Keane Duncan’s highest profile success, prior to being chosen as the Conservative candidate aiming to be the first elected mayor of York and North Yorkshire, was as the journalist who broke the news that Morrisons would not sell meat pies to people in Middlesbrough before 9am. “That went off the charts, with millions and millions of views,” recalls the 29-year-old, who worked for a number of local news outlets in the north of England before quitting to focus on politics. “It turned into this crazy viral sensation. That is my journalism legacy, everything else I’ve done is irrelevant.” Duncan was in the room as regional newspapers transformed from print chroniclers of local politics to click-hungry online publishers constantly trying to go viral on Facebook. Now a full-time politician – after a stint as a news editor on the Daily Star when it compared former prime minister Liz Truss to a lettuce – Duncan is attempting to apply the same approach to political campaigning. This includes announcing on Instagram his un-Tory policy of nationalising Scarborough’s dilapidated but symbolic Grand hotel through a compulsory purchase order. “A lot of the time, politicians are begging for coverage but this time journalists were asking me for details,” he said while driving his van around the outer reaches of North Yorkshire last week. “As a journalist, your job is to tell people’s stories. My job is to tell the story of the region.” The risk is that this approach bypasses traditional journalism holding politicians to account. But it might just reflect the reality of political campaigns in 2024: television audiences, where news programmes are legally required to give airtime to all candidates, are in long-term decline.
Local print newspaper sales fell off a cliff a decade ago. Advertising-dependent local news websites know that traditional political stories won’t bring in the clicks they require to keep solvent. Talk to senior figures in the Labour party and they bemoan the declining reach of cut-hit BBC local radio. Because if every election campaign is about communicating with the public, how do you reach voters when you have to fight for every click? Duncan’s hope is that a combination of ultra-local face-to-face campaigning (he’s visiting 1,000 communities across North Yorkshire in 100 days), a few appearances in traditional outlets (the BBC held a hustings), and simple policies designed to go viral (free car parking in town centres, half-price homes) can help him connect with voters who are less likely than ever to consume traditional news outlets. He knew that pledging to seize control of the Grand would resonate with the public because he knew how much people loved to click on stories about the hotel’s decline. In 2018, he wrote a piece for the Daily Star on the lightly sourced theory that Adolf Hitler dreamed of running Nazi-controlled Britain from the “£35 ‘shithole’ hotel”. Conservative levelling up secretary Michael Gove, who met Duncan for a photo op in the North Yorkshire village of Deighton on Thursday, gave his backing to the approach. Standing in a bitterly cold village hall with two voters who had turned up, Gove proposed the Trump-infused “Make Scarborough Grand Again” as a slogan for the campaign.
Not everyone is sure this is good for democracy. Chris Titley worked at the Newsquest-owned York Press in the 1990s and 2000s, when the newspaper had long-serving political reporters who could phone politicians up “at any time” and hold them to account. For the past 12 years, he has run the independent outlet YorkMix – but says commercial local media struggles to afford the resources required to cover politics: “We’ve all had to follow up Keane Duncan’s pledges as they’re outrageous and headline-grabbing. The worry for me is this is just another Brexit bus thing – a thing that helps win an election but isn’t interrogated by the media.” He added: “I sent him a list of questions about how much money this would take and what the hoteliers of Scarborough would think, all these challenging questions. He’s so far ignored my request for this information.” The unusual nature of this mayoral contest doesn’t help. The York and North Yorkshire devolution deal will give the new mayor control over an area five times the area of Greater London but with a population of fewer than a million people. It yokes the Labour-leaning university city of York to struggling coastal towns and hundreds of solidly Tory villages. Duncan’s leaflets warn rural voters against choosing a “York-centric Labour mayor”.
It’s also the first mainly rural devolution deal – but, as such, the new mayor initially gets just £18m of extra central government funding. As a result, it’s difficult to see how Duncan – who previously combined his job at the Daily Star with being the UK’s youngest council leader – will be able to pay for all of his viral pledges. The other candidates have adopted a more traditional approach. Labour’s David Skaith, who was unavailable for interview, has adopted a muted approach while touring the area alongside Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves – but is likely to benefit from the national unpopularity of the Tories. Duncan’s only rival for headlines is independent candidate Keith Tordoff, who pledged to give 20,000 egg-laying chickens to voters under the tagline: “Conservatives will give you money for nothing – Keith will give you chicks for free!” As for Duncan, he has no regrets on his viral campaign approach, even if he’s unsuccessful in the 2 May vote. “Some of this stuff feels wacky but it’s sincere,” he said. “I want to change York and North Yorkshire and make sure we’re front and centre with Manchester and the West Midlands. People from outside the area wouldn’t be talking about us otherwise.”