No Time For Chatting On

"It never did Dennis Skinner any harm" is all well and good. But Skinner has never held a front bench position in 47 years and counting. Whereas the Constituency Labour Party here in North West Durham is accustomed to Ernest Armstrong, Hilary Armstrong and Pat Glass.

That CLP is now fairly left-wing, having nominated Ed Miliband in 2010, Andy Burnham in 2015, and Jeremy Corbyn in 2016. But it had no say in the selection of Laura Pidcock, and it barely campaigned for her.

Instead, she bussed in the members of various Hard and Far Left networks, some of whom prided themselves on never having been members of the Labour Party.

And now, this.

North West Durham is a mostly rural constituency in which the largest town has steelworking rather than mining roots that in any case ended several years before Laura was born. I am sitting in that town as I write, mere yards from Laura's constituency office.

This constituency's, and not least that town's, population is still fairly fixed, but it is now vastly more fluid that it was even at the turn of the century, and it is becoming more so all the time.

While obviously the area is nowhere near back to its pre-Thatcher levels of prosperity, nevertheless it is visibly becoming more affluent, and it always did have quite sizeable pockets, so to speak.

Although, thanks to a Corbyn effect that benefited candidates across the Labour Party, Labour just about won over 50 per cent of the vote this year, that had not happened since 2005, and thumping great majorities have not been seen since 2001.

In the area of the old Consett Urban District Council, Labour's performance at local elections has been downright poor since as long ago as 2003. As a result, in its last years, Derwentside District Council remained under Labour overall control due to the Stanley wards in neighbouring North Durham.

That authority was run in practice, and rather well, by a de facto coalition between the mainstream left-wing Labour Leadership in Consett and the countryside, and a body of broadly Tory-inclined Independents. All of those Independents were in North West Durham.

Their Leader kept his deposit when he contested this parliamentary seat in 2005 and 2010. In 2005, in fact, he took 9.8 per cent of the vote. He remains a member of what is now the unitary Durham County Council, fewer than half of the members of which for this constituency are members of the Labour Party.

Of course, all that a parliamentary candidate needs to be is the First Past the Post. But having been imposed rather than selected in the first place, and then having made such a start in office, it is very far from clear that Laura Pidcock can expect to be even that for the six, seven or eight electoral cycles that she and her social media cheerleaders seem to presuppose.