingent are being given less credit or credibility or importance than the structural,’ he added. Brexit is both of these factors in Miliband’s analysis of what happened. ‘Bill Clinton used to say it’s better to be wrong and strong than weak and right, and Labour got the worst of all worlds, because its policy was hard to define, and late to be called, actually contradictory in various ways, and so I think that clearly Brexit was an issue.’
One of the issues that was raised previously at the Dun Cow pub, when several other customers joined the conversation after my drink with Brian and Janine, was carpetbagging candidates – MPs who are not born and bred in an area but represent it in Parliament. Blair was not from Sedgefield, nor was David Miliband from South Shields, whereas many of the newly elected Conservative MPs are from the areas they represent. ‘I couldn’t represent South Shields by claiming I was from South Shields, I had to represent South Shields by arguing for it, and delivering for it,’ he said. ‘The sense of being rooted, I think, is important; being informed, being representative, you know, you can represent both by who you are and what you do.’
Through his odd mixture of being thousands of miles away but also with first-hand Labour doorstep experience, Miliband is optimistic that Labour can win back the red wall. ‘They’re in play, you’ve got to say they’re in play, it would be foolish to say the vote’s only been lent and the pendulum’s bound to come back, but it would be equally foolish to say there’s been a Damascene conversion and they’ll never come back. The Sedgefields and the Blyth Valleys of this world are full of voters who want to know what politics is going to do for their lives, it’s about relevance . . . about organizing.’
Miliband is hopeful that Keir Starmer has grasped the message that the party needs to change its message. ‘We used to say in the nineties, if we’d been rejected four times, the electorate is sending us a message, the message is not “disappear”, the message is “come back, but come back better, give us a proper choice”. I mean, people don’t want the Labour Party to disappear, they want it to be relevant and effective . . . if we don’t understand what the electorate are saying then they’ll do it again to us.’
There is one Labour figure whose local credentials can never be doubted. Phil Wilson was one of the ‘famous five’ who installed Blair in Sedgefield in 1983 (two members of that original gang, Paul Trippett and Peter Brookes, have quit Labour due to Corbyn). His story is intertwined with the Brexit tale that cost Labour its red wall seats. At the age of sixty-one, he has a kindly, earnest demeanour. Bespectacled and sometimes downbeat, he exudes the sense of being a politician who is in the game for the right reasons. Within minutes of encountering him, it is impossible to question his deep love for his party, his home town and his Tony. Or his aversion to leaving the EU.
No one knows Sedgefield or Blair better than Wilson. He has lived in the constituency all of his life and devoted his career to its former MP. When his icon exited politics in 2007, Wilson took over the seat from Blair to keep the New Labour flame alive. He duly won the seat again in 2010 and 2015, but difficulties had emerged by 2017. During that campaign, he took to the pages of the Northern Echo to decry and distance himself from Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, stating he had no confidence in him whatsoever.7 Only thanks to Theresa May’s appalling election campaign did he win again.
During the 2019 campaign, I visited Wilson at his home in the village of Heighington, one part of Sedgefield that leaned Tory. Most of my memories of that election are of cold, drizzling evenings: it is rare for the UK to hold a December poll for good reason. Labour and Conservative campaigners traipsed across the red wall seats with torches and oodles of scarfs and gloves while their canvassing return sheets disintegrated. There is nothing romantic about politics in such conditions.
That dreary winter evening with Wilson in his local, the Bay Horse Inn, was no exception. Over pints and crisps, his depression consumed our corner of the pub. Locals popped over to wish him well for polling day, but he could scarcely muster optimism. He was dejected at the state of Brexit – Phil led the failed guerrilla campaign in Westminster to attach a ‘confirmatory’ referendum to Boris Johnson’s Brexit withdrawal deal – and seething at Corbyn’s leadership. His anger at the direction of Labour had grown further during the campaign. He could feel Sedgefield was slipping away and could not hide his despair at seeing his life’s work vanish in one day.
