A new dawn has broken, has it not? To say the Tories won the Hartlepool by-election implies it was a meaningful contest. Too many crimes against cliche have been committed over the course of the past six weeks or so. No journalist can so much as see the word Hartlepool without being moved to add the likes of “historic”, “seismic”, “red wall”, “northern heartlands” and “Peter Mandelson”. When Red Box first published polling suggesting that Jill Mortimer, the unloved and

Source: The Times May 07, 2021 08:03 UTC