Yarm high street was slippery and congested. On a dreary May afternoon, rain cascaded across the cobbles and the traffic hit a standstill. All attention in the northern English market town was centred on two figures in blue suits: one stocky, the other tall and broad. The pair darted from punter to shop, engaging with teenagers on their lunch break and tackling perplexed shoppers as they tried to duck both the damp and close social contact.
Those who spotted Boris Johnson asked for a selfie, or gasped as he walked by. But thanks to an ill-fitting waterproof, the prime minister was not immediately recognisable. No one present had any doubts about who the companion was, however. Often remarking on his efforts to save the local airport, voter after voter pledged to re-elect the mayor of Tees Valley for a second term. And they did: on the same day that Labour was hammered in the Hartlepool by-election, the shock narrow winner of the Tees Valley mayoralty from four years ago was returned—with a breathtaking 73 per cent of the vote. Ben Houchen’s victory exceeded the already high expectations. The Spectator, overegging it slightly, dubbed him “the most popular politician in the country.” But certainly no politician more dramatically embodies the extraordinary political realignment Britain is living through.
In Labour’s postmortem as to why Johnson’s Tories were gaining fresh northern ground after a year of pandemic chaos, the party’s campaigners reported the same thing: “the two Bs,” Boris and Ben. Though it dismays many on the liberal left, the Etonian premier’s popularity in Labour’s former northern strongholds is now an established electoral fact. Less familiar to outsiders, however, is the even higher regard in which “Ben” is held among the voters in County Durham and the top post-industrial corner of Yorkshire.
There was a third B too, of course: Brexit. Sixty-five per cent of the Tees Valley backed leaving the EU, which provided the Tories with an opening to be heard in the region for the first time in decades. Houchen has seized that moment and forged a new style of conservatism—and governing. There is much liberal unease about so-called “pork-barrel politics” at present. But as one Yarmite put it on that inclement afternoon, “he’s the first politician in decades who’s actually delivering for us.”
While no one (including Johnson) seems entirely sure what Johnsonism is, the 34-year-old offers a distinct—and winning—political economy. Well before the so-called red wall of Labour constituencies was demolished in 2019, Houchen had already chipped out the first brick. And the 2021 local elections confirmed that the post-referendum realignment of politics—the focus of my new book Broken Heartlands—is deepening, not unwinding, now that Brexit is “done.” He personifies the party’s new strength, and is the harbinger of its future direction.
None of this was clear, however, when Houchen eked out the narrowest of victories in the Tees Valley’s inaugural mayoral race in 2017. It was amid a low turnout and a spring drubbing for Jeremy Corbyn that the then-30-year-old edged the local Labour favourite by a mere half-point, and it might reasonably have been written off as a fluke. But Houchen immediately set to work prototyping what would become the Tories’ 2019 election playbook by pledging extra investment, while also making moves to exploit the cultural divides between Labour’s leadership and its traditional voters, for example regarding immigration and “wokeness.” Replacing the old Thatcherite orthodoxies about low spending and a small state with a new ambivalence on the relative roles of public and private sector, Houchen developed the formula that Johnson is now—intermittently—seeking to emulate on the national stage.
The Tees Valley conurbation does not fit the lazy stereotype of a post-industrial wasteland. The economies and landscapes across the region are diverse, joined together by the River Tees: from urban grit in Middlesbrough, to the remote port of Hartlepool; from the middle-class railway town of Darlington to leafy Yarm, there is both great prosperity and deep social challenges. The last of these, where Houchen lives with his wife Rachel, a French teacher, is verdant and the home of too many footballers. There have always been Tory leanings in some such places, and indeed if you dig deep enough you can find some deep Conservative roots (Harold Macmillan was for many years the MP for Stockton and his experience there during the Great Depression fuelled his later distaste for the rigid doctrines of Thatcherite monetarism.) But until recently, the party was on the margins in the poorer former industrial towns—until Houchen built his stunning second victory in exactly these places.