Later, on a brighter day, Phil and I returned to the Bay Horse for lunch – for both of us, our first pub meal after they reopened after the first lockdown. We were the only patrons indoors and followed the awkward one-way system to a broad corner table. The Bay Horse is your typically northern rural pub, all red and black carpets and gothic lettering on the walls. Helpfully, the BBC News Channel was streaming prime minister’s questions over our shoulders, with Keir Starmer making his latest attempt to cut through Boris Johnson’s bluster. Wilson’s demeanour was less resigned than the previous time we met, but the only rays of sunshine came in through the pub window.
Over fish and chips, Wilson admitted he hasn’t recovered from election night. ‘I just thought that it was inevitable really. You know, you didn’t know how bad the shock was going to be.’ He has campaigned for Labour in Sedgefield since 1979 but found the last election the worst campaign he had ever fought. Not because of the inclement weather, the Tories or Brexit, but the leader he blamed for losing his seat. ‘You’ve seen it all before and you’re just thinking: this is worse. And then you had the likes of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party: this great party led by somebody who’s as incompetent and narcissistic as him.’
When we later decamped to Phil’s garden overlooking the village green, he brandished a generic letter from Corbyn apologizing for his loss. Across the bottom, the outgoing opposition leader scribbled some personal thoughts. They were evidently written in a hurry, and neither of us can fully make out what he is trying to say. Squinty eyed, the best I could interpret, is ‘so sorry for the election . . . we had . . . future . . . all the best, Jeremy’. Phil intends to frame it in his study – alongside the signed original text of Tony Blair’s announcement he was standing for the Labour leadership.
While it is Corbyn’s leadership that Wilson primarily blames for the Sedgefield electorate turning against him – ‘we give them Jeremy Corbyn, they just thought we were taking the piss’ – he stated the decline began much earlier, in the days of Thatcherism. Although Sedgefield’s last mine closed in 1973, a full decade before Blair became its MP, he bemoaned the end of the ‘communality’ that bound people together. It is a trend that has been seen in the UK and many other Western countries through deindustrialization, but the end of community collectivism is especially potent in mining towns where lives were so closely interwoven. Wilson said, ‘In the 1980s, everybody was in poverty when the pit shut so it was very easy to find someone who was prepared to speak out on it. But now people suffer their poverty in isolation. Back then you would know who your neighbours were, where they worked. Today you don’t.’ Thanks to social media, however, we in fact know more about each other’s lives than ever before and we have our own networks that are not based on geographic proximity – something Labour has struggled to adapt to.
Wilson’s decades of campaigning in the patch led him to the conclusion Labour’s support was broad but not deep. In the southern part of the constituency, voters were naturally more willing to listen to the Conservatives. ‘But the rest of the constituency was always able to absorb the vote and come out with a big majority.’ When the red wall was firmly red, he knew where to focus canvassing efforts based on where the coal mines were. Those days have also passed. ‘Only if you’re brought up here do you know where the pit used to be.’
Wilson’s father was a Durham miner who ordered his son never to go down the pit, although, he wryly noted, ‘I didn’t need any persuasion.’ Heavy industry dominated his childhood, but the Sedgefield of today is a broadly wealthier, if more segregated, collection of towns and villages. ‘My father wouldn’t recognize this place today. Back in his day it was all mines, now one of the biggest employers is the science and technology park.’ And it is these new residents who Wilson identified as having turned away from his party since the days of the Blair supremacy. ‘We’ve got to not be ashamed of people who vote Labour being well off. I mean for god’s sake, we want to keep them well off! That’s the whole idea of the Labour Party.’
It was not only wealth. On the doorsteps, Wilson struggled with his community on Brexit. His arguments about needing to think again about leaving the EU fell on deaf ears. ‘Even in the referendum we were saying “these are the things that are at risk”, but they weren’t listening to us anymore.’ Why? The poorest residents in the former pit villages of County Durham could not be convinced life could get any worse. ‘In some of these housing estates, you would say to voters, “You know you’re going to be worse off?” And they would respond, “I can’t be any more worse off than I am now, so I want Brexit.” When the Tories came along with the slogan “Get Brexit Done”, who are they going to vote for?’
