Hartlepool By-election Result

4.55.12am BST (GMT +0100) Fri 1st Oct 2004

Labour managed to hang on to Peter Mandelson's seat of Hartlepool with a reduced majority. Despite a swing of over 19% to the LibDems, Jody Dunn just failed to win the seat by 2,033 votes. The Conservatives were pushed into fourth place by UKIP. If the results for 2001 and 2004 are compared, the combined Labour + LibDem vote was around 75% and the combined Conservative + UKIP vote was around 20% with less than 1% change in either figure, showing that Labour are losing a lot of support to the LibDems, and the Conservatives are not making any headway against UKIP, with only 7 months to the expected date of the next general election.

The result of the by-election was:

Iain Wright (Labour) 12,752 (-18.4%)

Jody Dunn (LibDem) 10,719 (+19.2%)

Stephen Allison (UKIP) 3,193 (+10.2%)

Jeremy Middleton (Con) 3,044 (-11.2%)

Other candidates 1,654 (+0.2%)

Jody Dunn intends to stand again for Hartlepool at the general election, having fought a very positive campaign. It was notable that many Labour supporters who were asked how they had voted, did so because they or their families had "always voted Labour", while other voters had abandoned the Conservative party in favour of UKIP. Michael Howard, as the third Conservative leader in three years, is making no progress at all. As LibDem leader Charles Kennedy recently stated, in many parts of the country the Conservative party is a spent force, and "three party politics" is here to stay!