The book everyone is talking about

No, not that one

I am very proud of this. I had thought about, and been asked about, writing a book for long time. But the ideas were never quite right.

Then the day that English Heritage reported a 20 per cent rise in visitors to Barnard Castle, we started talking on my radio show about other obscure sites of special political interest. Alternative destinations flooded in. This sowed the seed of an idea, which I blurted out a few days later to HarperCollins’ Arabella Pike, who concluded this was finally one of my ideas for a book which would work.

So I set about writing what became Planes, Trains and Toilet Doors: 50 Places That Changed British Politics.

The book celebrates the town halls and train stations; car parks and coffee shops; dentists’ chairs and desolate hillsides; beach huts and boarding schools where politicians changed history – most of the time without meaning to.

I drew up a few self-imposed rules: none of the places which changed politics could be in Westminster. They all had to be events that can at least tangentially be said to have changed politics. Sometimes the impact was instant – a new prime minister taking power – other times it would take months, even years, for the impact of the event to be felt, a political butterfly effect. And I wanted them to be unknown stories, not just well-worn tales told many times before. All of these rules are broken in the book.

It took me to the house where Gladstone gave his first speech aged two, the railway line where a former cabinet minister became the first person to be killed by a steam train and the opticians of Barnard Castle. I even took a dip in the pool where John Profumo first set eyes on Christine Keeler.

The brilliant Morten Morten produced stunning illustrations for half of the stories. They are so good I have got four of the originals hanging on the wall at home.

For the paperback, which is out today, I have added a bonus chapter on the place that changed Keir Starmer’s leadership. An extract of which is below:

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Hartlepool marina

Friday May 7, 2021

The result was bad enough. The Boris Blimp – full of hot air, prompting involuntary smiles from passers-by, flying high in the sky – only added to the humiliation. Just as Boris Johnson was posing with his 40-foot likeness, puffed up on the news of a by-election victory in once-rock solid Labour Hartlepool, Keir Starmer was 250 miles away, deflated, defeated and thinking about chucking it all in. 

Instead, over a weekend fraught with rumour, resignation, reshuffle, and recrimination, he reshaped his team, his strategy and his entire approach to politics - arguably it was this 48 hours which would put him on course to become the UK’s 58th prime minister. 

The port town of Hartlepool in the north east of England dates back to the 7th century, its docks playing a key role in its economic success. Ravaged by deindustralisation, much of the waterside area was redeveloped into a 500-berth marina in the early 1990s, officially opened by the Queen. Politically, it remains entwined in modern Labour Party lore, having held the seat since the 1960s. It’s where a young, mustachioed Peter Mandelson, the media Machiavelli, first became an MP in 1992, absolutely didn’t confuse guacamole and mushy peas, but did declare himself a fighter not a quitter after seeing off hard-left attempts to unseat him in 2001. It was also where H'Angus the Monkey, the football team’s mascot, was elected mayor to the absolute fury of Mandelson. 

Perhaps that mascot mockery was the first sign of shifting political sands. Hartlepool was also the sort of economically, geographically and politically remote place that some who lived there felt had been taken for granted by Labour. It voted 69.6 per cent in favour of Leave in the 2016 EU referendum despite the Labour leadership warning against it. A year later Mike Hill was elected as Labour MP in the town, an apparently anonymous footnote to the town’s storied political history.  That was until allegations of sexual assault and harassment emerged against him in 2019, which he denied. An official report into the claims was expected in early 2021. Jenny Chapman, the former Darlington MP who was now Starmer’s political director, paid Hill a visit.

“I spoke to Keir recommending that Mike shouldn’t receive support given the allegations and Keir agreed,” Chapman told me. “I went to Hartlepool - which isn’t far from Darlington - and told him he would likely face suspension, possibly a recall petition and would not get Labour support.” 

Then on Tuesday March 16 2021 Hill dramatically announced that he was standing down as MP for Hartlepool. “This was classic Starmer,” said one former aide to the Labour leader, who had been appalled by the allegations. “The only reason we had a by-election in Hartlepool was because Keir forced it. Even though we knew this was going to be an awkward by-election, Jenny drove to Mike’s house and said ‘you have to resign’. This was not just a purge of the left - Mike backed Keir for the leadership. Keir actually was going through the whole party and taking decisions that needed to be taken about people who were not fit for office.” 

Hill was later ordered to pay more than £434,000 to a parliamentary worker he sexually assaulted, harassed and victimised, and was stripped of his right to a parliamentary pass as a former MP. Starmer believed that Hill’s alleged behaviour could not be tolerated under his changed Labour Party, even if it meant risking a by-election at a time when Boris Johnson was riding high on the covid vaccine bounce, and Labour, bluntly, wasn’t. In March 2021 the Tories were ahead, sometimes with double-digit poll leads.

