The Observer journalist Tim Adams has been in the former Labour safe seat (and Tony Blair’s old constituency) of Sedgefield today, where the prime minister gave a triumphant speech to activists this morning.

The new Tory MP in Sedgefield, Paul Howell, a retired accountant, is the unlikely latest heir to Blair. He had watched hope harden into expectation a week into the campaign. He had walked down a street in the former mining village of Cornforth, north of Trimdon, knocking on doors. He went through a dozen without finding a Labour voter; the 13th was an ex-Labour councillor who also pledged him a vote.

There were so many following winds here: but the Brexit factor and the Corbyn factor were the big ones, while Boris was seen as someone who can deliver. Personally, I think people only ever lend you their votes. It’s up to you to make them trust you again to give it again.

The talk in the air is of a new Thatcherism, but “without the tribal connotations”. Oliver Peeke, who works in admin for the council, admits he is one of those referred to by Johnson whose grandparents would be spinning in their grave to see him wearing a Tory rosette.

A lot of our family were Labour, but I’m desperate that this time it will stick. I don’t want to go back to the dark old days when people would just scream Thatcher at you when you walk up the drive with a Tory leaflet. There has to be more to politics that that.

The defeated Labour candidate, Phil Wilson, told the Observer that “if Johnson was going to park his tanks on any lawn this morning it was going to be here. He wants to say to the world that New Labour is history.”



Wilson puts his defeat squarely at the door of the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. He is angry that his party has proved itself “unable to connect with people who are not in London”, and presented a manifesto “that was an essay about the past” with “nothing to say about the future”.