Get Sunak

Richmond and Northallerton is perhaps the platonic vision of a rural, Conservative seat. It is the second largest seat in England by area, spanning the western bounds of the Yorkshire Dales across to the border of Yorkshire and Teesside, encompassing dozens of towns and villages in between.

It is home to huge swathes of farmland, the UK’s largest military base, Catterick, which trains the UK’s infantry, and contains market towns that even the most jaded person would describe as “charming”.

It should come as no surprise that the seat was the safest Conservative seat in the country in 2010, and that two leaders of the Tory party have represented it as MP: until 2015, William Hague, and ever since then, Rishi Sunak.

So, when shortly before 10pm on a Saturday morning outside the Italian restaurant Il Murino in Stokesley – very much one of those charming Richmond and Northallerton market towns – a man is loudly and happily telling those around him he’s been a Labour member for 54 years (“It’s all Harold Wilson’s fault”), it cuts through the vision of eternal, Tory, tranquillity.

Labour activists from the “surprisingly active” Stokesley branch, and others from across the huge constituency, are gathering to kick off the party’s 2024 general election campaign – with Tom Wilson, a former parliamentary researcher who has worked for the NHS since Covid, from nearby Darlington, as the candidate.

Big parties try to run candidates in every seat, including the ones they have no hope of winning, to let their supporters put a cross in the right box, and to look like national parties. Such candidates are known as “paper candidates”, because their name goes on the ballot slip and they then do very little else during the campaign.

Wilson seems unwilling to just be a paper candidate – and it seems like supporters in his seat share that conviction. A handful of activists, bringing their old banners and rosettes from previous elections, quickly turns into more than a dozen, then twenty, then thirty.

Supporters are surprised at their own numbers, and are introducing themselves to unfamiliar faces. “I feel like I’ve won third place in an agricultural show,” says one woman delightedly, as she accepts a rosette.

“Things are changing very rapidly,” one Stokesley branch party member says. “We had 30 for our branch meeting yesterday, which is higher than we’ve ever had before. It’s a winnable seat for the first time in 100 years and it’s only winnable by Labour – we’ve battled a message that ‘only the Liberal Democrats can win here’, but that’s just not true.”

By the time Wilson steps back into the car park to try to get the obligatory photo of supporters holding up signs, more than 50 people (and one dog) have turned up to launch and support his campaign. As he tries to get the shot, a driver keen to get shopping almost clips him. “I hope it’s not being driven by Rishi,” he quips.

When he comes to address the assembled crowd, Wilson is optimistic – yes, this was the safest seat in the country in 2010, but “if you believe the polls, we’re the most marginal seat in Britain”.

The Daily Mail/GB News MRP poll released the day before Wilson is speaking has the Conservatives holding Richmond and Northallerton by just three percentage points, he tells them. That gives them five weeks to move the opinion polls in their favour – surely they can do that, he urges.

Before activists are allowed to disperse – with a recommendation they attend the farmer’s market just up the road (The New European attended, and it was indeed good) – they are asked to sign up for campaigning not just in Richmond and Northallerton, but the numerous more marginal “blue wall” seats that surround it. Wilson himself was planning to campaign in the marginal seat of Scarborough and Whitby the following day.

As the Labour activists dispersed, their most recent MP Rishi Sunak turned out to be just 15 miles down the road, at the (closed) race track in Redcar. That constituency had been held by Labour from 2015 to 2019 by Anna Turley, an MP who was commended for sticking by her stance that Brexit would be harmful for her area, even though her constituency strongly voted for it.

Sunak launched the Conservative battle bus in a carefully managed photo-op at the racecourse, away from the public. He is not seen elsewhere in the constituency that day. Down the road in Teesside, Turley – accompanied by shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh – launched her own campaign to retake Redcar, before travelling with Haigh on a local bus service to highlight cuts to local services.

Later, in the idyllic (and bustling) seaside town of Saltburn-on-the-sea, towards the edge of Redcar’s constituency borders, I spot someone looking awfully like Louise Haigh on the sea front.

“I launched Anna Turley’s campaign earlier,” she tells me. “So I stopped by here for fish and chips.”

I leave her to it.