On a sunny August lunchtime, the mayor was waiting in his local upmarket bistro, seemingly known to all the regular patrons. Having met Houchen half a dozen times, I know that his demeanour never changes: he is cheerful and quick witted, gossipy and opinionated. He speaks in a clear but potent northeast accent, almost Geordie but with flatter vowels. He is a mainstay on the local TV and radio stations and exudes the same sort of boosterism for his area that Johnson does for the country.
Over salmon and pork belly, I probed what shaped his politics—something he discusses surprisingly rarely. Houchen grew up in Ingleby Barwick, a suburb of Stockton-on-Tees wholly comprised of private houses. “There’s a Tesco in the middle of it, but it’s basically just a housing estate.” He recalls his upbringing as “pretty mundane, kind of average.” His father is a policeman and his mother a teacher. For the area, they were “reasonably well off”—something still possible in the northeast on two salaries near to the national average.
His childhood was not party political. “I couldn’t have told you which way my parents voted until I was 22 or 23. We didn’t talk about politics,” even though his father was a “very opinionated man” who would make his views known throughout episodes of Coronation Street. From school, Houchen was drawn towards the law and went on to study it at Northumbria University in Newcastle (a former polytechnic, the less elite of the city’s universities). It was the first and only time he has lived any distance away from his home patch. It may only be 40 miles away, but for many in Tees Valley, it may as well be London. One of the few connections with the Johnson backstory is that the young Houchen was, like the young PM, a keen rugby player—before fracturing three vertebrae playing for Middlesbrough. With his height advantage, he switched to volleyball.
After his graduation, amid the financial crisis and a squeeze on graduate jobs, he was grateful to be handed a training contract at a small law firm in Stockton, where he stayed before taking up politicking full-time. He won his first election at the tender age of 25, sitting on Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council for six years. He then stepped up to fight the 2012 Middlesbrough by-election, where his standard Tory platform failed to find much of an audience.
“No 10 insiders say Johnson, a former mayor himself, is ‘obsessed’ with Houchen”
“It was pretty rough,” he says, recalling one hustings full of Labour supporters at the height of coalition austerity. “This was a real bloodletting for them, they wanted to manifest their anger at somebody. I was thinking I’m probably not going to win, so I’ll just sit back and be sympathetic, understand their issues and just play it down.”
But instead, he decided to tell the audience why they were wrong. “I remember just something clicked and I thought, you know what? I’m going to stand up and I’m going to tell you exactly why I think you’re wrong.” He defended his party, but on polling day barely scraped a thousand votes.
Houchen’s worldview is intriguing. He offers a similar cocktail of nationalism and pragmatic, hands-on economics to Johnson. Crucially, in common with the prime minister but for very different reasons, he is judged as authentic by his electorate. Downing Street insiders says Johnson—a former mayor himself, don’t forget—is “obsessed with” Houchen. As one ally explains, “Boris is always talking about Ben and how the party needs more leaders like him.”
His first political memory is the same as mine: the 1997 election. “I have this vague recollection of Tony Blair down by the Thames in the early hours of the morning after. I just remember having a real sense that something very significant had taken place.” But unlike much of the northeast at the time, he was not enamoured with the New Labour project. He bemoans that the increased spending on public services, with new schools and hospitals, was scarcely felt on Teesside.
The 1997 landslide is a generational moment for thirtysomethings because, as children of the 1980s, we have no direct memory of how Thatcher reshaped the country. The dominant narrative in the region then was that we finally had a government that cared about the north. Houchen says his gut instinct was to see it differently. “Where everybody in the region was just Labour, I thought ‘well, maybe they’re wrong and maybe there is a better way of doing this and maybe people just haven’t found a better way.’ And maybe, at that stage, maybe I should get involved in politics.”
After 13 years in national power, and with regional hegemony, for Houchen it was obvious that Labour had to shoulder the blame for local failings: “It’s not as if you’ve just been in one term and you can say ‘oh well, you know, we didn’t have enough time to make the changes because of the devastation that the Tories reaped on our local area.’ You had five Labour councils in the Tees Valley. You had lots of councillors across the northeast and it just came down to the simple fact that nothing changed.” The remarkable trick that he—and his party—have now pulled is to persuade the northeast’s voters, too, that responsibility for the deep-seated problems of their region is down to its historic loyalty to Labour after 11 years of Tory-led rule at Westminster.
