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Conservative Lord Ben Houchen has held on to the Tees Valley mayoralty, providing a glimmer of hope for the prime minister in an otherwise grim set of local election results.
Houchen, who has been mayor of the north-east region since 2017, beat Labour rival Chris McEwan with about 54 per cent of the vote on Friday to win a third term in office.
Speaking at the count in Stockton-on-Tees, Houchen said he was “absolutely humbled”.
“To be re-elected for a third term in my own home community is absolutely the greatest honour that anybody could ever give me,” he said, adding that he had fought a “very positive campaign” with a “clear vision for the area”.
“I’m not sat here pretending it’s perfect, but we’re making progress,” Houchen said of the impact of his tenure in the Tees Valley.
Houchen’s majority was slashed on his previous margin in 2021, when he stormed to victory with 73 per cent of the vote.
But his victory, even on a reduced margin, was a boon to the Conservative party nationally, as local election results elsewhere so far indicate heavy Tory losses in councils across the country.
Labour also comfortably won the Blackpool South constituency from the Tories on Thursday night in a separate by-election.
A loss to Labour in the Tees Valley would have piled pressure on Sunak from Tory backbench MPs.
McEwan said he had still achieved a 17 per cent swing, arguing that was considerably more than the opposition party would need nationally to secure a general election majority.
“I was fighting an incumbent,” McEwan added of the reasons for his loss, “and someone who was portraying himself as an independent.”
Since first winning the Tees Valley mayoralty unexpectedly in 2017, Houchen has successfully carved out a brand distinct from the national Tory party.
He continued in that vein during this year’s campaign, against the backdrop of a nationally unpopular Conservative party. At Friday’s count Houchen claimed he “forgot” his blue rosette and denied “trying to pretend I’m not Conservative”.
“People know round here that I’m a Conservative, but thankfully what we’ve seen today is they also know that I’m a Teessider, and I’ll put Teesside first, I’ll put local people first and I’ll do what’s best for the local area,” he added.
Houchen’s seven-year term to date has been characterised by significant state intervention and subsidy, at odds with the more recent Conservative philosophy in Westminster under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
His decision in 2019 to nationalise the area’s airport proved immensely popular and remains so, despite the need for repeated taxpayer bailouts.
However questions about financial transparency at the Teesworks steel site, a huge regeneration project overseen by the mayor and heavily criticised by an independent report in January, cast a shadow over his campaign.
A vocal grassroots online anti-Houchen campaign sprang up against him as a result, while advertisements promoting him were also daubed with graffiti, reflecting a highly polarised local political climate.
In the campaign’s closing week, two businessmen involved in setting up Teesworks prior to Houchen’s first election, Middlesbrough Football Club owner Steve Gibson and former SABIC UK chair Paul Booth, also launched a scathing attack on the mayor.
Despite the controversy, Labour had viewed a win in the Tees Valley as ambitious.
While some in the local party machine privately believe Labour headquarters had not taken the race seriously enough, McEwan said there had been “a great team effort regionally and nationally”.
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