Why Nobody Really Won the Stoke Byelection

UKIP candidate and party leader Paul Nuttall (left) with the Monster Raving Loony Party candidate at the Stoke byelection count (Picture by Joe Giddens PA Wire/PA Images)

Perhaps one day, as his white glove is brushing the dust off a piece of 18th century Wedgwood Portland Blue, Tristram Hunt will look out of his office in South Kensington and think back fondly to Stoke On Trent. For six and a half years, he represented it to Parliament. As a biographer of Engels, he'd know only too well that the socialist kingpin had visited the town in the 1850s, to report on the condition of the urban poor there (TL;DR: pretty dire).

This January though, realising that his career and party were going nowhere, he quit to become director of the vases-n-shit V&A Museum. Hunt had the dubious honour of being "Britain's least-popular MP" at the 2015 election. Stoke Central was the only constituency to register a turnout of less than 50 percent, and with UKIP nipping at his heals, despite a 5,000 majority, that meant that only 12,000 people had voted for him.

Such is the nature of life in Stoke – a town that has been disembowelled by the modern world, and has since descended into a political nihilism few other places can imagine.

This, more than anywhere, felt like UKIP's happiest hunting grounds. For a start, it's the "Brexit Capital Of Britain" – a 65 percent vote for Leave. It looks like a city that threw up on itself. Like a city that had a couple of vallies and woke up on a couch smelling of ranch sauce, Mayfairs and vom with the TV still blaring Babestation.

The day before I arrive, the top two stories in the Stoke Sentinel are that pregnant women in the town are being given shopping vouchers to quit smoking, and that a former resident has married Britain's most notorious prison hardman, Charles Bronson. Mazeltov.

The quantity of vacant real estate here is dazzling. Even the fake-Nandos has been reduced to a glassy tomb, a pile of post gathering dust on the doormat.

Outside the train station there's a statue to Josiah Wedgwood, the man who put the town on the map after he discovered its soil made great pots. He cut the first sod of the canal in 1795, and after that, Stoke was a decent, happy place all the way up until the 1980s.

"Never Tories," one old woman announces in the Costa Coffee. "Not round here. George Osborne kept going on about a Northern Powerhouse. Well, you see, there used to be a Northern Powerhouse." At its peak, there were 70,000 people working on the Potteries, against a total population of less than half a million. Wedgwood shipped most of its operation to the fringes of Jakarta 20 years ago. Now, only 10,000 of those jobs remain.

Ironically enough, most of those jobs actually went under Tony Blair. In the late 1990s, the liberal-internationalist globalisation-is-good-for you wing of the Labour Party looked on patronisingly as the town flopped to its knees, and told them the economic cycle would catch up with them on the flipside.

There were a few green shoots. One derelict shop right in the town centre, did come roaring back to life lately. UKIP's campaign headquarters, plastered with pictures of Paul Nuttall's upside-down face grinning and claiming to love the NHS.

There was a jolly buzz about the place the Saturday before the by-election – people popping in and out for a chat like it was one big fondue party of populist nationalism. The party had reportedly sent over 500 canvassers to town. All up and down the central precinct, purple rosettes tried to catch your eye, dole you a flyer.

Next door, in a vintage 50s bar stacked with memorabilia, the Farage-loving owner had pinned his life-size Humphrey Bogart mannequin with a UKIP rosette.

If you met people in the street, they'd normally tell you they weren't voting. "They don't give a damn about us." "They're all fooking useless." "It doesn't matter, does it?" But if they were, then they'd normally tell you they'd "been Labour all me life" but that they were either proudly-UKIP or thinking-about switching to UKIP now. The stigma didn't exist here anymore. It felt like the breakthrough moment the party had billed it as.

This, then, was meant to be the moment that Stoke roared. After 70 years of Labour control, they'd kick against the pricks. They'd prove that UKIP could win in the north, and thereby entrain the destruction of the Labour Party in Northern England much like it had been ended in Scotland.

It didn't turn out like that. Instead, it's UKIP who will now be thinking about palliative care.

True, there were candidate issues. Paul Nuttall's Hillsborough fibs. His PhD fibs. His house in the constituency fibs. Whatever other fibs. And his bizarre decision to wear his flatcap and tweed outfit, like he was auditioning for a Guy Ritchie flick about the Common Agricultural Policy.

But Labour had just as many of those. Former councillor Gareth Snell was the proverbial donkey in a red rosette – he was walking spoon-faced shit-for-brains proof that "these plebs will vote for anyone". A quick trawl of his Twitter revealed only was he the sort of person who did not erase his ancient tweets before the national media got hold of them, but a) he thought Brexit was "a pile of shit", and b) he was the sort of person who tweets along mediocrely with The Apprentice.

Likewise, it seemed pretty obvious that the Tories' 7,000 votes would melt away into UKIP. To get over the line, Nuttall only needed to take 2,000 of them, plus 2,000 from Labour.

That seemed to be the Conservatives' idea too – while even the BNP were out canvassing downtown, not a single Tory was in evidence. The party machinery seemed to have instinctively abandoned Stoke. The focus was all on Copeland, three hours North, where they have today been rewarded with a historic victory. Finally, on Tuesday, Theresa May made a flying visit – sensing blood. She was rewarded here too – with a vote percentage almost identical to that at the last election.

Depressingly for Corbyn, rather than being able to claim any kind of lasting victory, the existential threat he faces simply reverses direction. In nearly 50 Northern seats at the last election, UKIP came second to Labour, with the Tories third. Proportionally, especially if May keeps a sharp line on Brexit, more of that will bleed back into votes for Conservatives. And as victory in Copeland shows, all bets are now off for the old saw about "safe Labour seats".

This was a perfect storm. It was a by-election – which, let's face it, is just a sort of comedy-election where you're not choosing the Prime Minister so can happily stick a cross next to any amusing bozo. Yet even here, the fact that UKIP's party leader couldn't make it over the line means that the party will be wondering if its scrappy summer was a death knell.

Insurance moneybags Arron Banks has personally bankrolled the party for several years, despite an increasingly testy relationship with the top brass. He briefly ran for the leadership himself in one or other of summer's contests.

Banks made multiple trips to Stoke, and must now be wondering whether him and his cash should push off and form his own right-populist party – something he has long threatened. A win in Stoke would have given the Kippers a second MP and thereby access to so-called Short Money – Parliamentary funds that allow small parties to compete with the big guys. As the turkeys who voted for Christmas, their EU Parliament funding will end in early 2019. Adrift and squabbling, it's not going to be easy to replace.

In the end, it wasn't even a squeaker. At the count, no one was even watching Gareth Snell give a victory speech about his impressive new 2,000 vote majority. Instead, Nuttall was being scrummaged by reporters wanting to know what his own future was. Would he resign?

"I'm going nowhere," he told them.

True.

@gavhaynes

Related: Can Jeremy Corbyn Survive His Byelection Humiliation?