The loss of Sedgefield was a dagger into Labour’s heartlands. But it was possibly inevitable: the seat has changed; its voters typify those who fell into the Conservatives’ arms. Wilson rejects generic labels about how the area has changed. ‘I’ve always hated the phrase “left behind seats”. It’s not the seats that are being left behind, it was the Labour Party, and the party hasn’t changed with [the voters].’ While Brexit and Corbyn were the catalyst for Sedgefield returning its first Tory in modern times, he agrees with the notion that the rot began with Ed Miliband’s leadership from 2010 to 2015. ‘There was something sort of weird about Ed, they [voters] couldn’t associate him as being the leader of the Labour Party. And so they thought we were having a joke and then we give them Jeremy Corbyn. If that bond between us and Labour supporters was starting to fray at the edges, it was just cut.’
Just south of the Sedgefield constituency lies Darlington, the large town that also flipped Conservative at the last election. It is not technically a red wall seat, having returned Conservative MPs in 1983 and 1987. Yet it shares many characteristics of the other County Durham Tory seats: a mixture of well-heeled and working class, culturally separate from any of the nearby cities. The further south you travel from urban Tyneside towards the greenery of Yorkshire, the more the Tory vote stacks up. Darlington is where Paul Howell, Sedgefield’s new Conservative MP, calls home. Whereas Phil Wilson exudes raw Geordie passion, Howell is understated. The pair are the same age but their backgrounds are far apart. The new MP is a middle-class property developer, the sort of guy it is a struggle to love or loathe.
Over socially distanced tea in his back garden – the sun was thankfully out on that day – Howell was still elated at his election victory. ‘How fabulous is this, this is my world these days!’ he proclaimed. His analysis of what happened to Labour was ‘a series of waves followed by a tsunami’. The Sedgefield constituency has changed, but the political parties too have been gradually reshaped. When Ben Houchen was elected as the mayor of the Tees Valley region in 2017, which included the seat, he became the first notable Conservative voice for the area in two decades. Brexit was another wave, when people split with the message of the Labour leadership (even if Corbyn was a low-key voice for the Remain cause). Howell campaigned in all of these elections but noted a striking mood change by the 2019 general campaign.
‘I’ve campaigned many times in parliamentary, local councils . . . I’d never seen responses on the doors like I was getting. They were giving very short messages, you know, can we please get Brexit done? Sedgefield was a pro-Brexit seat, as you know. They were very much wanting to know why that hadn’t been delivered, they wanted to know why their MP was standing against that idea, because Phil was very much pro second referendum.’
While Howell reckoned that anti-Corbyn sentiment was the strongest element that flipped Sedgefield blue, locality and a sense of place were also in play. ‘The other thing that I would get is: “Where are you from son? Are you from round here? Do you understand us?” It’s about locality and things like that, isn’t it? And as soon as you start talking . . . that discussion evolves fairly quickly.’
Sedgefield’s political transformation was most decisively seen when Boris Johnson visited the constituency to drum up Tory support. He was videoed leaving a rugby club with Howell and outside the crowd was chanting ‘Boris! Boris! Boris!’ To witness this, in Tony Blair’s former patch, pointed to Johnson’s personal appeal – an odd thing for an Old Etonian educated at Oxford. ‘He has a connection with people that is just beyond belief,’ Howell recalled. ‘It’s a charisma thing, and people believe that they can relate to him, and he relates to them. It’s strange given his background, I agree.’
Howell believed that the sunny optimism at the core of Johnson’s schtick – which caused him so many headaches during the dire days of the coronavirus pandemic – appealed to the people of Sedgefield. ‘That to me is one of the reasons why the Conservatives have done well this time, because for too long politicians in this part of the world have talked the area down, so the fact that we talk it up is a different tone,’ he said. ‘If you look back at Blair, Blair always talked about coming through, representing this mining village in the north-east, that sort of thing. He never mentioned this beautiful constituency and all that it has.’
