On Monday last week, Jamie Driscoll pressed the nuclear button. Barred from standing to be Labour’s candidate in the inaugural north-east mayoral elections – despite being the party’s sitting mayor of the smaller North of Tyne region and a member since 1985 – he announced he was quitting the party. He tweeted the news, promising to run as an independent next May if he raised £25,000 by the end of August.
A week later, his fighting fund stands at more than £114,000. More than 5,300 people have donated, mostly fivers and tenners, decrying the “undemocratic decision” to bar Driscoll from the selection contest. “You didn’t leave the Labour party, Jamie. The Labour party left you. And me!” was a typical comment.
Five Labour councillors in the region have quit Labour to campaign for Driscoll, with one saying: “The party was a broad church that allowed for a range of views. A party of fairness, a party of equality, a safe place for my political views. Unfortunately, this once safe place no longer feels like home.”
Quitting has propelled Driscoll to the top of the news bulletins in a way few of his mayoral policies ever did. Talking to people in the north-east constituencies of Blyth Valley and Wansbeck in recent days, his treatment seems to have cut through.
“The reason Keir Starmer doesn’t want [Driscoll] in is because he’s going to show him up, because he’s doing a better job than him and he doesn’t like it,” said Dan Snowden, a dog walker who was exercising eight of his charges on Cambois beach in Wansbeck.
“I think he’s got a great chance. Like any great progressive leader, he is offering hope and change and everyone wants that. What was it Wes Streeting said the other day? ‘No hope is better than false hope’. Unbelievable to hear something like that coming from a Labour MP’s mouth. Plus in the north-east, the one thing we won’t tolerate is injustice and that’s the overarching feeling with what’s happened with Labour.”
Lifelong Labour voter Kevin, having a coffee in Blyth, said Driscoll’s treatment was “disgusting. But to be honest, I don’t think the Labour party is the Labour party any more. Keir Starmer is more Conservative than the Conservatives are. It’s just disgraceful.” Starmer, Kevin said, “runs the party like a dictatorship … he will purge anybody who disagrees with him.”
It was a drizzly day in Blyth but Driscoll was full of sunshine. A confident man who is not above shoehorning his former membership of Mensa – or his black belt in jiu-jitsu – into conversation, even he seemed taken aback by the support he was getting.
“The reaction has been genuinely unbelievable,” he said, giving the Guardian a whistlestop tour of projects he has funded in the “red wall” constituency, from dredging a dock at the Port of Blyth to decontaminating brownfield land for a new housing estate. “I’ve had Tories get in touch and say ‘I’ll vote for you’. One of them was a Tory MP!” He declined to name names.
It is a surreal situation for a man who was widely viewed to be “too leftwing” for Starmer’s Labour party, hence, people believe, the controversial decision by the party to bar him from standing as its north-east mayoral candidate last month.
Driscoll wears his socialist credentials with pride, turning up at pickets and giving the impression of saying what he actually thinks, rather than what a focus group might want him to say. Even when showing us around Nu-castle, a youth club affiliated with Newcastle United FC and built with £2.5m of his mayoral money, he happily dismisses Saudi Arabia – whose sovereign wealth fund bought the Premier League club in 2021 – as “a murderous regime which starts illegal wars”.
The only public explanation for his blacklisting came from the shadow business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, who suggested it was because Driscoll had hosted an event with Ken Loach earlier this year, discussing Loach’s films. The film-maker was suspended by Labour in 2021 for supporting Labour Against the Witchhunt, which claimed allegations of Labour antisemitism were “politically motivated”.
The move has not gone down well among many Labour supporters in the north-east, with 11 out of 22 constituency Labour parties (CLPs) in the region refusing to endorse any mayoral candidate in protest.
Mary Murphy was one of a number of Labour councillors to quit the party in solidarity, pledging to campaign for Driscoll instead of Labour’s chosen candidate, the Northumberland police and crime commissioner, Kim McGuinness.
Murphy, a Northumberland county councillor, thinks Labour will come to regret blocking Driscoll’s candidacy. “I think it’s a complete misreading of the strength of feeling in the north-east of England with regard to democracy within the party, and our respect for our incumbent mayor. None of this is anti-Kim. It’s very much about the process. I think they’ve just totally underestimated this all.”
Ian Mearns, the Labour MP for Gateshead, picks his words carefully: “The decision to exclude Jamie Driscoll from the longlist wasn’t done with a great deal of openness and transparency. If there was a good reason to block him, they [Labour’s national executive committee] should say what it was.”
Mearns has not yet heard of any of his local members quitting as a result, but with membership already down two-fifths on the Corbyn era, he cannot afford to lose many more. “If you have a membership who are at all uneasy about the process by which candidates are selected it doesn’t exactly motivate people to go out and campaign. The danger is that apathy reigns.”
None of the other 16 Labour MPs in the north-east would go on the record about the selection shenanigans. But Driscoll’s Tory rival from 2019 was happy to talk.
Charlie Hoult came second, polling 45,494 first-round votes to Driscoll’s 62,034. He described Driscoll as an “intellectual ideologue” and criticised his “lack of profile in a cheerleading role” for the region, compared with the Tees Valley Conservative mayor, Ben Houchen, a Downing Street darling. Nonetheless, he thinks his old rival stands a chance of victory: “He’s got a good length of time to build his support.”
But Hoult hopes Driscoll will split the Labour vote and make a Tory victory more likely. “The more candidates there are, the more splits there are.” He believes he may have won in 2019 had it not been for the presence of an independent candidate, John McCabe, a well-respected business figure who is now chief executive of the north-east chamber of commerce. McCabe won 31,507 first-round votes before being eliminated.
Stuart Murray, who until earlier this year was media officer of Blyth Valley Labour party, resigned his party membership last week and predicts a “landslide” victory for Driscoll.
“He’s competent, he’s got a proven track record. And I think they’re just scared. [Labour are] scared of the damage that he could do to them because he wouldn’t just be a yes man. Everybody in our area that has been imposed on us have been people who will nod their heads to other decision-makers rather than the electorate that they’ve been tasked to represent.”
McGuinness, he said, “is a candidate that will agree to whatever her paymasters tell her, and her paymasters are the London Labour office”.
It is a suggestion that clearly riles McGuinness. “I’m nobody else’s candidate … I am a woman who wants to represent the region that I live in,” she says. “And it is as simple as that. I have my own ideas. I have my own brain. I have my own decision-making capacity, surprise, surprise – imagine!”
McGuinness says her No 1 priority is to end child poverty, describing Starmer’s decision to retain the two-child cap on child benefit as “a really disappointing position, but it’s where we have been left by the government and I understand that”.
She refuses to answer any questions about Driscoll. Wouldn’t she rather have beaten him fair and square? She answers a different question. “I just have got a vision for the north-east, I have put myself forward because it is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. And it’s something that I’m doing because I really want to improve our area. I don’t want to spend the next nine months talking about a man. You know, there’s one woman mayor in this country [Tracy Brabin in West Yorkshire]. And there’s two called Andy. And we need more women in these positions.”