Houchen cheerfully describes his younger self as a “bit of a contrarian”: “There is sometimes a natural reaction to just take an alternative viewpoint from the consensus,” which—with Labour dominant—inclined him towards the Conservatives. Politics for Houchen is not a “big ideological battle,” but rather about “people’s lives and how you can affect a positive change.” He explains: “If you’re in power and you’re spending your time, effort and other people’s resources, you’ve got to show tangible differences.”
Houchen’s thoroughly pragmatic pledge to nationalise the struggling local airport almost certainly made the difference in that close-run 2017 vote—just as Ukip took control of Thanet council in Kent in 2015, when it pledged to reopen Manston Airport. One Tory councillor recalls: “we thought it was bonkers, it’s not a very Tory thing. But Ben won and had to do it. And, well, it has worked.” Houchen also promised to rename and revitalise the airport, and said if all efforts failed, he would sell the land and build houses. But his direct control has born success: daily flights to London have returned, holiday routes have been restarted and the terminal has been refurbished. On the doorsteps of Tees Valley during the May 2021 race, the airport pledge was cited by voters as Houchen’s main achievement. He admits becoming “the guy that wants to buy the airport,” and has no qualms: “It’s authentic, it’s local and unless you are from Teesside, you genuinely can’t understand it.”
He is not fazed by local opponents questioning its viability and whether the continued support from the Tees Valley Combined Authority is a wise use of taxpayers’ money, and insists that despite pandemic disruptions, it will turn a profit within a decade.
Houchen claims to be “very commercially orientated,” and has always been clear that his scheme “could go wrong.” For him, though, public ownership had to be worth trying because “it is our last chance to save the airport,” which—as he sees it—made it a sound pro-business position. Here we are close to the nub of his flexible Toryism: sometimes the private sector can’t deliver, and then it’s valid for the public sector to step in—so long as it’s not so cosseted as to preclude failure. “I would say ‘well, that’s not instinctively anti-Conservative.’” Either sector can be a valid way “to allow you to achieve.”
Like Michael Heseltine’s approach to redeveloping Liverpool and London’s docklands, his big idea is to jolt the public and private into working in tandem. He has no qualms about harnessing the power of the public sector to compensate for market failures, whether that means buying land, borrowing for capital investment or commissioning infrastructure.
Very much unlike Hestletine, however, Houchen is a passionate Brexiter. Since the UK’s break with the European bloc, he has brushed aside complaints from some business groups about disruption. The Leave vote has brought his region greater political recognition: towns such as Redcar, Hartlepool and Stockton are now central to national politics in a way that would have been unimaginable if the country had voted Remain.
He views Brexit as widening the scope of the possible, and thinks what local voters expect to see is results in the form of practical and physical changes. And, whether it is truly down to Brexit or not, there are signs of new industrial life. General Electric is building a factory for wind turbine blades, creating 750 jobs. The Net Zero Teesside project is expected to bring 6,000 jobs to the region as it looks to become a home for the development of carbon capture technology. The mood and the demand now, he says, and “the way I run the Tees Valley,” is: “you’re going to get more money in your regions, we’re going to do new hospitals.”
Houchen’s local standing gave other nearby Tories an unprecedented opening. Richard Holden, the first-ever Conservative MP for nearby North West Durham, argues that the mayor has helped “transform the image” of the party. “Having Ben’s voice at such a high, influential level and getting stuff done has been incredibly important. It stands in stark contrast to how Labour MPs have treated the northeast… as their fiefdom, full of safe seats.”
His Labour critics have thus far struggled to scupper his popularity. Jessie Joe Jacobs, whom Houchen routed this May, accuses him of failing to tackle inequality. During the campaign, which she called a “David and Goliath scenario,” she told me: “my personal motivation is all the people that the mayor hasn’t delivered for… Those many houses that I visited had no food in their fridges and no carpets on the floor.” But her platform—a nebulous “radical plan that addresses both the kind of steady decline in industrial jobs and the jobs that we’ve lost from the high street from retail”—failed to connect.
