Extraordinary election brings changing battlegrounds in the North East & North Yorkshire

One of the (rather depressing) features of our democracy is that general elections are generally fought over a relatively small number of swing seats.

Richmond, North Yorkshire is never normally among them.

Its boundaries are changing slightly now and it's being renamed as Richmond and Northallerton, but those are just technicalities.

Rishi Sunak finished more than 27,000 votes ahead of his nearest rival there in 2019, making it the safest seat in our region.

It has been in Conservative hands for a century, and never held by Labour before.But a new opinion poll analysis from Savanta and Electoral Calculus for the Telegraph has projected that Mr Sunak will be beaten by Labour's Tom Wilson on 4 July.

He would become the first Prime Minister ever to lose their seat at a general election.

That polling model sees the Tories left with just 53 MPs, and wiped off the map altogether in our region.

It is just one poll, but many others are predicting Conservative wipeouts of differing degrees, a remarkable turnaround from the last election.

Then, the road to a big majority in parliament clearly led through the 'red wall.'

The Tories gained seven traditional Labour seats in the North East, with Boris Johnson talking of people "lending" their votes to his party to 'Get Brexit Done' and acknowledging many new loyalties were likely to be pretty shallow.

The boundary review that's made constituencies more equal in terms of population means many have changed name or shape for this election, but it's long been said that Keir Starmer had to win back those Labour heartland areas to get into Downing Street.

They were expected to be the key battlegrounds, helping decide whether Labour would get to a majority.

Now, though, it seems those seats’ returning to Labour is already priced in, as part of a landslide.

Conservative plans to get Mr Johnson back on the campaign trail seem to have been shelved.

The Times quotes a Tory strategist saying: "What’s the point of sending him to the red wall when the focus of the campaign is to defend 150 seats in the south? This is not a campaign that is looking to win seats in the red wall. This is a fight for survival."

With a fortnight to go until polling day, some Tory ministers are talking publicly about just trying to limit the scale of Labour's victory.

Mr Sunak has spent most of his time campaigning elsewhere in the country, in constituencies where the Conservatives are defending majorities of more than 10,000 votes.

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The North East hasn't seen much of Keir Starmer either, but several of his colleagues have notably spent time in the Hexham constituency in recent weeks.

That's another seat which has been held by the Tories for 100 years.

Next door, North Northumberland (formerly Berwick) was previously on a list of seats Labour felt were unwinnable, but they recently changed their minds, and most polls see it going their way now too.

Back in North Yorkshire, historically safe seats like Skipton and Ripon and Thirsk and Malton are also under threat.

These are largely rural and more affluent areas, with deeper, long-lasting Conservative loyalties that have been tested to breaking point, so significant is the party's self-destruction.

Labour claimed the first York and North Yorkshire mayoral election six weeks ago, but Mr Sunak still opted to call the general election after that pretty loud warning in his own backyard.

Harrogate and Knaresborough is now projected to fall to the Liberal Democrats, who remain pretty uncompetitive in the North East.

Reform UK are expected to come second in many seats in our region, despite clearly focusing their efforts further south, on trying to get Nigel Farage and a couple of colleagues into parliament.

Together, the three other main parties look like squeezing the Conservative vote to an unprecedented extent.

Labour are set to be the overwhelming beneficiaries in the first-past-the-post system I referred to at the start, and go much further than just recovering lost ground in our region.

Clearly real votes are what will count, but time is running out for the Tories.

Even if the polls - and that one in particular - don't turn into reality, it has already been an extraordinary general election campaign.

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