Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain scored a striking political victory on Friday when his Conservative Party snatched a bellwether parliamentary seat from the Opposition Labour Party, which had held it since the constituency’s creation in the 1970s.

In a byelection in Hartlepool, in the northeast of England, the Conservative candidate, Jill Mortimer, easily defeated her rivals, consolidating Boris’s earlier successes in winning over voters in working-class areas that had traditionally sided mainly with Labour.

Better still for the Prime Minister, the vote on Thursday came after days of publicity over claims that he broke electoral rules over the financing of an expensive refurbishment of his apartment.

That appeared to have counted for little with voters in Hartlepool, an economically struggling coastal town, when the results were announced on Friday morning after an overnight count.

Instead, voters may have been focused more on the gradual relaxation of Covid-19 restrictions in Britain after a successful vaccination programme for which Boris has been able to claim credit.

Though not unexpected, the outcome underscored the extent to which Boris is rewriting Britain’s electoral map and dealt a blow to Keir Starmer, Labour’s leader. Starmer took over from Jeremy Corbyn last year after Labour’s defeat in the December 2019 general election, its worst performance in more than 80 years.

That landslide election victory for the Conservatives in 2019 followed the crisis over Britain’s exit from the EU, and Boris scored well in many traditional working-class communities with his appeal to voters to give him the power to “get Brexit done”.

Though Britain has now completed its EU withdrawal, and the issue is fading somewhat, the new Conservative victory suggests that Boris remains popular in areas — like Hartlepool — that voted for Brexit in a 2016 referendum.

Collectively known as the “red wall”, because they were once heartlands of the Labour Party, these areas are being targeted by Boris who has promised to “level up” by bringing prosperity to the north and middle of England, and to areas that feel forgotten.

In fact, Labour would probably have already lost the Hartlepool seat in the 2019 general election had the Brexit Party, then led by Nigel Farage, not put up a candidate to run there and won more than 10,000 votes. The Labour Party lawmaker elected in Hartlepool then, Mike Hill, resigned his seat in Parliament in March because he faces an employment tribunal.

New York Times News Service