Other Labour voices rail against Houchen’s “total lack of transparency in his dealings,” citing the Teesside Development Corporation that he chairs—an almost black box that allows him to buy land, borrow money and push through his agenda with minimal influence from meddling councillors. He is dismissive about the carpers: “They have nothing constructive to say.”
Even while championing an industrial renaissance, Houchen connects the Tories’ rise to the breakdown of the old firms that once dominated Tees Valley: “You don’t have big single employers that control the mines or the steelworks or the chemical plant. That paternalistic, unionised collective employment dissipates and people become more autonomous, they can become more freedom-loving.”
He believes a “weird and so outdated” Labour Party could be condemned to losing for as long as it remains excessively downbeat: “They just can’t seem to get their head around… anything positive,” he says, the tone and temperature slowly rising. “And what it comes down to is they still see the northeast of England in particular as trying to find its way out of whatever it was in the eighties, as if the government is trying to destroy everyone’s lives and they’re there to save the little people.” For many people on Teesside, life feels pretty good—and Houchen reinforces that.
“Mayors are inherently post-ideological: they can’t afford to bicker”
Johnson’s “levelling up” agenda is still criticised for existing more in the realm of rhetoric than reality. But Tees Valley is the practical petri dish. The Treasury announced that its own northern campus will be located in Darlington, the mid-sized town pipping potential big-city hosts like Manchester and Newcastle after intense lobbying by Houchen. He takes full—and unembarrassed—advantage of his connections within the governing party.
But his admirers, who interestingly include the staunchly anti-Conservative and anti-Brexit economist Will Hutton, hope his success could inspire a new and more active way of running things across the spectrum. The green energy projects on the site of the former Redcar steel works offer a template Whitehall hopes to replicate in other towns that have suffered from de-industrialisation, such as Hull and Grimsby. Yes, he breaks from the free market instincts that defined Tory economics from Thatcher to Cameron, but so what? If his formula—extra cash, and a lot more state action—has worked in Tees Valley, goes the Downing Street line of thinking, why can’t it work for the rest of the country?
The American political scientist Benjamin Barber argues that mayors are inherently post-ideological: their roles force them to focus on delivery, and direct local accountability means they cannot afford to bicker with their rivals. Houchen is the perfect case study, but he is not alone. The West Midlands has very different demographics, but it is today governed by another Tory with the same sort of political flexibility.
Although the Conservatives have proven they can win mayoralties in unlikely places, the government has cooled on its devolution agenda, no doubt spooked by Andy Burnham’s war of words with Downing Street over Manchester’s treatment during a regional lockdown. But it would do better to build on devolution, because it has worked. Houchen’s result this spring stood out; in one respect, though, he is very much part of a pattern: the UK’s most impressive politicians are no longer made in Westminster. But, exactly as is seen with Burnham’s regular refusal to rule out returning to Westminster, there is the question of whether they will forever be able to resist its pull.
Houchen has road-tested what could be a handy slogan for Johnson at the next general election: “A record of delivery, a promise of more” is what he told the voters of Tees Valley. Houchen’s first term as mayor gave Johnson a template for winning, and if his second goes just as well, he could provide his path for re-election too. He has clear ambition and an addiction to politics, so does he plan to head for parliament? He dodges the question, saying “there’s still a lot more work to do here,” before conceding: “It’d be disingenuous and inauthentic to say no because I’ve just told you a bit of a life story. Everybody who wants to be in politics wants to change things for the better. And the biggest stage you have to change things, you’re more likely to want to go for it,” he smiles. Although Houchen may well stand for a third term, it certainly sounds as if that national stage beckons. “If the opportunity came along, I wouldn’t say no.”
Photo credits: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo, A.P.S. (UK) / Alamy Stock Photo, David Dixon / Alamy Stock Photo