Talking up the area’s natural beauty may work during the insurgent anti-establishment campaigns of 2016 and 2019, but it is likely to fare less well in a re-election effort. The Johnson government’s plan is to focus on delivering tangible investment people can feel and see – micro-scale economic improvements in contrast to the Blair era’s more macro approach to the whole country. Howell was focused on reopening Ferryhill Station, a disused railway stop closed during the Beeching cuts (nearly all red wall seats had a train station closed in the infamous programme). ‘Hopefully we’re making good progress on that agenda,’ he said, noting that arguments about the station’s renewal have been running for years.
‘I got comments from some of the Labour group [of councillors] along the lines of, well, we tried to do that before but [Margaret] Thatcher stopped us. Hang on a minute, Thatcher stopped you? Right, but the following twenty-four years, you had Tony Blair as your MP. Initially an MP and then the prime minister. And nothing happened. Nothing happened in terms of local investment for this part of the world. That’s the message I got back on the doorsteps: yeah we had a Labour Cabinet up here, and what did they do for us?’
It is a sentiment I have heard over and over across Sedgefield and it is one the Johnsonite Conservatives are aware of – no doubt voters will soon be asking, ‘We’ve had a Conservative MP for five years, what did they ever do for us?’
Although Phil Wilson vigorously disputed the notion that New Labour took the heartlands for granted, Howell thought much of his election was based on a ‘complacency that they were always going to get elected’ and ‘the effort on the streets wasn’t as good as it could have been.’ Although coronavirus has ‘inhibited’ Howell’s efforts to be ingrained in the community, the new Tories will be ‘all over’ their constituencies.
Levelling up, as the prime minister calls it, is how the Tories hope to fulfil what was promised their new voters. Offering a physical embodiment to those first-time Tory voters that their faith was not ill-founded is key to Howell’s hopes of holding onto Sedgefield. ‘I need to be in a position where I can say, this is what me and my government have done, this is what me and my government are promising . . . we have to find a way, to use Ben Houchen’s term, to show a “record of delivery, a promise of more.”’
What that looks like is not too dissimilar to what Blair attempted during his tenure as Sedgefield’s MP. ‘It’s training, apprenticeships, all that sort of thing . . . the infrastructure’s about getting people to and from jobs.’ Like many of the red wallers, and unlike many traditional Tories who think of fiscal conservatism and reducing the national debt pile, he wants the government to do a lot of spending. ‘In terms of getting a community infrastructure in place, making sure that we do something to try and get communities helping themselves through better resourcing of things like community centres, youth clubs, these sort of things, that have come under extreme pressure through the austerity years, but now we need to make sure that those facilities are back in, so you can actually build a heart of a community.’
To the question of whether what happened in 2019 is a transformation or a fluke, Howell naturally argued it is a longer-term change. ‘I firmly believe that the Conservative Party has been moving more in the direction that would attract these sort of people, that the Labour Party’s been moving against it. Brexit focused the mind and got us the eighty majority that we have now.’ Even without Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn, he believes the Tories would have won a majority in 2019. ‘Might not have been as big, might not have been as strong, might not have included my seat’, but Labour was on course for defeat.
One of the curious things about speaking to Howell is how uncontroversial his prescriptions sound. The red wall Tories are a diverse lot when it comes to finances: some are ardent free marketeers, others are big state interventionists who are devoting their first term in Parliament to demanding money from the Treasury. Howell’s political hinterland is typical for a sixty-year-old, his youth dominated by trade union disruption and the 1970s winter of discontent. ‘I believe in personal responsibility . . . it’s the handout vs hand up argument.’ Recalling his school days, when much of County Durham spent the working week on strike, his conversion to the Tory cause came through militant labour movements. ‘It never felt right to me that the Labour Party wanted the union officials in Number 10. The union officials are there to look after their employees in factories or businesses.’
Howell’s schtick of being a local businessman done good speaks to a desire for aspiration – no matter what improvements he secures on the ground. ‘It then comes down to, who is your local guy or girl, and do you think they’ll represent you? So I think that, on this particular occasion, the way that the election went, an implant from the south could possibly have taken Sedgefield, but they wouldn’t have got the majority I got.’
