Chris Lloyd: The Tory Tsunami is just beginning - but the blue tide is still coming in

“If there’s a lesson, it is the public want politicians to get on with their priorities,” he said, standing coatless on the quayside despite the threat of hail. “Here in Hartlepool, people voted for Brexit and we got Brexit done, and then we are able to do other things.”

With the new MP shivering beside him, he launched into his bullet points of the freeport, of the economic campus in Darlington, of taking control of our borders, of overturning the European Super League, and of levelling up.

“There’s talent, enthusiasm and flare everywhere in the country, but the opportunities aren’t evenly distributed.”

“Yeah,” shouted out two men spontaneously. “Well said, Boris!”

Instead of a hailstorm, it was a "hail, Boris!" moment, as in a town which is proud of its identity, this well received positivism gives a clue to one of the reasons behind yesterday’s remarkable results.

Those results were a shock, but not a surprise.

They were a shock because of the size of the Conservatives victories – in the Tees Valley, Ben Houchen took a staggering 73 per cent of the vote; in Hartlepool, Jill Mortimer won by 7,000. And they were a shock because of their historic nature: for the first time since 1959, Hartlepool elected a Conservative MP.

But not a surprise because in 2019, a Tory tsunami swept through the Tees Valley and County Durham. It lapped around Hartlepool, but the Brexit Party allowed Labour to cling on. Yesterday's by-election result was just a continuation of 2019 – it shows that after Redcar, Sedgefield, Bishop Auckland and Durham North West, the blue tide is still coming in.

The size of the majorities shows that Labour’s Keir Starmer has not stemmed it in any way.

Peter Mandelson said yesterday that there were two Cs that caused the defeats: Covid and Corbyn. Perhaps. There were definitely three Bs at play: Brexit, Ben and Boris.

Brexit has accelerated the drift away from Labour that has been happening in the North-East for decades. For Labour to select a remain candidate who lost his seat in 2019 – “if he’s not good enough for Stockton, he’s not good enough for Hartlepool” was a cry Tory canvassers heard on the doorsteps – was not wise, despite his credentials as a virus-fighting doctor.

Allied to Brexit was the game-changing election of Ben Houchen in 2017 as Tees Valley mayor. It proved that people could vote Conservative without the sky falling in. He showed that Tories were electable in these Labour heartlands. He promised change and a new brand of pragmatic politics – and he set about nationalising the airport.

Generations in this area have been scared of “the same old Tories”, but this now looks like a new kind of Toryism.

And Boris has allowed people to vote Conservative in Parliamentary elections in a way they couldn’t for a party led by someone like Theresa May or David Cameron. People talk of “voting for Boris”, or indeed of voting for Ben, rather than voting for the Conservatives.

Despite the media scandal, as the encounter of the quayside yesterday showed, they still like the Prime Minister's positivism – it ties in with their pride of place and country that fuelled the Brexit vote.

Boris burbled happily along the waters' edge, elbow-bumping with his thumbs up, keen to see the 30ft hot air caricature of himself – “it looks like that detective out of Line of Duty”, he said – while telling everyone within earshot that everything was going to be levelled up and would turn out alright.

By contrast, Labour just told negatives about public services being poor. Whether anyone would have been listening to any opposition leader immediately after such an historic defeat is debatable, even without the pandemic, but other than not looking like Jeremy Corbyn, Mr Starmer has not set out a vision of how fundamentally Labour has changed.

And he hasn’t addressed the existential question of whether the party can change to represent working class voters who have no memory of the monolithic manufacturing industries on which the Labour movement was built. Indeed, they are so long gone in Hartlepool that they’ve been replaced by the nostalgia industry, and Mr Johnson used Trincomalee, Europe's oldest floating warship, as a backdrop yesterday as the wind in his sails turned further seats and wards from red to blue.

“They call them by this horrible phrase ‘left behind places’,” a former North-East Labour MP said to me yesterday as the numbers of the fallen in his ranks swelled by another one, “but really they’re not left behind; they’ve moved on. It is the Labour Party that has got left behind.”

The votes that will be counted in Durham today will show just how left behind it has become.