Labour’s new candidate for the by-election, Paul Williams, had previously been the Labour MP in Stockton from 2017 until 2019, where he faced criticism for opposing the Brexit that two-thirds of his constituents voted for. He fared little better in Hartlepool. Within days of his campaign beginning it emerged that a decade earlier he had posted online: "Do you have a favourite Tory MILF? Mind-blowing dinner table conversation."

Starmer squirmed as he was asked about it on the campaign trail. In all he visited Hartlepool on three separate occasions. In fact the infamous takeaway curry in Durham, which saw him investigated and cleared by police over allegations of breaking lockdown rules and dubbed Sir Beer Korma by Johnson, happened the night before one of his Hartlepool trips. The door-to-door canvassers were pleased to see him make the journey, though his other advisers were despairing.

For weeks Ben Nunn, Labour’s director of communications, had been quietly briefing journalists that they would lose Hartlepool. But the campaigning arm of the party kept sending Starmer there on visits, something a leader would only normally do if victory was certain. It wasn’t just that they lost. Although that was bad. It was that the Labour campaign machine had no idea, indeed on the day of the vote they still thought they could hold it. This could not have been more wrong. 

The error was confirmed at 7.05am on Friday morning, in the town’s Mill House Leisure Centre: Hartlepool had turned blue for the first time in 60 years. The Tories won with a substantial 6,940-vote majority, on a whopping 16 per cent swing away from Labour.  Jill Mortimer, the Conservative candidate who had largely refused to speak to the media, used her victory speech to declare: “Labour have taken people in Hartlepool for granted for too long.”

Elsewhere in the local elections, Labour lost control of key councils including Harlow and Rossendale and failed to win the Tees Valley mayoralty, where Ben Houchen, the Conservative incumbent, took 73 per cent of the vote.“There just wasn’t clear data telling us what was going to happen,” said one former Starmer aide. Morgan McSweeney, the leader’s chief of staff, had become especially aggravated at the performance of the campaign machine.

Starmer’s critics leapt on the results. John McDonnell, who had sat alongside him in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet as shadow chancellor, blasted: “You cannot go into an election without any policy programme, without explaining what sort of society you want. You can’t send candidates out there naked without something to advocate.” Diane Abbott, Corbyn’s shadow home secretary, tweeted: “Crushing defeat for Labour in Hartlepool. Not possible to blame Jeremy Corbyn for this result. Labour won the seat twice under his leadership.” She added: “Keir Starmer must think again about his strategy.” 

Andrew Adonis, a former Labour cabinet minister who backed Starmer for the leadership, called for him to go, writing in The Times: “The question now is what Keir transitions to and when; and whether Labour needs to lose another general election, to Boris or Rishi Sunak, before choosing a leader who can win.” Momentum, the pro-Corbyn campaign group, said Labour had gone "backwards", while Len McCluskey, general secretary of the Unite trade union, urged Starmer to "press the reset button". Unbeknownst to all of them, he was already doing just that. 

Leaving his red-brick terraced house in north London on the Friday morning, Starmer ignored questions from waiting reporters: “Has Labour lost touch?” In his own mind, he agreed with the analysis.  As he headed to the suite of rooms which make up the leader of the opposition’s office in parliament, he questioned how long he should remain in the role at all. Surrounded by his closest aides - Morgan McSweeny, Ben Nunn and Chris Ward - Starmer had his biggest wobble, wondering aloud if he should resign. They told him the idea was “mad” and “total nonsense”. He also discussed it with his wife Victoria and old legal friends too, who urged him to stay on. As did Chapman, who told me of this high-stakes moment of self-doubt: “Keir was right to not be arrogant about his leadership. But also I felt very strongly that Keir’s decision on Hartlepool, although politically painful, proved he is a leader of conviction and sound moral judgement - I know that sounds a bit pious but we were fighting Boris at the time - and that I thought this meant he was the right person to lead Labour given where we’d been.”

Starmer has since variously described the Hartlepool defeat as a "punch in the stomach", “a very, very low moment”, “a really hard time” and the defeat where “I got thumped”. “It was undeniably the rock bottom of his four or five years as leader,” says a friend of Starmer. “I think it made him much more resilient and really focussed minds.”

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I went on to track down the Hartlepool man who bought the Boris Johnson inflatable which loomed over the Tory PM, but to find out why he did it you’ll have to buy the book…