The artefacts of Blair’s time in Sedgefield have worn away. A decade after his election as prime minister, Blair made his last trip to the Trimdon Labour Club to announce his exit from front-line politics. The club closed soon after, going the way of many working-class clubs, and has become a carpet showroom.8 Instead of spending an evening in a working men’s club with live entertainment, social changes mean Trimdon’s residents now prefer to drink at home or in one of the local pubs. The closure of this club – and many others like it – is another example of how Labour’s connection with the community has broken. The social club is not the only bit of the Blair era that has changed. Myrobella House was listed for sale in 2020 as a ‘unique period property’ for £299,950, with no reference to being owned by the former prime minister. Blair said he returned to Sedgefield in 2019, before the election, and vigorously disputes any notion that he did not deliver for the place during his time as an MP.
‘So what did they get in Sedgefield? They got all their schools renewed, and the results went massively up. They got a new community hospital, a new general hospital just outside the constituency. We have the lowest unemployment we’ve ever had. And they had massive improvements in pensioner poverty and child poverty. If you were to talk to those people in 2005, that’s why they voted for us. We got major factories as well.’
While he blamed ‘the distance of time’ and ‘ten years of austerity’ for voters changing their mind on New Labour’s record, there is a broader political point. While in power, the party delivered nationwide change to the UK that benefited Sedgefield and the other red wall areas. Schools and hospitals were improved. Child and pensioner poverty was slashed. The National Minimum Wage tackled in-work poverty. Where the party struggled was in singing its own praises. Even the most casual glance at Twitter at any given hour will see Conservative MPs talking up their electoral achievements. Instead, Labour has spent much of the last decade attacking its own record. As Blair puts it, ‘The Labour Party itself was saying to those people, “We agree that was just sort of a Thatcher-lite government, never really did anything for you” and the Tories say the same thing.’
‘I know again this is what people want to say because they’re searching for some deep meaning in what’s happened. We put in disproportionately large amounts of investment, you just take one issue. Miners’ compensation. Nobody even remembers that now. We put several billion pounds into mining communities and miners’ compensation. Most of the people that benefited as pensioners from the improvements we gave to pensioner poverty were in Labour areas.’
Not that this is a new debate. Harold Wilson’s Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s are still maligned by activists for their lack of ambition, despite their advancement in liberalizing society. Blair recalled this attitude from his first election success in 1983. ‘Regional policy and anxiety over the loss of traditional industry, that is a debate that goes back seventy years. It was a dominant debate in the 1960s. That’s why you have Peterlee [built in County Durham under the New Towns Act] and all these places set up. Our strategy was we invested heavily in the university sector and technology spun off from it in Durham, in Newcastle, in Teesside, we made a real thing of that.’
For Blair, it is about perception. ‘If they feel that your party is completely out of tune with them, it changes their perception of what the party’s done in the past – and if the party isn’t standing up for what it’s done in the past, then of course they’re left without any leadership. That’s why I have no doubt at all if you’d had a serious Labour leader in the 2016 referendum campaign, they would have persuaded a lot of those Labour voters that this Brexit thing was a right-wing Tory plot that was going to do enormous damage to their constituency.’
New Labour was also successful with its cultural attitudes. From its inception, the party was built on a Hampstead-to-Humberside electoral alliance: bridging metropolitan liberal voters, typified in the north London enclave, to the working-class voters in England’s working-class towns. Brexit annihilated this alliance, but Labour’s shift on other matters set the stage for the demise, according to Blair. ‘The problem came afterwards when we broke up the New Labour coalition, and a vital part of that New Labour coalition is that we were strong on law and order, strong on defence. And actually, contrary to how history is being rewritten, we were pretty strong on immigration.’ Ed Miliband meekly attempted to continue this stance, memorably with mugs promoting ‘Controls on Immigration’. Whereas voters did not believe Miliband was serious about the issue, Blair argued his own credentials were strong. ‘No one ever thought I was out of touch with the issue of immigration.
‘The first thing we did was try and cut asylum claims, that was a great big battle. Then we had various immigration bills, all of which the Tories opposed, by the way. And then we had the identity card thing, because I said, rightly, the only way ultimately you can deal with immigration is to decide who’s got a right to be here and who hasn’t.’
