Inside Hartlepool election battleground where 'you never tell people what to do'

I’m sharing a drink with Andy Capp, Hartlepool’s most famous son. He’s a little fella, standing on the waterfront where he has the best view of the town’s parliamentary by-election.

Or would have, if he didn’t have his cloth cap pulled over his eyes.

Not that there’s a great deal to see since they took down the Bojo blimp across the water.

The Tory who thinks she can win is invisible, hidden from the media by party babysitters.

And Labour ’s Dr Paul Williams, a local GP, is usually too busy fighting on the front line against Covid-19 to knock on voters’ doors.

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“The numbers are coming down,” he says. “Things are getting better, but everyone is still very cautious.

“We have had 250 Covid deaths in this town, including one of my colleagues. It’s hard. Everybody knows somebody who’s either been lost to Covid or has been affected by something like long Covid.”

This must be the most unusual poll of its kind in history.

It has a cast of 16 players, but there is no show. No vans blaring out slogans, no big posters, no rallies, no hustings.

If you drove through Hartlepool, you wouldn’t know what is billed as the most important by-election since, well, the last one 21 months ago, was taking place.

So it was a relief to get out of the town centre to the statue of Andy Capp, the Mirror’s iconic cartoon character, complete with cap and muffler, a pint in his hand.

Adorned with an NHS banner, he stands on the Headland, next to the Pot House pub.

Publican Taffy Turner, 57, plans to vote for the Veterans’ Party – “because it’s so new it can’t be corrupt like all the others”.

Sam Jones, 29, who works at the nearby nuclear power station, beat Mr Capp to the bookies.

He’s put a £450 bet – the maximum he could get – on a Tory win, at odds of 8/11. “And I’ll be voting Conservative, it would be silly to vote for anyone else.”

Self-employed Chris Sainty, 34, begs to differ. “I’ve always voted Labour, and I will next week.”

So, I bet, would Andy’s creator, Mirrorman Reg Smythe, a ‘Pools boy and the greatest cartoonist of his generation, who retired to the town he loved. He always described himself as a socialist.

Not so sure about his creation. Capp never talked politics, and his boozy, layabout lifestyle had him down as something of an anarchist.

That’s in keeping with the local tradition, thinks Dr Williams.

“You never tell the people of Hartlepool what to do,” he tells me in the windswept town square. “They enjoy the spirit of independence that they have. They take their own decisions, and some haven’t made up their minds. This election is there to be won. I’m not taking any votes for granted.”

People are not talking about the Tory candidate on the doorstep, he finds. This is not surprising. Jillian Wendy Mortimer, a farmer from over the border in North Yorkshire, is the best-kept secret in County Durham.

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A member for the past two years of Hambleton District Council, she has the public profile of a harvest mouse. My requests to the Conservative Party’s North East Head of Press Relations for an interview went unanswered. I don’t blame her. If I were her, I wouldn’t want to be interviewed by me.

But it’s the voters who count, and I couldn’t find one who knew her name – not even those who plan to support her on Thursday.

Indeed, one Conservative twitterer has likened her to Miss Trunchbull, the horrid heroine in Matilda, the Roald Dahl film. This isn’t fair. She may own huntin’ and shootin’ rights on her land, but she’s not “more like the eccentric and bloodthirsty follower of staghounds than a headmistress of a nice school for children” of the movie.

In fact, by her own admission, she’s just “a bit of a busybody, the type of person who enjoys sorting things out for everybody else.”

Mrs Busybody’s confession will come as a relief to locals. They had enough bloodthirstiness when Milord Peter Mandelson was their MP.

On the town’s streets, I met a variety of opinion. Carer Tracey Cafferkey, 55, out shopping with her 80-year-old friend Rose Hastings, will back Labour.

“I wouldn’t vote for the Tories,” she says firmly. “I’d vote for the monkey before the Tories!” She refers to the enduring story of the time when local people hanged a shipwrecked monkey on the sands during the Napoleonic Wars, fearing it was a French spy.

And the townspeople have voted for a monkey in modern times.

They chose Hangus the Monkey, Hartlepool United’s mascot, as their first (and only) directly elected Mayor. And re-elected him, when he came down from the trees as Stuart Drummond, now a local entrepreneur.

These are still entertaining times. Inam Hussein, a 43-year-old taxi driver and father of three, will “probably” vote Labour. Hairdresser Mark Wadrop, 41, is undecided. His friend administrator Bob Greenwhow, 39, will back the Tories even though he doesn’t really like the party leader.

Peter Jones, 86, has used his postal vote, but can’t remember for whom – “not Boris Johnson, I wouldn’t give him the licking of a dog”. Mrs Busybody may have her name on the ballot paper, but the real Tory candidate in this election is the Prime Minister.

The real issues are the “Boris bounce” from NHS vaccination success versus Downing Street sleaze.

That’s why he scorns by-election protocol and campaigns in the constituency. He is the man to beat, and Labour knows it.

Hartlepool 2021 is played up by the pundits as a possible watershed, another Orpington, another Crosby, another Bermondsey.

We’ll see. Hartlepudlians enjoy a good joke, but they don’t always mean it.