Why Batley and Spen voters trust Boris Johnson over Keir Starmer – Bernard Ingham

The outcome is complicated by myriad allegations of dirty tricks in a multi-cultural seat, the effect of Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s half clinch and Boris Johnson allowing him to resign rather than sack him.

It will be ironic if, as some polls suggest, the Tories win after their recent drubbing at the hands of the Liberal Democrats in Amersham.

Yet it would be perfectly logical.

Just as the Tories took their long-loyal supporters in Buckinghamshire for granted in driving the HS2 rail project through the Chilterns and causing fears that the Green Belt will be concreted over, so Labour’s ruling so-called metropolitan elite has lost touch with its Northern grassroots.

Indeed, there is evidence Labour’s Remoaners regard us as “thick”. As a Brexiteer, this makes me doubly proud to be a Tyke.

In the normal course of events I would expect Labour to win – if only out of loyalty to a former murdered MP, Jo Cox, whose sister, Kim Leadbeater, is seeking to follow her to Parliament.

Sadly, nothing has been going right for Labour for a good 15 years.

First, Tony Blair blew it by invading Iraq with a false prospectus.

Then, when Gordon Brown forced his way into No 10, he threw money around just as we were hit by a financial crash. The result: a £153m budget deficit.

After 10 years, the Tories had still 
not balanced the books when Covid struck.

Worse was to follow Brown. Ed Miliband effectively paved the way for Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader by opening the floodgates to the hard Left with a £3 annual membership fee.

And now Sir Keir Starmer is trying 
to bring a broken party together, labouring under the handicap of being a leading member of Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet.

It is an unholy mess compounded by the reason for the by-election – the election of Tracy Brabin, the sitting Labour member, as the new metropolitan mayor of West Yorkshire.

When will Labour get its act together?

Superficially, Batley and Spen is spoiled for choice with 16 candidates.

Yet not one of them, apart from the Tory, Ryan Stephenson, has any chance of entering government, though the Monster Raving Loony Party may be more representative than is comfortable, given today’s preoccupation with mental health.

George Galloway, in his Workers Party fedora, is the most experienced.

He is, at best, a mere protest vote just like the Liberal Democrats.

Nobody remotely expects to see a Liberal Democrat government after the Cameron/Clegg coalition this side of Armageddon.

But what is worrying is the fragmentation of politics with a ballot paper of 16 names.

Which brings me to the Tories. Their victory would be on a par with Hartlepool and would place Keir Starmer in jeopardy.

Yet where is his successor? Indeed, where is there anyone of stature and political skill to rescue the Labour Party from its abject plight?

But the same might be said of the Tories. Who, even after 10 years in government, hits you as Boris Johnson’s potential successor, except possibly the treacherous Michael Gove?

The awful truth is that we have a dearth of experienced and charismatic candidates for No 10 to handle the greatest peacetime set of problems ever encountered.

Just look at the agenda: conquering Covid, regenerating the economy more evenly across the country, reforming the social services and not least the NHS, getting on top of crime and immigration, repairing the education system, cleaning up the planet, finding a modus vivendi with the vindictive EU and rising to the challenge presented by Communism and the terrorist states.

This is not to mention the intensifying threat from within to freedom of thought and expression from the pesky zealotry that is, inexplicably, called ‘woke’.

I count the influence, nay coercion, exercised by an endless number of minorities as a far greater threat to our way of life than Covid.

It may be that Batley and Spen voters, reading this, will throw in the towel.

But their vote matters enormously. In the testing circumstances in which we find ourselves who is most likely to bring us through them in reasonable order?

Boris, for all his many faults, still takes some beating.

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