If you want to get an idea of England’s prevailing mood, go to the Midlands. That wasn’t a bad principle to apply to the general election, when the Warwickshire town of Nuneaton became a byword for the Tories’ defeat of Ed Miliband’s Labour party. Now, with the news that the Labour MP Tristram Hunt is resigning a seat that was destined to disappear under boundary changes, triggering a byelection, the same idea looks very relevant again.

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Suddenly all eyes are on Stoke-on-Trent: a post-industrial city haunted by the decline of its pottery industry that lies within the official boundaries of the West Midlands, but which also has a distinct flavour of the north-west. In Jeremy Corbyn’s office, Stoke is presumably already a signifier for panic, anger and the frustration of trying to accomplish a relaunch in the midst of an escalating political firefight. It could be his Waterloo. There again, he and his party are not the only ones who are faced with a defining challenge.

Which brings us to Ukip. Though the Londoncentric media still regularly announces its imminent extinction (Diane James lasted just over a fortnight as the party’s leader back in the autumn), the party is still here. Its new boss, Paul Nuttall, is talking about a fresh injection of energy and purpose: “new atmosphere, a new attitude, a new era, a new Ukip,” he recently boasted. No sooner had Hunt announced that he was quitting than “party sources” were reportedly confirming that Nuttall was being urged to run. If that’s true, it’s not hard to see why: Stoke-on-Trent Central is precisely the kind of seat where Nuttall’s aspirations to “replace Labour” might conceivably take wing.

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At the 2015 general election, Ukip came second, just ahead of the Tories, having improved on their 2010 showing by 18 percentage points. They may have still trailed Labour by 5,000 votes, but then came the EU referendum, in which support for Brexit in the city as a whole came in at nearly 70%.

I spent time there in the buildup to the vote and found a case study in the working-class disaffection that is now causing Labour no end of disquiet. Though local Labour people were energetically campaigning for remain, whole streets were set on voting the other way. Leave was doing a brisk trade among not just white voters but also British-Asian people. There was a sense of a long-dormant political relationship between party and people that had now reached the point of an indifference tinged with bitterness: perhaps Hunt’s sudden arrival in the city, in 2010 – after a career as an author, academic, TV face and New Labour apparatchik – had only made things worse.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tristram Hunt has been MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central since 2010. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

In that sense, I sensed strong echoes of Scotland in 2014, captured in something Hunt himself told me. “[As with] the Scottish referendum, I’m worried about the aftermath,” he said as he handed out remain leaflets outside a shopping centre. “I’m worried about whether there’ll be more splintering of the vote.” In the heat of the campaign, this perhaps translated as a warning, which still stands: that once Labour voters get in the habit of not doing what the party tells them, there’s no knowing where it will end.

Perhaps Nuttall will do a Nigel Farage, and prove frit, insisting that someone else takes on the challenge. Maybe Labour, which still has a strong councillor base and a long history of local dominance, will pick a good local candidate and stay put. If the troubled pro-Corbyn “movement” Momentum is still capable of campaigning not just for the Labour leader but for the survival of the party’s values, it might want to think of Stoke as the temporary frontline in the fight against rightwing populism, and give the campaign everything it has got; clearly, Ukip will do the same. In that sense, this byelection will provide a fascinating sense of post-referendum politics, and whether the two forces competing for working-class Brexit voters are prepared for the fight.

For Labour, there is much to worry about. When I was there, no one I spoke to had cottoned on to the idea that Corbyn was a new kind of leader, supposedly set on reconnecting the party with its supposed “core” vote. All too often he was seen as just another embodiment of a metropolitan world light years away, who was at odds with what scores of people thought about immigration. The political scene was replete with fascinating details – such as the fact that one of Ukip’s leading lights is Tariq Mahmood, a barrister and former Labour member who left the party in 2014 over its stance on Europe. And there was already evidence of what local disaffection with Labour could mean. Circa 2006, Labour had lost support to the fascist British National party; in 2015, it ceded control of the city council to a coalition split between the Tories, Ukip and a grouping called the City Independents.

We should keep one eye on the looming contest in the Cumbrian seat of Copeland, but Stoke’s byelection is an altogether bigger story. Late last year, Richmond Park offered a story of what 48:52 politics might mean in places that backed remain; now we’re about to get a very vivid sense of changed political realities on the other side of the Brexit divide, in a city that has already served notice of its fraying relationship with a party that once considered it a heartland. Hold on tight: as Labour pinballs from crisis to crisis, for the first time in far too long somewhere chock-full of ghosts is going to tell us a hell of lot about the future.