Jubilant Keir Starmer hails Wakefield win as 'vindication of past two years'

Sir Keir was cheered as he arrived to speak to activists in Ossett, a market town in the Wakefield constituency, alongside new MP Simon Lightwood.

He told them: "You didn't just get this over the line, you absolutely smashed it. A great result for Labour.

"This is vindication of all of our hard work over the last two years because what Wakefield could see was a Labour party confident, united and absolutely focused on the issues affecting working people.

"As a result, they put their faith in Simon and they put their faith in our party.

"What a judgement this is on the Tories and Boris Johnson."

Mr Lightwood was elected to the West Yorkshire seat with a majority of 4,925 on a swing of 12.7 per cent from the Tories to Labour.

Wakefield had been a Labour seat continuously from 1932 until 2019, when it was won for the Conservatives by Imran Ahmad Khan as part of the Tories’ takeover of ” so-called red wall constituencies across the north of England.

A by-election was triggered after Mr Khan resigned earlier this year following his conviction for sexually assaulting a teenage boy.

Sir Keir told reporters the win was a “huge result” for the party and was “absolutely” a brick back in Labour’s red wall.

“This puts us now absolutely on track for a Labour government, which is absolutely coming,” he said.

Sir Keir faced criticism over the selection process for the seat after Mr Lightwood was preferred above candidates living in the constituency.

On a wider national level, he has also been criticised by some within the party for not restoring the Labour whip to former leader Jeremy Corbyn, as well as recent reports that Labour frontbenchers have been ordered not to join RMT picket lines outside railway stations during the current rail strike.

But he told reporters in Ossett that the Wakefield result showed the party was moving in the right direction.

"This is a historic by-election so far as we are concerned. This is significant, this is a huge swing to Labour and it vindicates that for two years we have been changing the Labour party to make it into that confident party, that party that is facing the voters and that is laser-like focused on the issues that affect them. That's why people have put their faith in Simon and our Labour party.

"I couldn't be prouder of this historic moment on the step towards the next Labour Government."

He said the resignation of Oliver Dowden as Tory party chairman following the by-election results in West Yorkshire and Devon showed the Conservatives are "absolutely imploding".

"They know they are out of ideas and out of touch. If they had any decency, they would get out of the way for the next Labour government," he said.

"What happened here in Wakefield was people exercising their judgement on this Conservative Government and voting no confidence."

Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab described the Conservative party losses in the by-elections being the result of a “perfect storm”.

Speaking on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, he said: “My view is that the by-elections, both of them, were the result of the perfect storm of very difficult local scenarios, given the situations of the previously sitting Conservative MPs, plus the national headwinds, first of all, inevitably, for a mid-term government, but also, frankly, the distractions that we’ve had.

“I think the Prime Minister put it well: we need to listen very carefully, we need to take that feedback.

“I think (with) Tiverton, the most striking thing is how many of our supporters didn’t come out. We need to spend the next two years absolutely relentlessly focused on delivering our plan, without those distractions and with a real calm focus on delivering.”

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