āI have been a foster carer for over 14 years and have never sexually assaulted anyone. I am happily married to Janet.ā Paul Bickerdike secured 102 votes when he stood for the Christian Peopleās Alliance in last Julyās by-election in Batley and Spen. Almost a year later, he is pinning his hopes on winning Wakefield, where, as the first line of his campaign leaflet makes clear, he does have one thing going for him: unlike the cityās last member of parliament, he is not a paedophile.
When that MP, Imran Ahmad Khan, was imprisoned last month for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy, over a century had passed since wardens at HMP Wakefield coined the term ānonceā. Ahmad Khan defied political history by winning the seat in 2019; three years later, history took its revenge.
Wakefield had been Labourās since 1932. In Mary Creagh, it had a reliable Labour MP whose popularity had shown no sign of waning since she was elected in 2005. But then two-thirds of Wakefield voted for Brexit, Creagh said she would be a Remainer until she dies, and the Tories spotted an open goal. Wakefield was theirs for the taking. It didnāt matter who was on the ballot. It didnāt matter that nobody in Wakefield knew who Ahmad Khan was. It didnāt even matter that, just days before the vote, party officials were warned that their man was a nonce.
āIām ashamed that someone from Wakey was done for doing something like that,ā Sharon Horncastle, 60, tells me. āI had two lads from Labour come knocking on my door to ask if Iād vote for their man. I just told them: āIt depends if heās a paedo or not.āā
Horncastle didnāt vote in 2019, because ātheyāre all shitā. But this time round, she feels she doesnāt have a choice. āI have to vote Labour. The Conservative here got done for being a paedophile. How could I vote for them?ā Is that the only reason youāll vote Labour? āThereās Borisās lockdown parties, too. While he was doing that, my mum died of Covid. Thereās five of us children but only one person could go and see her on her deathbed. But of course Keir Starmer was at it too. Theyāre just as bad as each other.ā
But will voting Labour make her life better? āNo,ā she says immediately. āI work at Morrisons. I can see how everyone is now struggling. People canāt afford their shopping. We need an MP whoās going to make a difference. But what choice do I have?ā
In Wakefield city centre, the extent of that choice swiftly becomes clear. It is Market Day, and the political offering is meagre. Neither Labour nor the Conservatives can be bothered to campaign. They leave that to the lesser parties.
A gaggle of supporters from Reform UK, the Brexit Partyās disappointing second album, squawk about cutting taxes. Campaigners from the local Freedom Alliance party silently hand out leaflets, then watch them be discarded in the bin a few metres away. Over the road, a collection of photographers stare expectantly at the cathedral looming over the square. I ask which political Big Beast is about to emerge: Angela Rayner? David Davis? Liz Truss? āOh no,ā Iām told. āWeāre not here for that. Thereās a peregrine falcon nesting in the spire.ā
A megaphone attached to a crawling black cab interrupts our conversation. Ukip have arrived. āAre you tired of Westminster?ā its candidate booms from his⦠black cab. An hour later, the car returns to the city centre, this time blasting out Dusty Springfield. By lunchtime, the party has moved on to Adele. I spot the car again later parked outside Wetherspoonās: one of its passengers is arguing with a Stand Up To Racism campaigner over who is more fascist.
The by-election circus is yet to arrive in Wakefieldās suburbs. āIāve got my postal vote, but weāve had no canvassers knocking on our door,ā Deanne tells me on the cityās Peacock Estate, where a third of households live in fuel poverty. āWeāve had no leaflets either.ā Deanne, an NHS worker, voted for Labour in 2019, but is yet to make her mind up. āThe Labour candidate talks about buying his first house in Wakefield, but when the ballot paper came through, it turned out he lives in another constituency.ā Is that enough to make her vote Tory? āI donāt think so. Thereās all the nastiness with the last MP. And then thereās Boris ā how is he still even around? If Iād done something like that, Iād be out the door.ā
Anthea Ambleton, who lives around the corner from HMP Wakefield, doesnāt need a leaflet or canvasser to sway her vote. āThe Partygate scandal is bad enough,ā she tells me. āBut I used to work in child protection, so I was absolutely furious with their last MP. I donāt know why the Tories let that git stand last time when there were all those rumours circulating about him.ā
Yet the reason is depressingly straightforward: three weeks before Imran Ahmad Khan was elected, another āgitā was lined up to be Wakefieldās next Tory MP. However, Antony Calvertās campaign came crashing down at the last minute. Not because he was caught sneering at a working-class constituent for going to Costa. It was tweets that did for him ā a cocktail of misogynistic remarks about Mary Creagh and racist jibes about Bradford.
And so the Conservatives parachuted in Amhad Khan from his mansion in the Lake District, along with an election agent who had once been hired by an American prison to teach staff how to execute people by hanging. It didnāt matter that Ahmad Khan was rumoured to have already applied to stand in Wakefield and not been selected for interview. The Tories could afford to be complacent: Labour still had Corbyn and Brexit was still infused with hope. Even a nonce and a hangman could get the job done.
