“The only thing I’ve heard is something about wallpaper,” says Simon Bennett, who is busy unloading a box of petunias at the fruit, veg and flower stall he helps run in Dudley market. To him all the news about Tory sleaze and spending by Boris Johnson on his Downing Street flat seems an overblown fuss about not very much. Bennett describes himself as a floating voter and is yet to make up his mind about how to vote in Thursday’s local council and mayoral elections, if he votes at all. As for Johnson’s suitability to run the country, it is too early. “He has said he will sort out Brexit and Covid. We’ll just have to see if he delivers.” Sheltering from the rain in a shop entrance nearby, pensioner Brian Benjamin has been following the stories about Tory sleaze more closely than Bennett, but he is not bothered about them either. “It is all nit-picking,” stirred up by Labour and the media, he says. Benjamin used to be in the building renovation and decorating business himself, and says he knows a thing or two about wallpaper. “I think people round here would say he should have somewhere decent to live. OK they might have gone about it better, but Labour people were just as bad. I think Johnson has done well on the Covid vaccine and Brexit and that is what is important, not this stuff.” If Labour believes it can exploit recent stories about the prime minister and his Downing Street flat, and his alleged comments about bodies in the street, to launch a comeback in “red wall” elections on Thursday, then immediate evidence on a cold Thursday afternoon in Dudley North was far from overwhelming. Certainly all the noise about sleazy goings-on among Tories has influenced some. Jennifer Grice, selling children’s clothes on the market, never liked Johnson and thinks even less of him now after “wallpapergate”. “He just has an attitude that he can do what he wants, that what he says goes. They are all at it, all fiddling,” she says. Grice stood by Labour when Dudley North fell to the Tories at the 2019 general election, as large areas behind the so-called red wall turned blue, and will vote for the party again on Thursday. Importantly for Labour, there are also signs that Tory sleaze has made an impression on some first-time voters. Outside Dudley college, 18-year-old students Tiana Smith and Oliver Barklam said they were appalled to hear what Johnson was alleged to have said about preferring bodies piled high to another Covid lockdown. “I think he is just awful,” said Smith. “I wasn’t surprised, knowing what we do about him. He is racist, homophobic, everything bad.”
But it is a mixed picture as Labour tries to rebuild under Keir Starmer, not just in former strongholds in the north and Midlands, but in Scotland and Wales too. Because contests were postponed last year as a result of Covid, Thursday will see the largest set of local and devolved elections ever held in the UK. For Starmer it is his first electoral test since becoming leader just over a year ago. Inevitably it has proved difficult for the man heading the opposition to get much of a hearing in a pandemic. Four students outside Dudley College – all studying photography – said they knew nothing at all about the recent sleaze controversies that Labour and its leader had been hammering on about for weeks. As for Starmer there were blank looks. None of them had any idea who he was. Cathryn Bayton, a retiring Labour councillor on Dudley council who has kept up the campaigning for her party in recent weeks, is nonetheless optimistic. She believes that Thursday will see signs of a Labour recovery, from the disastrous low point of the 2019 general election. “At that time a lot of people here who would have voted Labour wanted to get Brexit done and said they did not like Corbyn. In this council area every ward voted comfortably to leave the EU in 2016. But now Brexit is done, finished and we have a new leader. The mood is changing quite significantly. Despite relief at the vaccination programme, people are dismayed with the government nationally and what has been going on at Westminster.” These, though, are nervous times for Labour as well as the Conservatives. People like Bayton, who says most people will vote on local issues, can hope but they can’t be remotely certain of seeing their party stage a fightback. Many contests here and in other red-wall areas are on a knife-edge, from the byelection in Hartlepool and across much of the north to the Midlands. Covid-19 and the battle against it have complicated the political picture, making predictions more difficult than ever. Will the Tories, buoyed by the vaccine programme and despite their recent troubles, somehow escape unscathed and stand firm in former Labour heartlands, or even strengthen their hold? In some council areas including Bury, Bolton, Durham and Rotherham there are concerns in Labour ranks that the Tories could make gains that not long ago would have been regarded as unthinkable. Last week in Rotherham, where Labour holds 48 of the 63 seats on the metropolitan borough council and the Tories none, most people dismissed any thought of voting Conservative. But loyalty to Labour is not what it was, and there were some who found something in Johnson to admire. “People could be swayed,” said Andrea Sissons, a volunteer bereavement counsellor taking a walk in the town centre. “Boris has done quite a good job. I like him – he’s quite a character.” She adds: “I was always a Labour supporter but I have thought about trying something different.”
If there is one single English contest behind the red wall that Tory and Labour strategists will have their eyes on come Thursday, it will be the close race for the West Midlands mayoralty, narrowly won in 2017 by the former boss of John Lewis, Andy Street. The mayor of this region represents about 3 million people across Birmingham, Coventry, Solihull and the Black Country. After his 2017 victory Street said the Tories had arrived to stay and would champion local working people where Labour had failed. It was part, he suggested, of a massive reconfiguration of the political map. “This marks the rebirth of urban Conservatism,” Street claimed. “It’s about economic success and about shaping a region which works for everybody, no matter how strong or weak you are.” Labour’s candidate Liam Byrne, the MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and a former chief secretary to the Treasury, is talking up his chances, saying “the atmosphere on the doorstep is radically different to December 2019. We see the Labour core vote is incredibly strong. In our more red-wall areas about 13% of our contacts are people who are switching back from the Tories to Labour.” Byrne’s campaign has produced what he calls “the greenest manifesto any Labour candidate has ever run on”, which has set a target of the mid-2030s for the West Midlands to become net zero carbon. “And we have married that to a story about bringing back industry to the area,” he says. Street’s pitch, however, is that he has brought investment to the entire area, improved transport links and secured the 2022 Commonwealth Games for Birmingham. Unlike Byrne he can also put distance between himself and the political class at Westminster – a bonus in the current climate of sleaze. “People recognise that Andy has a business background rather than being a career politician,” says his spokesman. Senior Labour figures don’t like to contemplate failure here. It could, they believe, signal terminal decline and be evidence that Street was right to predict the Tories had arrived to stay. “If Labour can’t win in the West Midlands it means Labour can’t govern nationally,” said one very senior party figure at Westminster. “It is absolutely crucial. If we lose here it is very serious. Thursday is a big day indeed.”