Labour’s victory in the Wakefield byelection is proof that the party is “ready for government”, Keir Starmer has said. The Tories, who gained the seat in 2019 for the first time in almost 90 years, lost it on Thursday, trailing Labour by 4,921 votes and 18 percentage points. Simon Lightwood, an NHS communications executive who worked for the previous local Labour MP, was elected on a swing of 12.7% from the Tories. The previous Wakefield MP, the Conservative Imran Ahmad Khan, quit after being found guilty of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy. He is serving an 18-month jail sentence. Lightwood spent the short campaign repeatedly telling voters it was their chance to “boot Boris out of Downing Street”. He used his victory speech to address the prime minister, saying: “Your contempt for this country is no longer tolerated.”
The result, Labour’s first byelection gain since Corby in 2012, was greeted with relief rather than out-and-out jubilation by party organisers at the count at Thornes Park Stadium. It has major symbolic value for Starmer, the party leader, to show Labour is making progress in “red wall” seats won by the Conservatives in 2019. Starmer said it showed Labour was “back on the side of working people, winning seats where we lost before, and ready for government.” Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling up secretary, said the result showed Starmer had “sorted out the problems in the party, he’s persuaded people to have a fresh look at us.” She told BBC Radio 4’s The World At One: “We’ll never be complacent … but this is a stunning result for the Labour party and it really has lifted us right across the country.” Keenly aware that if Labour did not win the seat back then a leadership challenge would follow, Starmer had ordered the party to throw everything at Wakefield. He visited three times and ordered his shadow cabinet to follow suit.
Lightwood’s selection was viewed as a “stitch-up” by many in Wakefield’s constituency party, and there were resignations from its executive committee in protest. ButDavid Pickersgill, a Labour councillor in Wakefield, said members had rallied around Lightwood. “Those who resigned from office (not from the Party) still asked people to vote Labour. About 10 people from that group have not campaigned. Fifty or 60 other members (including a number from that Executive) have campaigned and worked bloody hard for a @UKLabour MP and future Govt,” he tweeted on Thursday night after polls closed. In interviews during the campaign, Lightwood talked about having grown up in poverty. “I know what people are going through in this cost of living crisis. After our childhood home was repossessed, I shared a bedroom with my nan, my aunt and my sister,” he tweeted. Nadeem Ahmed, the Conservative candidate, received rather less support from Tory party HQ, which was preoccupied with trying and failing to defend its 24,000 majority in the byelection on the same day in Tiverton and Honiton in Devon. Johnson cancelled a trip to Wakefield last Friday to visit the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in Kyiv instead.
Though often described as a typical red wall seat, Wakefield has been marginal for 20 years. Mary Creagh, elected for Labour in 2005 on a majority of just over 5,000, managed to hang on until 2019, when she was ousted by Khan, who won by 3,358 votes. A passionate European who once said she would be “a remainer until I die”, Creagh found herself out of step with many constituents in a seat that voted 66.4% to leave the EU. This time around an independent candidate, Akef Akbar, came third with 2,090 votes. He was elected as a Conservative councillor in Wakefield last year but resigned in protest at the whipping system in March. The Yorkshire party came fourth with 1,182 votes, the Green party was fifth on 587, Reform UK was sixth with 513 and the Liberal Democrats seventh on 508.