Britain’s Johnson hails win, focus turns to Scotland race

LONDON — Britain’s governing Conservative Party made further inroads in the north of England on Friday, winning a special election in the postindustrial town of Hartlepool for a parliamentary seat that the main opposition Labor Party had held since 1974.

Managing to present themselves as agents of change despite having led the U.K. for 11 years, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives extended their grip on parts of England that had been Labor Party strongholds for decades, if not a century.

Many of these seats that have flipped from red to blue voted heavily in 2016 for Britain’s departure from the European Union.

“What has happened is that they can see we did get Brexit done,” Johnson said during a visit to Hartlepool, where he posed next to an inflatable blimp of himself. “What people want us to do now is to get on with delivering on everything else. No. 1 is continuing the vaccine rollout, making sure that we go from jab to jab, to jab to jobs, jobs, jobs.”

The Conservatives appeared to be headed for a series of victories a day after millions of voters cast ballots in an array of local and regional elections in England, Scotland and Wales.

On what was dubbed Super Thursday, about 50 million voters were eligible to take part in scores of elections, some of which had been postponed a year because of the pandemic that has left the U.K. with Europe’s largest coronavirus death toll.

The party has also picked up a host of council seats across England and hopes to prevent the Scottish National Party from winning a majority in the Scottish parliamentary election, which would speed up the prospect of a second independence referendum.

The results of Thursday’s election in Hartlepool, one of the poorest towns in England, showed Conservative candidate Jill Mortimer secured nearly 52% of the vote. The Labor Party candidate, Paul Williams, received about 29%.

“Labor have taken people in Hartlepool for granted for too long,” Mortimer said in her victory speech.

In the 2019 general election, the Conservative Party made big inroads into the Labor Party’s “red wall” in northern England on a combination of factors, notably Johnson’s insistence that he would deliver Brexit after years of parliamentary haggling. The recent success of Britain’s coronavirus vaccine rollout also appears to have helped the Conservatives.

Whatever lay behind the result, the loss of Hartlepool represents a big blow for the Labor Party and its leader, Keir Starmer. He has already faced a backlash from the left wing of Labour in the wake of the result.

Hopes had been high that Starmer would help Labour reconnect with its lost voters in the north of England when he took the helm a little more than a year ago after succeeding the more leftwing Jeremy Corbyn, who in 2019 led the party to its worst election performance since 1935.

Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions, said he took full responsibility for the party’s defeat in Hartlepool, adding that he would soon be setting out a strategy of how it can reconnect with its traditional voters.

“Very often we’ve been talking to ourselves instead of the country and we’ve lost the trust of working people, particularly in places like Hartlepool,” he said. “I intend to do whatever is necessary to fix that.”

Starmer and the Labor Party should have some results to cheer over the coming couple of days, with Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham expected to win second terms as the mayors of London and Manchester, respectively. The Labor Party government in Wales is also expected to hold on to power.