Three years later, even with Partygate, even with Ahmad Khan in jail, a whiff of that complacency lingers. It doesnāt matter whether you live in Wakefield (a paedophile) or Tiverton (penchant for tractor porn): the selection of unsuitable candidates has always been a symptom, not a product, of the Conservative Partyās nihilistic lack of direction. In Wakefield, it now takes the form of Nadeem Ahmed.
Ahmed is an improvement on his predecessors, though the bar is low. He is a local candidate (unlike Khan), and he is capable of restraining himself on Twitter (unlike Calvert). But politically, he is a failure: despite serving as the Conservative group leader of Wakefield Council since 2014, he was forced to quit last July after losing a vote of no confidence at a party meeting. Ahmedās colleagues deemed him too incompetent to represent them on the council. Yet here he is: hoping to represent 70,000 people in Westminster.
Ahmed bristles when I ask why he thinks a failed council leader deserves to be Wakefieldās next MP. He deflects; he pretends he canāt hear me; he makes excuses. āI didnāt want to be group leader anymoreā; āI always wanted to pass on the leadershipā; āI wasnāt feeling well at the timeā; āthe story was spun by the Wakefield Express and Labourā.
So I ask directly: did he lose a vote of no confidence last July? There is silence. Is he going to lie? He is. āNo,ā he says. āThere was no vote of confidence.ā I tell him that Iāve spoken to a Tory councillor in the room at the time who watched him lose, but still he denies it. Perhaps he knows that itās too late, that Boris Johnson has already āpriced inā the fall of Wakefield, and that he has nothing to lose. Or perhaps he thinks it simply doesnāt matter. After all, at least heās not a nonce.
The Labour candidate who will win Wakefield is Simon Lightwood, though it should have been someone else. During his campaign to become Labour leader, Keir Starmer called for the partyās selection process to be āmore democraticā. Labour āshould end NEC impositions of candidatesā, he said, and ālocal party members should select their candidatesā. But two years is a long time in Labour politics, and Starmerās call for more democracy has given way to iron-clad bureaucracy.
When the by-election was announced, roughly 25 Labour candidates put their names forward. Only three lived in the constituency, including a popular local councillor who had already been through the partyās Future Candidate programme. āHe didnāt even make it on to the shortlist of four,ā a member of the local party told me. āNormally, the candidate is decided by a panel of five people ā three from the local party, one from the NEC and one from the unions. But this time, Labour HQ put a stop to this.ā There was only one local representative and three from the NEC, who effectively block-voted to whittle it down to two alternatives. āNeither of them were from the constituency and both were anti-Brexit. Lightwood doesnāt even live in the constituency. This is the fifth place heās tried to be nominated.ā
Pushed aside by the party machine, the 16 members of the Wakefield constituency Labour party resigned. āAfter Corbyn, itās control gone mad,ā one of them told me. āWe are having nothing to do with it. The local constituency party, many of them Labour councillors, are refusing to campaign. Look at Lightwoodās campaign photos and youāll hardly see any locals in them. Heās having to ship in canvassers from London and MPs to knock on doors.ā Will any of this affect the result? āLabour will win but it wonāt be meaningful: if you canāt defeat a party whose last candidate is a convicted paedophile, then youāre really shit.ā
Lightwood will win ā though it seems unlikely he will match the 23,000 votes secured by Creagh in 2017, or the 21,000 by Ahmad Khan in 2019. That would require there to be enough people willing to vote for him, rather than simply against Johnson and Ahmad Khan. āIāve seen them come and go,ā Susan Albrighton, 70, tells me. āAnd nothing gets better. Even with Brexit, which I voted for, nothing has really changed. The leaders are all as bad as each other.ā Itās hard to find anyone who has a good word to say about Starmer: āHeās just like the rest of themā; āhe doesnāt stand for anythingā; āheās better than Corbyn, but thatās not saying muchā.
This by-election, then, is a tale of political failure: of the Conservatives winning a Labour stronghold for the first time in 87 years and then handing it over to a paedophile; and of Labour losing Wakefield ā once home to the man who introduced communism to Britain ā in the first place, and then winning it back without needing to make amends. This isnāt a battle of politics, or of great ideas. Itās a procedural game, where the least-worst candidate wins and the voters always lose.
In 1967, Wakefieldās Mayor boasted of living in an āindustrial city with much of the air of a country townā. Fifty-five years later, Wakefieldās industry has disappeared. It is now just a small city like any other in Britain: home to a boarded-up high street, a glistening centre on its periphery, a bus system that doesnāt work, and a population concerned they wonāt be able to put food on the table. As Rob Morris, 61, told me: āI donāt care who wins. Iām past caring now. I canāt afford to.ā
This is the consequence of systemic negligence: a city in stasis; its residents resigned to the fact that nothing will get better. Both parties had an opportunity to give Wakefield a voice ā and squandered it. Labour handed the city to a disdainful Remainer; the Tories chose a paedophile. It’s hardly surprising that Wakefield is past caring now. Labour will win. Nothing will change. At least he’s not a nonce.
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