I still get a pang every time the train from King’s Cross pulls into Darlington station. It comes from a month campaigning flat out in a by-election in that County Durham railway town in the spring of 1983 where Michael Foot’s Labour party saw off Roy Jenkins’ insurgent Social Democratic Party (by then operating in alliance with the Liberals) which took a quarter of the vote but failed to break through. As dawn rose after the declaration, I clambered back on the train south, never to set foot in the town again until I became New Labour’s minister for schools and went there to reform its chronically failing secondary schools.
It was depressingly clear on that morning of 25th March 1983 that Foot would now survive as Labour leader—and that Margaret Thatcher would storm the coming general election on a split opposition. Which she did, calling the election days afterwards and winning a landslide, including Darlington.
I had joined the SDP on my 18th birthday two years before and passionately supported Jenkins, a great reforming home secretary and Britain’s only president of the European Commission, as leader of a bold centrist alternative to both Thatcher’s “heartless” Tories and Foot’s “headless” Labour. One forgets now quite how unelectable Labour was in those days, committed to mass nationalisation and the abolition of much of Nato.
But it was not to be. The SDP stalled at Darlington and never regained momentum. It was 11 long years before Tony Blair was able to take on where Jenkins left off and re-create the SDP in New Labour, offering a bold centrist alternative to a Conservative government by then in its fourth term. He did so in effective alliance with Paddy Ashdown’s Liberal Democrats, the party created out of the merger of the SDP and the Liberals in the late-1980s, and went on to win three famous election victories and govern for a decade.
To be fair, the SDP was already vulnerable by the time of Darlington. Thatcher’s victory in the Falklands war a year earlier, and Foot’s narrow success in stopping the extreme Tony Benn becoming Labour’s deputy leader, guaranteed a three-way battle in the looming election. But its outcome was not foreordained. Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams had recently won spectacular by-elections. I campaigned in those too—in Glasgow Hillhead and Crosby in Merseyside—and the Liberals, supported by the SDP, won a landslide victory in the previously solid Labour seat of Southwark and Bermondsey in south London just a month before Darlington. I won a £50 bet on the result of Southwark; had Darlington been lost too, all bets were off. The SDP was ahead in the polls in Darlington until the candidate, a local TV presenter, bombed in a televised debate (on the then-new Newsnight programme) when he couldn’t name Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent.
At moments of turbulence in British politics, by-elections make the political weather. They did so during the Brexit crisis. Labour’s narrow survival (with just 31 per cent of the vote) in the Peterborough by-election of June 2019, where the Tories were eviscerated by Nigel Farage’s Brexit party which came just 683 votes behind Labour, was the final hammer blow to Theresa May and rescued Jeremy Corbyn from another—possibly fatal—leadership challenge. Boris Johnson took over as Tory leader and prime minister, forcing a general election just six months later, and the rest is history.
History is being made too in the cauldron of this year’s by-elections. Hartlepool, Chesham and Amersham, and now Batley and Spen from the so-called “red wall” this Thursday, are reshaping the forces arrayed against Johnson.
If Labour loses Batley and Spen, on top of Hartlepool last month, Keir Starmer could be the shortest-lived Labour leader since George Barnes in 1910 (remember him?) At any rate, he or his successor would be on the defensive—not only against Johnson’s pro-Brexit Tories, but also the resurgent anti-Brexit Lib Dems, who just a fortnight ago won a stunning majority of 8,028 in previously rock-solid Chesham and Amersham in Tory Buckinghamshire.
If Keir falls, who might be the Opposition leader who ultimately faces Boris in a 2023/24 general election? I suspect that may turn on… yes, another by-election or two, just possibly featuring successful Labour figures from yesteryear, the equivalent of Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams in 1982. Who knows, Andy Burnham or Blair?
Oh, and in 1982 I was also at the Beaconsfield by-election, the neighbouring seat to Chesham and Amersham. The Labour candidate was an unknown 29-year-old barrister called Tony Blair. He came bottom with 10 per cent—but never looked back.