But there was one moment where Blair was out of touch with Labour’s heartlands on immigration. On 1 May 2004, eight Eastern European countries joined the European Union as part of an enlargement programme eagerly advocated by the Blair government. The UK was one of only three countries that did not implement transition controls, meaning its job market was open to millions of citizens from the new member states, known as the ‘A8’ countries. Despite the prospect of better paid jobs and a better life in the UK, the government estimated net migration would be ‘relatively small’, no more than 13,000 a year (with the critical qualification that the figure would rise if additional countries introduced transition controls).9 In 2004, the year of A8 accession, 53,000 people migrated to the UK from the A8 countries.10 In 2005 the figure rose to 79,000 and by 2007 it had reached 112,000. It was a serious policy failure: Labour had disastrously underestimated the appeal of the UK to these Eastern European citizens and poured the political equivalent of several drums of petrol onto the immigration debate. The rise of UKIP, Nigel Farage and the events of 2016 can be traced back to this moment when traditional Labour voters felt trust was broken. There was a clear sense they had not voted for this influx of migration, nor had they voted to change the make-up of their communities. It lacked democratic consent: it may have been part of the New Labour modernization agenda to improve the jobs market, but there was no specific commitment to welcoming further migration. It also created a new class of employment, which traditional working-class voters may have felt locked out of.
Blair admitted his government could and should have done more to tackle this issue. ‘Now, I agree that after 2004 this Eastern European immigration became a much bigger thing, but we could have dealt with it within existing European rules. We could have done what the Belgians did and said, “Look, you have two months, if you haven’t got a job, you go back.” We could have made sure the seasonal workers were genuine seasonal workers. We could have done huge numbers of things to take care of that problem. But when we were in power, no one ever could say I didn’t take the issue of immigration seriously.’ That use of ‘we’ and ‘I’ could be a gentle dig at his immediate successor Gordon Brown, who attempted to tackle the immigration issue with his inept ‘British jobs for British workers’ campaign, which went nowhere. Or Blair could be projecting further, and be speaking about those who ended the New Labour project.
New Labour’s economic message of the early noughties is ill-fitted for the post-coronavirus, post-austerity world of the 2020s. While Blair gave no credit to Corbyn for the surprise surge in Labour’s vote – ‘the 2017 election was a complete freak result for all the reasons we know’ – he acknowledged that his erstwhile colleague stumbled on the need for a fresh economic message. Corbyn rallied Labour voters with his radical economic message, which is precisely what Blair believes Keir Starmer has to do. ‘The trouble is, post the financial crisis we had ten years of austerity.’ With a typical Blair soundbite, he sums up the debate. ‘The problem of economic policy is very simple: the radical people aren’t sensible and the sensible people aren’t radical, that’s the problem for progressive politics. So that’s why, in my view, you’ve got to take the fact, the big fact of modern life is this technology revolution, and you’ve got to turn that into a narrative of optimism about the future.’
The things Blair would do, were he in power today, are similar to Boris Johnson: improving transport links, beefing up the UK’s broadband network and adapting to remote working to ‘create much more attractive places for people to come to and locate’. Not that this problem is exclusively an issue for Labour. Blair closely followed the 2020 presidential contest in the United States and believed the Democrats are facing the same issue as Labour. ‘The problem is they don’t have a modernizing economic message, their economic message is basically a bigger state, and more tax and more spending. The problem with that is the only part of that that’s popular is the spending and the right wing is prepared to do that in any event.
‘If Labour wants to get back, it’s got to say this technology revolution is going to intensify and accelerate, there’s no way out of it. We are going to manage it and harness it in your best interests, and here are the things we’re going to do for that. And ultimately the Tory Brexit vote is a cultural vote that you can defeat. Because in the end, people will realize it’s all very well but actually the economy has not got better.’
He was particularly animated during our conversation about the Labour Party’s cultural divide with its heartlands, which became most obvious during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, which was geographically and intellectually wholly rooted in the northern suburbs of London. Blair contrasts how the Conservatives deal with public perceptions about its stance on the NHS to how Labour slants increasingly leftward with its cultural issues.
