- A Parliamentary by-election is being held in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, in the north of England.
- Insider spoke to locals, candidates, and campaigners in the city on how the contest is going.
- Polling suggests Labour is set to win the seat from the Conservatives, its first by-election gain since 2012.
A spectre is haunting the Conservative Party's campaign in Wakefield—the spectre of a Jacobean figure in a tall conical straw hat that haunts the Old Vicarage in Wakefield where Tory headquarters are, if local tales are to be believed.
Eric, 72, is a volunteer in a small bookshop next to the Conservative Party's campaign office. He's trying to use the Parliamentary by-election to drum up business and has placed a number of political biographies in the window that looks onto the Tory office. There's Boris Johnson's "The Churchill Factor" as well as Churchill's own autobiography, plus his "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples", Michael Heseltine's autobiography, and history books on Gladstone.
But the move hasn't attracted any business from the volunteers, canvassers, and Tory MPs shuffling in to try and support Nadeem Ahmed's campaign to hold Wakefield for the Conservatives, after the incumbent Imran Ahmad Khan resigned following his conviction for sexually assaulting a teenage boy.
The Christian Peoples Alliance candidate, Paul Bickerdike, raised eyebrows after putting "I have never sexually assaulted anyone" on his election leaflets and telling the media "I do look at children but I look at children in a proper way, not the way that the previous MP was looking at children." Eric reckons this should "go without saying".
Tory candidate Ahmed, a local councillor since 2006, is a "pleasant bloke", Eric tells Insider, who is thinking of voting Conservative in the by-election if he can get down to the polling station. "My dad used to say only Conservatives and Communists vote when it rains."
Eric voted for Johnson's party in the December 2019 by-election, but has voted Labour before. Keir Starmer is "down to earth and ordinary", but he finds Johnson to be "genuinely honest", adding "I am a very forgiving" person.
During an interview with Insider, Ahmed also speaks of the forgiving nature of Wakefield's voters, saying he would have backed Johnson in the vote of confidence. "I would have voted to respect democracy, which is to keep Boris Johnson to fulfil his mandate," he says.
"What do we do as human beings, if somebody makes a mistake? If they confess their mistake, they apologise for the mistake, they say what was wrong, they say I'm going to correct this, sort my office out, which he's done."
Despite the woes Johnson's premiership has faced, they don't come up for Eric, who is more concerned at what he says are plans by the Conservatives locally as part of regeneration work to Wakefield's city centre.
Among the casualties would be the Old Vicarage, with the bookshop and the Conservatives' own offices, and its tombstone-lined secret tunnel leading from the basement, under the road, and to the Masonic Lodge opposite. The Wakefield Labour Club's "Red Shed" is also next to the Old Vicarage, albeit not connected by an underground passageway.
A week after the Platinum Jubilee celebrations, Labour's campaign headquarters elsewhere in Wakefield is still decked out with Union Jack bunting and a flag above the door. Simon Lightwood, the party's candidate, is not available for an interview, but Lou Haigh MP, the shadow transport secretary who is responsible for helping to shape the campaign's narrative, says Labour are feeling confident about the by-election.
She casts doubt on polling that predicts a lead of 20% for Labour, saying Labour's data is suggesting closer to an 8 or 9 point lead.
Haigh says the election is "make or break" for British politics. "We're putting Boris Johnson on the ballot paper," she says, although declines to say what the ramifications could be for Labour and Starmer's leadership should they lose the contest. "I'm not going to countenance the Labour party losing this by-election."
Haigh says the Conservatives have recently realised they have "an awful lot to lose, and the stakes are much higher for them than they are for us". She adds: "Particularly over the last week, they've really clearly upped their spend and are throwing a lot more at it now."
Back outside the Old Vicarage, mother and daughter Helen, 78, and Kate, 57, talk about the most pressing issue that week – the bus strike which began on Monday. They won't be voting for either the Conservatives or Labour.
Kate thinks Labour will win, and while both admit they would probably back the Tories in a general election, they plan to use the by-election to give the governing party "a bit of a kicking", not least because of a response to the cost-of-living crisis that has been "too rigid".
So they'll be voting for Reform UK, the latest iteration of what was the Brexit Party, which they backed in 2019.
It's leaping into that gap and giving the Conservatives – or "Consocialists", as he calls them – a bit of a kicking that Reform UK's leader, Richard Tice, is drawn towards.
In an interview with Insider, Tice claims the party has knocked on 70% of the doors in the constituency two weeks ahead of polling day, seeking to fill the vacuum left by the Liberal Democrats busy campaigning for the by-election on the same day in Tiverton and Honiton as the protest vote.
Tice says he has heard two themes: "Fear, genuine fear, at how people are going to pay their bills and the cost of living. And the other is fury. I think people are furious at partygate, furious at the fact that trust in politics has just been decimated across the board, and furious at energy bills."
Wakefield voted around 63% to leave in the 2016 referendum, according to analysis by politics professor Chris Hanretty.
Tice says people are also "furious that Boris has basically botched Brexit. People know that Northern Ireland is a mess, totally of Boris's making."
It's because of that Brexit support that the party are focused on Wakefield, instead of Tiverton and Honiton, where "shire Tories" are more likely to want to vote for the Liberal Democrats as a protest vote, he says.
And like the Liberal Democrats, Tice says a priority for the next non-Conservative government should be electoral reform, admitting his interest as the leader (albeit an unelected appointee after Nigel Farage left) of what he describes as the UK's fifth largest party.
Ahmed, the Conservative candidate, doesn't seem fussed by the idea of losing due to voters backing Reform. "I don't even know – they don't even know what they stand for. What are their policies? What do they stand for?" He's sceptical of the relevance of electoral reform as a priority for Wakefield voters.
The Liberal Democrats don't have a campaign base in the constituency, with the registered office 17 miles away on the other side of Leeds.
In an interview over the phone, their candidate, Jamie Needle, admits the party is putting more resources into Tiverton and Honiton, a contest that for the party is "more in contention". There, he thinks the contest is likely to be close, but as for Wakefield, he says he knows no better than the pollsters, which have him in either third or fourth place.
The effects of war on the continent and conflict further afield have not skipped the city. Nika, 26, tells Insider she is an asylum seeker, fleeing Moscow in early 2022 before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and one of what she estimates to be 300 to 400 refugees in Wakefield from countries including Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Nika says she has been welcomed to Wakefield, "a wonderful place with parks and developed infrastructure", and thanks the UK government for its "good attitude" that has given her a roof over her head.
Her response to a question on what Wakefield needs suggests she's well in line with the views of long standing residents on what really matters: "More buses."