In Blair’s old seat, the regulars agree: ‘Corbyn doesn’t understand us here’

It came as no surprise that Boris Johnson hot-footed it to Sedgefield on Saturday . The prime minister probably never had much doubt that he could eclipse Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party in this election, but to rewrite the electoral history of this particular place was perhaps beyond his imagining. He needed to see it for himself.

Sedgefield had not only returned solid Labour majorities since 1935, it was also the symbolic home of the politician who, by the time of the next election, will be the only Labour election winner in half a century. Johnson wore an ironic red tie for the occasion, and came close to quoting some of Tony Blair’s most famous lines verbatim. “We are not the masters, we are the servants, and our job is to serve the people of this country,” he said. Even when he is making gestures of one-nation humility, he can’t help himself from trolling.

He pulled a pint to prove he had also laid to rest images of that other recent Tory nemesis, Nigel Farage, and offered all the familiar half-truths about nurses and hospitals and investment. The audience believed him just as much now as they had when they had gone to the ballot box on Thursday.

You can intellectualise the collapse of Labour’s vote in its north-east heartlands, but it is still a surreal spectacle up close. How had it happened? I had spent the previous evening at Fishburn Working Men’s Club, a mile down the road from Tony Blair’s old constituency home, asking that question. Downstairs, in the party room, there is a battle-worn miners’ banner in a glass case bearing the stern face of Keir Hardie; it is brought out each year to head the Durham miners’ parade. On the walls of the main bar, there are paintings of the former Fishburn colliery which once employed nearly every family in this village and, in pride of place, above the red leather seating, a solemn tableau of the “pits closed by the Tories”, row upon row of lost mines, each with its symbolic badge of arms.

Underneath this memorial, on Friday night, regulars at the club for 40 and 50 years explained to me, one after the other, how for the first time in their lives they had voted Conservative at this election.

That collective shift of will in Sedgefield saw the most formidable of Labour majorities crumble to a defeat for Phil Wilson, “the heir to Blair”. Blair remains an honorary member at Fishburn I’m told (“though possibly lapsed”); he won a majority of 25,000 in 1997. The Labour vote this time around was only 15,000 in total. When the news had come through at 3.30am, midway through Corbyn’s statement of defeat, the Conservative campaign headquarters pumped Things Can Only Get Better through its loudspeakers.

Wilson’s father was a miner in the Fishburn colliery. His own speech conceding defeat to Paul Howell, a retired accountant who also grew up in the constituency, could hardly have been more direct in apportioning blame.

“If you are on the doorstep and one person mentions Brexit, but five people mention the leader of the Labour party for being the reason they are not going to vote for you, then things need to change. I believe that the leader of the Labour party should not be resigning today, he should have resigned a long time ago.”

Any Momentum diehard who doubts the truth of that sentiment up here should come and talk to the Fishburn regulars. Arthur Hudspeth is playing the fruit machine in the social club. He recently celebrated his 91st birthday. He went down the pit at 14 in 1942 and worked in mines until his retirement at 65. The only two years he missed were for his national service: “first battalion of the Durhams” he tells me, looking me in the eye. He has voted Labour without fail in every election since Attlee’s victory in 1945, but not this time. He is ashamed to say he didn’t vote at all, but winces at the mention of Corbyn’s name and shakes his head. Why? “Rubbish. He’s not my kind of man. Not strong enough. He doesn’t understand us here.”

To start to unpack what Hudspeth means, you need to look in the dominoes room of the Fishburn Club. The symbolic decoration here is provided by the plaques and banners not of mines but of local regiments. It is this strand of the collective memory to which Corbyn, as Labour leader, appears to have had nothing to say.

Talking to regulars the same allegations surface again and again. That Corbyn consorted with the IRA, that he is soft on terrorists. That he has remained silent on prosecuting veterans over the Bloody Sunday killings. The leader’s shifting agnosticism on Brexit, in this context, is portrayed as yet another failure of patriotism, just as symbolic as his unforgivable reluctance to sing God save the Queen at a Battle of Britain remembrance service.

Tom Blenkinsop, the former Middlesbrough MP who stood down in 2017 after organising against Corbyn, described exactly that sentiment to me on Friday, when anger at the catastrophic result for Labour was still keeping him from sleep. Blenkinsop, now an army reservist, had been campaigning with Wilson in Sedgefield for the previous couple of days and knew what was coming.

“Brexit was obviously a factor, but the main issue again and again here was the leadership. It didn’t matter what the message was, they didn’t like the messenger.”

Were people not persuaded at all by the pledges on the NHS, the promise of nationalisations?

“You are talking about the north-east of England. It is not just based on a strong unionised workforce, but also the armed services. There is hardly a family around here who has not had a son or a brother or a father serve. A man like Corbyn, with his history, they could not vote for him.”

Blenkinsop and Wilson were among those who believed that remaining in the EU could have been sold as a Labour issue and a patriotic one – by arguing that pooled sovereignty was enhanced sovereignty and that a strong economy was what made Britain great – but that argument was over before it began. Both men enthusiastically endorsed Alan Johnson’s scathing assessment of Corbyn and his “Momentum cult” as incapable of “leading the working class out of a paper bag”.

In the absence of that leadership, other pseudo-patriotic voices have stepped in. Penny Pearson, 60, who helps to run the committee at Fishburn, tells me with some pride how the club hosted three events for a tweed-jacketed Nigel Farage and the Brexit party, down in the room with the Hardie banner. They catered for 100 each time and more came. Like many here Pearson would have voted for Farage, but went Conservative “just to make sure” that Corbyn’s Labour had no chance.

Of all the people in the club the only one who admits voting Labour is the barman, Lewis White, who is working part-time here to help fund his way through a teacher-training course at Teesside. He is a lone fan of what is generally described as Corbyn’s “London” politics. White is 28 now and has been coming here for a decade. “It was always a Labour club; it’s unheard of, what’s happened.” He looks around the bar, “Even the seats here are red,” he says. “Perhaps they will have to think about redecorating.”