‘The Tory Party understand they’ve got a huge problem with the National Health Service, so they fall over themselves in professing their love for it. There’s no end to the love that they have for the National Health Service, they realize they are weak on it. They constantly, constantly, constantly go on about how much they care about it but the Tory protestations of love for the NHS are hollow.’
The weakness for Labour, and an acute danger for Keir Starmer, is the party’s left-wing activist base, which Blair warned could drag them further away from their traditional voters, particularly with political correctness. ‘I cannot tell you how much they hate this tearing down the statues, sacking people if they made an off-colour remark. It’s death to the left and that is what will keep the right in power, unless you deal with it.’
Blair does not think the red wall has gone for good, but urged Starmer not to be defensive on cultural matters. ‘Keir will be smart enough not to engage in the culture war, but I don’t think that’s going to be enough for that vote, they’re going to want him to engage on the right side of it. And that is not, by the way, “We don’t care about black lives”, it’s “We can support the sentiment of these movements, but we’re not subcontracting policy to them”. So, whether it’s Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, MeToo, trans rights, if you look as if you’re in a negotiation with those groups over policy, you’re not going to get those people back.’
Brian Lowes, having dispatched the last of his red wine outside the Dun Cow pub, concluded the next election will not be easy for the Tories in Sedgefield – despite whatever new projects their MP brings to the area. ‘I’d be very surprised if we get the same result in four years. Boris is doing his best to lose the red wall with how they’ve dealt with [coronavirus]. It will have a big impact whenever the next election is.’ Although Brian is unlikely to back the Tories again, his wife Janine felt otherwise, although was undecided about how she would cast her ballot. ‘This is too posh of an area to go back. People might forgive the fact that Conservatives are trying their best – people seem to like a lot of what Rishi Sunak is doing. They might just say, “They can’t deliver, we will forgive that.”’
But she added a note of caution about her own vote. ‘I kind of like Keir Starmer, he’s kind of appealing at the moment . . . untested, he’s a bit of a non-personality but there’s something about him that’s steady, he’s handled things quite calmly.’ Brian agrees. ‘The main thing about Keir is that he’s not Jeremy.’ Or as Blair himself put it, ‘With Corbyn, the doors shut in your face. You weren’t even having a conversation – he was completely unacceptable and you’re insulting us, they felt. With Keir, they’ll open the door and have the conversation, and that’s a big step forward.’ Never mind their front door, Brian and Janine have already emotionally welcomed the Labour leader into their living room. Whether he stays there, or whether Boris Johnson barges back in, is the test of the next four years.
After spending time in the constituency, it is tough to see an electoral path back here for Labour. Sedgefield may prove to be one of the tougher red wall seats to win back. Once voters of Trimdon, Ferryhill and Newton Aycliffe went against the wishes of their grandfathers in 2016, 2017, and in overwhelming numbers in 2019, the historic bond with the labour movement was broken. It can be rebuilt, but it can no longer be taken for granted. Had this seat been in, say, Kent, or another part of the south that had a legacy of voting Conservative, its demographic profile would have made it a safe seat some time ago. With boundary changes set to take in more rural parts of County Durham, it could become even more Tory by the next polling day. In many ways, it is England’s new bellwether: Keir Starmer cannot make it to Downing Street without winning it, Boris Johnson cannot remain there without holding it.
Labour’s macro record for places like Sedgefield is strong, as the list of achievements Blair and Wilson rattled off showed. It is stronger here on a micro level than in many other red wall seats: the Hitachi factory, NETPark and copious amounts of new private housing are proof of how a Labour MP and a Labour government improved the seat. But the number of people I casually encountered who said, ‘Labour did nothing for us’, suggested the party did a bad job of selling itself, or it was simply not enough – the level of dissatisfaction I found in the area should not result from having Tony Blair as your local MP. Or maybe Labour was too successful: it made the seats richer and therefore more Conservative. Without a decent narrative for these aspirational voters, the party simply fell out of step.
Next, it was back onto the M1 for an hour and a half’s drive south into Yorkshire – past the traditional blue patches in the North York Moors and the Dales, the cathedral city of York and market towns of Harrogate and Wetherby, into the urban core of what its residents insist is God’s Own Country.